As I Write This: Songs & Solos of Aaron Helgeson

Featuring

Ryan Townsend Strand
Karina Kontorovitch
Josh Modney
Donald Berman
Eric Umble
Sharon Harms

Aaron Helgeson

Did you know?

1/7

Composer's Artistic Vision

Composer Aaron Helgeson uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to blend contemporary sounds with historical sources like wax cylinders, medieval psalms, and unfinished manuscripts.

Composition History

The piece "Once a While in Time" was commissioned by tenor Ryan Townsend Strand for the "Letters to Jackie" project and uses text from letters sent to Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy after President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Composition History

"A Place Toward Other Places" was written during the composer's weekly trips between San Francisco and the parks of the Northern San Francisco Bay, gathering aural experiences from both urban and natural environments.

Instruments

The "Hardanger Transcriptions" feature the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, an instrument similar to a violin but with additional sympathetic strings inside its body that create acoustic reverberation.

Compositional Technique

The music for "Once a While in Time" is collaged from fragments of Willie Nelson's song "Ain't it Funny How Time Slips Away," which was on the Billboard Top 40 chart the week of President Kennedy's assassination.

Compositional Technique

The rhythmic notation in "Hardanger Transcriptions" attempts to preserve the tension of fiddler Torleiv Bolstad's playing by subdividing the melody and meter differently, often requiring a symmetrical melody to fit an asymmetrical stomp rhythm.

Compositional Technique

"Through Glimpses of Unknowing" was inspired by Chiharu Shiota's installation "In Silence," and its music is created by cutting up, stretching, and re-arranging individual trills and tremolos from Claude Debussy's solo Preludes.