Press
The highlight of the evening was a premiere of First Music by 22-year-old Carolyn Yarnell. The young musicians were obviously playing in their favorite medium and approached this masterpiece with deep love and feeling. The short tone poem is profound and Miss Yarnell must have been pleased with its hearty acceptance from the audience. If this eminent young composer continues to create music of this quality, she will be a milestone in musical history.
— Bob Reed, The California Voice, May 10, 1984
Of the three, I most admired Yarnell’s “Enemy Moon” and “Exit” – the two final movements of a symphony still in progress. “Enemy Moon,” dissonant and violently aggressive, gives the impression of an inexorable, carefully directed chaos, dominated by a spectacular part for a hyperactive tympanist and a general emphasis on the percussion section (at times, the sound of the snare drum called to mind nothing so much as machine-gun fire). “Exit” is calmly elegiac, replete with the ethereal, shimmering sound of bowed cymbals that heighten its evanescent qualities. The performance was expertly led by Oliver Knussen, who called the composer to the stage upon its completion and embraced her warmly.
— Tim Page, New York Newsday, August 9, 1991
Yarnell composed this music in 1997, completing it on December 22; the work had its premiere in March 1998. The score calls for triple winds, trumpets, and trombones, four horns, tuba, timpani, three percussionists, piano, harp, electric bass guitar, and strings. Ms. Yarnell, who is also a "mostly abstract" oil painter, was a graduate student, at Yale, of the late Jacob Druckman (1928 - 1996). Paintings for Jacob combines Yarnell's careers as composer and painter in tribute to a significant mentor. Prior to her time at Yale, Yarnell completed undergraduate studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is a member of Common Sense Composers, a collective whose annual collaborations run the gamut from American Baroque, an early-music ensemble that plays period instruments from 1650, and "twisted tutu," a New York duo that employs the latest in digital technology.
She writes that Paintings for Jacob is comprised of four movements, or sonic images, played without pause. The first one, Dark Upon Darkness, unfolds in low, slow-moving, broad tones of lamentation. It proceeds directly to the second movement, Strata, a multi-layered composition of contrapuntal lines, some pulsating upwards while others descend, and repeated notes fade in and out at different pitch levels, like echoes or intuitions. Expanding textures open into the ethereal, floating, note-filled world of Stargazers, likewise pluralistic — a clear sky full of bright stars, and an intimate view of simply outlined flowers. Three-quarters of the way through, a musical inversion (in the Schoenbaroquian sense), leads to a climax that segues into Palindrome ("Triumphant, Ascendant"). Although this movement is Strata retrograde (i.e. backwards), the two do not read the same. Strata is geological, earthy, grounded, and strong, whereas Palindrome is constantly fleeting, like lofting steam from a warm spring on an icy day, like dreams receding into the dimension of sleep, loved ones returning to the landscape of birth, before birth.
Formally, the music progresses from Dark Upon Darkness, develops, then inverts, and finally retrogrades. The detail-work is intricate. Both linearly and vertically there are great fluctuations of time — expansions and contractions, crescendos and decrescendos at differing rates. But the higher structure is unadorned, bold, direct. Materials for Strata, which generates Palindrome, originate in Dark Upon Darkness, a title that describes the essence of the entire work at the same time it refers to Jacob Druckman’s own composition, Dark upon the Harp. Paintings is dedicated to his memory.
— Melinda Bargreen, The Seattle Times, March, 1998
The latest work in the series, Carolyn Yarnell’s Halcyon, was played in Carnegie Hall in December. The Halcyon, a kind of kingfisher, nests on the waters and, so the ancients believed, has the power to calm them, to bring “halcyon days.“ In a program note, Yarnell described her work as “a psychological portrait of what I imagine the Halcyon to be: an expensive, majestic bird possessing great beauty and compassion, yet a predator, capable of extreme aggression and violence.” Her peace seemed to me more picturesque than psychological - a 10 minute sea picture in which a very large orchestra is employed with skill and beauty. It opens with long, deep, complicated chords, subtly shifting. Currents stir, the surface changes from sparkle to squall. (there are striking pages of wild woodwind activity) and a climax is reached. Then calm – but a different, more luminous calm – returns. Yarnell has a long harmonic reach and a remarkable ear: the instrumental lines are lively; the profusion of detail does not blur. Once again, the New York Youth Symphony has brought forward a composer to watch for. Samuel Wong, its musical director, conducted a colorful, controlled performance.
— Andrew Porter, The New Yorker,
January 7, 1991
The rest of the evening offered difficult music, strikingly performed by the orchestra and directed by Dennis Russell Davies. Carolyn Yarnell's "Living Mountains" and the Sessions Sixth Symphony represented luxury embraced as opposed to luxury denied. Ms. Yarnell's tone poem incorporates all the familiar modern American themes: repetition, clamorous and colorful textures, layers of diverse meters and the like. "Living Mountains" is at its best -- and that best I found engaging -- in the boiling tuttis, where differing movements rub energetically against one another. The Sessions, in contrast, was all hard-nosed energy and surefooted purpose, a piece that does not seduce but instead demands respect on its own harsh terms.
