Aaron Jay Kernis

Introduction
Aaron Jay Kernis is an American composer born January 15th, 1960 in Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania. Kernic currently is a member of the Yale School of Music faculty and spent 10 years serving as the music advisor of the Minnesota Orchestra. His musical career began at the age of 13 and throughout his time as a student, he received three BMI Foundation Student Composer Awards. Throughout his life, he studied composition with John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, Morton Subotnick, Bernard Rands, and Jacob Druckman.

Work Analysis
The piece I will be analyzing is Air. Air was composed in 1995, completed in 1996, and is a piece written for violin and piano. Kernis himself describes this piece as "a love letter to the violin." The piece has two main themes and is dedicated to Kernis' wife Evelyne Luest and was composed for violinist Joshua Bell. Since it's premiere there have been many different versions created some featuring orchestra and others chamber ensemble. The violin is apart of a call and response technique with the piano in the first section and then both instruments change from a light and graceful sound to a more aggressive and suspenseful one. The violin plays extremely high notes throughout the second half of the piece in contrast with the piano which stays in a moderate register for most of the piece.

Comparisons
Aaron Kernis has been described as a neo-romantic composer and with his orchestral pieces, he has been compared to composers such as Leonard Bernstein, Gustav Mahler, and Stravinsky. His style influences come from composers like Debussy and Kernis has described his works being influenced by minimalism, impressionism and 19th-century romantic music. Although Stravinsky and Bernstein wrote many of their pieces as a tonal works Kernis has discussed that he was never comfortable writing atonal music and preferred tonal over everything.

Observations
I chose to analyze a non-orchestra piece to be able to look at the composer in a more subjective way. Air is dedicated to his wife and I loved listening to this piece and thinking about love and dedication. Atonal music is extremely difficult to listen to objectively and I agreed with Kernis when he said it made him uncomfortable. However, my uncomfortable feelings when it comes to atonal music is simply because of the constant dissonance. Instead of following Stravinsky through musical style he followed him through musical techniques which I was much more fond of.