Kenneth Frazelle (born December 2, 1955) is an American composer.
Early life and studies Frazelle was born in Jacksonville, North Carolina, United States. Both his parents were from small tobacco farms near Richlands, North Carolina. His mother, Olive Ann Shaw, was a civil service employee at nearby Marine Corps base Camp LeJeune. His father, Kenneth Henry Frazelle, untrained but musical, died in 1962 from alcohol related illness. In the earliest years the family played musical guessing games and had a toy piano at home. The composer's mother was an excellent provider and realized the importance of music, art, and dance lessons for each of her children. At age eight Frazelle began private piano studies. He began composing at the age of ten and also played both flute and bassoon in middle school band.
The composer left home at fifteen to attend the North Carolina School of the Arts (now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts) in Winston-Salem. His principle composition teacher was Robert Ward. He was graduated from NCSA's high school in 1974.
Frazelle was accepted into the Juilliard School in 1974. Roger Sessions, his composition teacher for four years, had a profound influence on issues of musical gesture, contrapuntal discourse, and the integrity of musical form. The composer studied theory with David Diamond and ear training with Renée Longy. The experience of living in New York was vital. Attending operas; hearing Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez; discovering the poetry of A.R. Ammons, and attending John Cage and Elliott Carter premieres all had a great impact. He saw Pinter, Beckett and Albee plays on Broadway. He frequently visited the city's art museums and galleries. Both the work of the Abstract Expressionists and the burgeoning Minimalists were influential.Interview with Kenneth Frazelle, October 1, 2013.
Career Frazelle's works have been commissioned and performed worldwide by some of today's most prominent artists and ensembles, such as Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, Odetta, Emanuel Ax, Jeffrey Kahane, Paula Robison, Cassandra Wilson, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The music has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Westminster Abbey, the Concertgebouw and Wigmore Hall.
The composer's distinctive voice blends structural and tonal sophistication with a lyric clarity. He has been influenced not only by his study with the great Modernist Roger Sessions, but also by the folksongs and landscape of his native North Carolina. Critics have described the music as "sublime," "stunning," "atmospheric,"“Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish: ‘In Concert,’ Opera News, February 2012—Vol. 76, No. 8 "sweeping and powerful""'Motion of Stone' at Gardner enjoyed from sea of comfort" by Susan Larson, Boston Globe, September 29, 1998 and "spectacular."
During the composer's Juilliard years, he discovered the poetry of A. R. Ammons, which resulted in two song cycles, "Slightly Thinner Than Sight" (1976) and "Diversifications" (1978). The setting of Ammons' poetry would become a lifelong pursuit. To date he has set around forty of the poet's works.6. "Kenneth Frazelle’s 'Blue Ridge Airs I' and 'Sonata for Cello and Piano:' A Synthesis of Music, Poetry, and Nature." Joanne Inkman, DMA dissertation, 1993. UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, MI.
The composition department at Juilliard in the 1970s has been described as entering a "golden age," and Frazelle was among "some of the most talented composers of the younger generation," including Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Tobias Picker, Todd Machover, George Tsontakis, Larry Bell, Daron Hagen, Joel Hoffman, Richard Danielpour, Eric Ewazen and Bruce Adolphe."Juilliard: A History" by Andrea Olmstead. University of Illinois Press, 1999
Upon returning to Winston-Salem in 1978, the composer completed a large-scale piano work, “Fantasies for Piano,”, for NCSA piano instructor Clifton Matthews. A year later, Frazelle approached the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, a vital arts institution in the region, about composing a site-specific work for the Center's Main Gallery. SECCA's director, Ted Potter, encouraged the composer to create Seascapes (1981), an hour and a half work with the audience and performers seated in a giant chambered-nautilus-shaped spiral. Again, the composer returned to poems of Ammons, creating a work for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra. The poet contributed recorded readings of several of his works, which were interspersed among the sections of music. This was Frazelle's first work exploring environmental and theatrical elements.
In 1983, another site-specific work was composed for SECCA. Prisma was scored for three pianos and chamber orchestra, interacting with lighting design. “Prisma” premiered in 1983.
Soon after, the pianist Jeffrey Kahane was looking for a composer of his generation to champion. Kahane and Frazelle had known each other casually at Juilliard. Artist manager Elizabeth Sobol brought Frazelle's Fantasies for Piano to the attention of Kahane, who had an immediate response to the score, and instigated the composer's first commission, a quintet for piano and strings for members of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Kahane's advocacy of Frazelle's music has had a profound effect on the composer's career, resulting in the premieres or performances of fifteen works. The collaboration would also lead to orchestral residencies in the 1990s.
