Musical Visions : The World Premiere of Robert Frederick Jones's La Terra Promessa by Daniel Harley
/ April 1, 2011
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The Vanier College Music Department will
be celebrating its 40th anniversary with fifteen events,
including the world premiere of Robert Frederick Jones’s oratorio,
La Terra Promessa.
Robert Frederick Jones is a composer,
pianist, conductor and pedagogue who has been teaching at Vanier College
since 1976. A prolific composer, he has a large body of chamber music
and choral works to his name, and his compositions have been performed
around the world.
With an MFA and PhD from Brandeis
University, Jones studied with many noted composers and music theorists,
including Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions, and Robert Cogan. In a 1984
interview, he described his style in terms of “freedom to combine
traditional and novel features in the same piece, freedom to vary the
stylistic mixture from piece to piece and movement to movement, freedom
to combine the rigidly predetermined with the freely intuitive, and
a desire to involve the listener’s whole self, not just the ears
or the intellect.”
Born in Wisconsin but raised in
Arizona, Jones’s compositions often allude to the desert landscape
where he grew up, and his works often contain strong spiritual elements.
His new work, La Terra Promessa, combines these influences. The
idea for the work originated thirty years ago and has always been something
that Jones returned to while working on other projects. After he was
diagnosed with cancer last year, he renewed his focus on the piece,
and continued work even when bedridden. The act of writing the music
was therapy, he said, and the piece is an artistic summation, containing
references to work throughout his career.
La Terra Promessa
is a symphony for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, with texts in Sanskrit,
Latin, Chinese, Italian, French and English. It is a large-scale work
of twelve movements. According to the composer, the movements are “musical
visions” that “evoke images of our world and the world beyond, and
of outer and inner states of being.” The work, an ode to friendship,
begins with the world at the dawn of time and the musical visions lead
us from barren but beautiful prehistoric landscapes through to the ascent
of humankind. Each movement has a different dedicatee, and the entire
work is dedicated to his wife, Pamela. As a whole, the work is a spiritual
progression ending with a “collage of songs sung by the heavenly
beings.”
La Terra Promessa
will be Vanier College’s Gala Concert. Directed by Philippe Bourque,
it will be performed by the Vanier College Choir in collaboration with
the St. Lawrence Choir and l’Orchestre symphonique Joseph-François
Perrault.
» May 6 at 7:30 p.m., Église St. Sixte
www.vaniercollege.qc.ca/music
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