— Bernard Holland, The New York Times, June 22, 1993
New York composer Carolyn Yarnell's contribution followed: a three-movement work entitled More Spirit Than Matter. The first number (Yamell was still stumped for a title by showtime) flirted with] the audience in a habanera pulse that escaped all cliche. Yarnell has a gift for creating new textural landscapes, and that gift was certainly in evidence. Through an ingenious balancing of thematic material with witty part- writing, one was able to still feel the infectious pulse: of the opening even after the piece changed rhythmic direction. The middle section followed with a groundbass development that had a certain sweet solemnity, yet led so logically back to the recap that the interruption felt like a fading daydream. The following movement, titled Plain Music, utilized the baroque convention of building upon resolved suspensions. In Yarnell's rendering, the suspended notes emerged dreamily from the slowly moving tonal mass to resolve and ebb like a spent breaker.
Against the inexorable build of the music, the mute-stopped harpsichord sounded like an improvisation on koto. 'The final movement, Spinning Music, set out in the form of a gigue, which led to playfulness, and thence to the complete abandon of swirling strings and circling winds. The vortex somehow gave birth to the gigue again, which pulled the thematic whole of the movement to a very satisfying conclusion.
— Thomas Goss, 20th-Century Music, June, 1996
Detonations of Sound, Here, There and Everywhere
Kathleen Supove's open-ended project "The Exploding Piano" offered music by seven composers on Saturday night. Topped with carrot hair and wrapped in one-piece lingerie, Ms. Supove attracted the kind of young, hip, overflow crowd that makes the heart jump with hope for music's future.
The music exploded, or at least ambled, in all directions. Judith Weir's King of France is modal melody over a drone bass that soon runs off its tracks and yet never stops referring back to the original elements. Mean Harp, by Carolyn Yarnell, offered grim counterpoint to Ms. Weir's fancies. For much of its course an agitated two-part invention, Mean Harp, has a bass-heavy insistence that comes close to emotional overkill. To violence like this, the wistfully tonal ending offered only slight mitigation.
— Bernard Holland, The New York Times, December 21, 1994
It was hard to know what to make of Carolyn Yarnell’s Enemy Moon and Exit, this summer’s commission from the Paul Jacobs Memorial Fund, because these are the concluding section of a five-movement symphony. Enemy Moon begins excitingly with violent rhythmic tattoos from the percussion, which continue throughout the quarter hour of the piece, more or less obliterating everything else: You could see everyone playing away like mad, but you wouldn’t hear anything but a uniformly angry, pulsating mass of sound. The composer says the music deals with “basic and intense human emotions,” but beyond reason and coherence; a neighbor rightly called the piece a “tantrum.” Exit was quieter, a precisely calibrated cloud-sound piece, but whether it provides the “ethereal, transcendent” conclusion to the whole work the composer intended was impossible to tell in the absence of the first three movements.
— Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe, August 9, 1991
SYMPHONY DOES MEMORY OF JACOB DRUCKMAN PROUD
The order of the night was right. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (a k a ASCAP) had asked the symphony to perform three world premieres it commissioned in memory of Jacob Druckman, who died in 1996. Different works were performed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Eric Zivian, Carolyn Yarnell and Steven Burke were students of the eminent American composer, as was Gerard Schwarz, who conducted the concerts.
Yarnell's piece was a tribute to her mentor, with whom she studied at Yale. Born in Los Angeles and a current resident of San Francisco, she has a fistful of handsome credentials, including a Fulbright scholarship and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Aspen, Yaddo and Tanglewood, which commissioned her first symphony in 1991.
She is also a painter, and that shows in her Paintings for Jacob. Four sections, unbroken in sequence, define the work. While they are different in character, they are amorphous in shape and reminiscent of abstract paintings expressionistic in tone and style.
The opening, Dark Upon Darkness, is effective: gloomy, even murky, at the start with lower strings punctuated by a percussive piano. Eventually other strings join in and woodwinds and percussion take over the piano tasks. In Strata, the sense of mourning fades and there is a transition to Stargazers, in which textures open up and light enters. Light bursts of sound swim easily over an airy ground. The final movement, Palindrome is Strata backwards: Movement is in many directions and often striking.
This is a direct, bold work that serves as a worthy tribute to Druckman but does not merely imitate him. Yarnell is unafraid to assume neo-romantic poses, although she never dwells there for long, or to try different facets of her own voice.
Last night was Yarnell's turn, with a four-movement Paintings for Jacob that threw so much paint on the musical canvas (extensive instrumentation, many styles and forms) that the total picture was often murky. The Stargazers movement, with its diffuse, Messiaen-like textures, was the most appealing.
— R.M. Campbell, The Seattle Post-Intelligence, March 4, 1998