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Fred Lerdahl with the New York Virtuoso Singers and Daedalus Quartet

Sep. 27, 2012

Fred Lerdahl with the New York Virtuoso Singers and Daedalus Quartet

“Once their fruit is picked, The cornstalks lighten....” So begins the text, from a poem by Richard Wilbur, of Fred Lerdahl’s new a cappella choral work Cornstalks, written for Harold Rosenbaum and the New York Virtuoso Singers. Rosenbaum leads the October 21 world premiere of Cornstalks at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City. The two-minute a cappella work for double choir was commissioned in celebration of the ensemble’s 25th anniversary. Lerdahl shares:

Cornstalks is a homophonic, antiphonal, and mostly syllabic setting of the poem ‘Zea’ by the American poet Richard Wilbur. My title replaces the obscure Zea, the name of the genus to which corn belongs, with the ordinary word that is the poem’s subject matter. Beyond its precise observation and beautiful language, the poem attracted me because as a child I often played hide-and-seek in the cornfields at my aunt’s farm in Wisconsin.

Wilbur’s poem describes cornstalks in autumn, after ‘their fruit is picked,’ in which ‘one white corn-leaf…can seem to be the sole thing breathing.’ Each tercet is laid out in the manner of a haiku (lines of five, seven, and five syllables), with the first and third lines rhyming. The nine tercets in turn group into three parts. My setting incorporates some but not all aspects of this elegant structure. My main concern was to reflect the poem’s combination of apparent simplicity and underlying depth of meaning.

On October 18, the Daedalus Quartet performs Lerdahl's complete cycle of string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  The Daedalus Quartet will give an authoritative performance of Lerdahl's three acclaimed string quartets, written over a span of three decades from 1978 to 2008, and expressly intended by the composer to be performed as a cycle. The third quartet, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was written especially for Daedalus, who will take the work on the road for their tour of Germany in November.  Daedalus' recording of the complete string quartet cycle was released last fall on Bridge. Learn more about the recording of the quartet cycle at www.bridgerecords.com.

Details on the New York Virtuoso Singers program can be found here: www.nyvirtuoso.org.

For Daedalus Quartet program details, click here.

More information on Fred Lerdahl and his music is located at www.fredlerdahl.com or www.schott-music.com.

Fred Lerdahl
Cornstalks
SATB double choir a cappella
2’

String Quartet No. 1
21’

String Quartet No. 2
22’

String Quartet No. 3
21’

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