Kenneth Frazelle's work came to national attention when the noted singer Jan DeGaetani and pianist Gilbert Kalish premiered Worldly Hopes, in 1987, at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. The composer chose five Ammons poems to comprise the cycle. A review in “Musical America” stated that "Its structural integrity, as well as its emotional depth, are truly compelling. . . Within a very tightly disciplined format, Frazelle's music—like the poems that inspired it—has a haiku-like power to suggest feelings, moods, whole landscapes, much vaster than itself. . . Especially striking is the long final song, 'Rainy morning,' which begins as a delicate nature-poem, fragments with almost cyclonic vehemence into an abstract vocal cadenza, then coalesces once more into an ecstatic climax of primal intensity."“DeGaetani and Kalish: Frazelle ‘Worldly Hopes’ Premiere” by William Trotter. Musical America, July 1987 The review brought the work to the attention of Peer Southern Concert Music, Frazelle's first publisher. The work was released on Bridge Records in 2011. Kalish remembers DeGaetani working "like a woman possessed on the intricate and immensely challenging score."Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish in Concert,” liner notes. Bridge Records, Inc., 2011 Worldly Hopes was among the last works that DeGaetani and Kalish premiered—she died of leukemia in 1989.
DeGaetani and Kalish discussed the immense complexity of “Worldly Hopes” with Frazelle, relating that it was the most challenging score they had ever tackled. They told him there would be very few performers who would be willing—and able—to take on scores of this difficulty. The composer took this into careful consideration, as the duo had premiered many demanding twentieth-century pieces by Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Mario Davidowsky and dozens of other composers.
Auspiciously, Frazelle had already embarked on a new aesthetic pursuit, involving the incorporation of folk music from his grandmother and great uncle. The first piece in this genre was Playing the Miraculous Game (1987). The work implemented a toy piano and three harmonicas, referencing the musical instruments around the home in Frazelle's childhood. During the composer's earliest years, his family played a musical guessing game they called "Miraculous." The first few notes would be played by Frazelle's father, and included "Froggy Went A'Courtin'" and other children's songs. The composer's hometown orchestra, the Winston-Salem Symphony, commissioned and premiered the piece, conducted by Peter Perret. The work was chosen by composer John Adams to receive a reading with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Adams has written "[Frazelle] is a mature composer with a broad cultural awareness. It seems to me that [he] has something quite fresh and original to say. He is obviously not a part of any particular stylistic juggernaut, be it downtown, uptown, East or West Coast. His work is seriously crafted and his incorporation of American vernacular music I find really very satisfying."John Adams, letter to Kenneth Frazelle, October 9, 1991
The Spoleto Festival commissioned the composer to write a piece for Jeffrey Kahane in 1988. Frazelle designed a rhapsodic single-movement work, Blue Ridge Airs, which wove ballads and dance tunes into a sonic landscape. This was the first of many works which either quote Blue Ridge music directly, or have a more sublimated modal or landscape quality beneath the surface of the music. Kahane performed the work at the Kennedy Center and the Montreal International Piano Festival the following year.
Yo-Yo Ma and Jeffrey Kahane commissioned Frazelle's Sonata for Cello and Piano in 1989, and performed it throughout the US, presenting it at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco's Davies Hall, and Los Angeles' Ambassador Auditorium. The San Francisco Examiner reported "[it] came straight from—and went straight to—the heart, an organ too seldom addressed by contemporary composers."Davies' dynamic duo by Timothy Pfaff, San Francisco Examiner, April 9, 1990 And the Los Angeles Times stated the Sonata "could quickly become a repertory staple."Ma and Kahane in Recital at Ambassador by John Henken, Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1990
Soon to follow was the Elegy for string orchestra (1990), which has been performed by the Colorado Symphony, the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Eastman Philharmonia.
Soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Jeffrey Kahane commissioned Sunday at McDonald's for their national tour in 1993. The cycle consists of five settings of A. R. Ammons' poems. Responding to the work, Ammons stated "I think Mr. Frazelle is the finest composer of his generation in America. . . The range of his invention and technical brilliance is apparently inexhaustible and is accompanied by a profound depth of song or feeling.""Affinity: Words will sing between Ammons and Frazelle" by Gordon Sparber, Winston-Salem Journal, February 16, 1997 In 1994, the composer's score for Bill T. Jones' dance theatre work "Still/Here" received worldwide critical acclaim. The piece incorporated movements, images and words that Jones had gathered across the country from people living with life-challenging illnesses. Gretchen Bender designed the video imagery for the piece, and rock guitarist Vernon Reid contributed music for the Here section. Jones spoke of Frazelle's contribution: "In these songs, he evoked survivors' revelations, states of mind, moments of intensity, with a power and specificity only poetry can deliver."Last Night on Earth by Bill T. Jones, Pantheon Books, 1995 In the Washington Post, Alan Kriegsman described it as "the perfect amalgamation of music, visual imagery, and kinetics. Kenneth Frazelle's music for 'Still' for the Lark Quartet and the staggering vocal soloist Odetta, with percussionist Bill Finizio, makes one think of the late Beethoven string quartets and their otherworldly perfection." The New York Times remarked "part Schubert, part Kurt Weill, Mr. Frazelle"s songs have their own lyric beauty."Bill T. Jones' Lyrical Look at Survivors by Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times, December 2, 1994.