Vesper

Vesper was composed for Kim Bova who at the time (1989) was living in Santa Barbara, California. I asked her to write me a short description of the kind of piece she would most like to play and to include in it her ideas about piano technique and about musical expression that might help me in starting the work. What I received was a wonderful document that gave me enough raw material for several pieces had I wanted to undertake them and which included all I had asked for plus her evocative and insightful impressions of the land- and seascapes in the Santa Barbara area. I decided to base the music on them. After many interruptions Vesper was completed in 1992.

The title of the first movement "Fogs and Winds" refers to both the sunsets off the California coast in which, depending upon the weather, the sun sometimes sets slowly into a rising pinkish fog and to the Santa Anna winds which rise "Off the Inland Desert" and blow out to sea at night, drying up everything in their path and leading to the spectacular wildfires which are a part of the natural history of the area. The second movement, as its title suggests, is a playing-out of the first, to which it is seamlessly connected.

The third movement is a lullaby ("Berceuse") and takes its title from a passage in Ms. Bova's impressions of her former home '...so many smells, views, warmth...night blooming jasmine...' and is for her son David, born in 1990.

Though the piece is programmatic in nature it was my intent that it not necessarily be dependent for its effectiveness upon any program and that it might suggest a variety of images to its audience, including purely abstract musical ones.

Because all of the subjects of the titles suggest events that are associated with night or its onset I chose the latin word "Vesper" as the title for the whole piece. The word's association with the nightly Vesper service of the Catholic Church is not one I would emphasize over others but nevertheless is one that I welcome as it suggests a kind of ritual inevitability of the nightly rounds of humans and nature: sunsets, storms and children being put to bed.

Vesper was made possible by a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and is dedicated to Christopher Rouse for whose help I am very grateful.