composer
Tristan Keuris (Amersfoort, 3 Oct 1946 - Amsterdam, 15 Dec 1996) was one of the leading Dutch composers of his generation.
Education: As a child, Tristan Keuris wanted to imitate what ...
related works
Genre:
Chamber music
Subgenre:
Piano
Scoring:
pf
Three times : mixed choir, orchestra, 1974 / Daniel Manneke
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Mixed choir and large ensemble
Scoring:
GK4 1110 0220 3perc 2vl 2vla 2vc cb
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Mixed choir and large ensemble
Scoring:
sopr-m bas recit GK4 9vl 3vla 2vc cb synth
Genre:
Vocal music
Subgenre:
Mixed choir and large ensemble
Scoring:
sopr GK4 ensemble
composition
To Brooklyn bridge : for 24 voices and instrumental ensemble, 1987-1988 / Tristan Keuris
Other authors:
Crane, Hart
(librettist)
Description:
Program note (English): (Premiere US: 23-3-1994 - Lincoln Center, New York - Ensemble, cond. Harold Rosenbaum). In 1982, I bought a beautiful reproduction of the first model for the Brooklyn Bridge. Shortly thereafter the Netherlands Chamber Choir commissioned me to write a work for approximately 15 instruments and choir. As the scoring was miraculously clear to me (choir, four clarinets, four saxophones, two harps, two pianos, and three basses), I set about to find a suitable text. Leafing through a volume of poems, I stumbled upon the American poet Hart Crane's ode "To Brooklyn Bridge". It was then that I decided to build my own musical bridge with the chosen instrumentation. For further inspiration, I turned to other sources of information on Brooklyn Bridge. Ed Schilder's 'Brooklyn Bridge' proved to be of enormous help with all its descriptions of reactions to the bridge. Sixteen years of blood, sweat, and toil and the bridge was inaugurated to an amazing and sceptical public in 1883. Thirty years
later, with the opening of other bridges, New Yorkers began to take "their bridge" for granted. Later on, poets helped obscure the line between fact and fiction. Hart Crane had a lifelong romantic attachment to the Brooklyn Bridge. The poet not only devoted an entire cycle of poems to the subject, but he went so far as to rent the room in which the bridge's architect, Washington Roebling, had lived during the time the bridge was constructed.
The choral work is based on the text of the opening poem in Crane's cycle. The bridge becomes supernatural in the text, a symbol for eternal rest and peace. To the poet, the bridge transcends the work of mortal labor and is intuitively related to an understanding of God. For me, this work is intended as an ode to John and Washington Roebling who, along with many others, made supreme sacrifices to lend form to their dreams. - TRISTAN KEURIS