May 2011 Subscription Concerts

With STRINGS ATTACHED:
SFCA meets The Alexander String Quartet

language of the birds (2011) by Veronika Krausas

To write for San Francisco ensembles has provided a special inspiration for all the commissioned composers, but especially for Veronika Krausas. Ever since its installation in 2008, she has been taken by Language of the birds, a spectacular outdoor sculpture by San Francisco artists Brian Goggin with Dorka Keehn located in North Beach, in front of City Lights Bookstore. In reference to the site-specific character of this creation, she chose to set her work to San Francisco Poems by the Bookstore’s owner, Lawrence Ferlenghetti.

“From all the texts Brian used in his sculpture, I was struck by Ferlenghetti’s. His words help you see the wonder of life: not only in nature, but also in the quirkiness of the people around us. They make you stand on your head, look at things from a different perspective.”

Her pieces, “light-hearted, resembling the music of Erik Satie,“ as she says herself, combine lines such as “I put my cap in the cage, and went out with the bird on my head”, with a phenomenally rich variety of texture in the music. The three light-heared “bird pieces” are set off by two introspective, slower pieces that evoke the stillness of fog drifting into SF and “trees dreaming thru all time.”

Language of the birds press release from the SF Arts Commission

The Ferlenghetti texts

no. 1
“Bird-song is not made by machines.
Give your poem wings to fly to the treetops.”
from Great American Waterfront Poem

no. 2
“at a very still spot where the trees dreamed
and seemed to have been waiting thru all time”
from In Golden Gate Park That Day …

no. 3
“I saw one of them
I saw one
with a bird on his shoulder”
from I Saw one of Them

no. 4
“The light of San Francisco
is a sea light
an island light
And the light of fog
blanketing the hills
drifting in at night
through the Golden Gate
to lie on the city at dawn”
from The Changing Light

no. 5
“I put my cap in the cage
And went out with the bird on my head”
from Quartier Libre

All excerpts from Lawrence Ferlenghetti’s San Francisco Poems (City Lights Foundation, San Francisco, © 2001). Used with permission of the author.

About Veronika Krausas

Composer Veronika Krausas has had her works performed in Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Romania. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) writes that “her works, whose organic, lyric sense of storytelling are supported by a rigid formal elegance, give her audiences a sense that nature’s frozen objects are springing to life.” LA Times critic Mark Swed said of The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth, her chamber opera production is Los Angeles in 2010, “something novel this way comes.” Born in Australia, and raised in Canada, Krausas has received commissions from ERGO Projects, the Penderecki String Quartet, Continuum Music, Toca Loca, and two commissions for Motion Music (Canada). She is currently on faculty at the Thornton School at the University of Southern California, the advisory board of Jacaranda Music, and a member of Catalysis Projects.

Past Seasons