Something magical happened at Finlandia University's (founded Suomi College) Finnish-American Heritage Center on Wednesday, 29 July 1998, when Roger and Karen (Hill) Reynolds, Priscilla (Haapa) Hawkins, and Melvin Kangas presented a night of "Midsummer Music" to a standing-room-only audience in Hancock, Michigan.
The eclectic program consisted of works ranging from special arrangements of Finnish folk songs to classics to an avant-garde piece that was both visual and aural. It concluded with an encore collection of Finnish songs arranged by Pulitzer prize-winner Roger Reynolds specially for this occasion. A reception was held for the quartet of performers following the event.
The program opened with Antonio Vivaldi's Sonata in e minor, played by Karen Reynolds on the flute and Melvin Kangas at the harpsichord. It was followed by Kangas's arrangement of two Finnish folk tunes, with Ms. Reynolds on the flute and Kangas at the piano.
Reynolds and Hawkins review score.
Jean Sibelius was represented by the tender, haunting Romance, with Ms. Hawkins on the cello and Kangas at the piano. Next, with Reynolds on the flute and Kangas at the harpsichord, was John Dowland's Weep You No More, Sad Fountains and Thomas Moore's poem Song set to music, When Leila Touch'd the Lute, by the late Arthur J. Hill, arranged by Ms. Reynolds for flute and piano. These two works are concerned with loss. Two movements from Haydn's Trio in D Major completed the first part of the program, with all three performers playing on the flute, cello, and harpsichord.
The second portion of the concert proved to be both startling and beguiling in its originality. George Crumb's Vox Balaenae ("Voice of the Whale") calls for three masked players on electrically amplified flute, cello, and piano. Roger Reynolds managed the electronic processing and balancing of the sounds. The piece was introduced as being essentially "evocative," and certainly it was. It evoked the sounds of whales through the ages, from the Archaeozoic period to the Cenozoic, with a "Vocalise" (...for the beginning of time) introduction and a "Sea-Nocturne" (...for the end of time) conclusion. It was also evocative in its borrowings from classic composers of the past as well as Oriental music of the present.
Reynolds balances sounds for "Voice of the Whale."
The concert was presented in part to draw attention to the Ila Amanda and Arthur J. Hill Endowed Scholarship at Finlandia University, established by Karen Reynolds in memory of her parents Ila Amanda and Arthur J. Hill, whose musical contributions as Director of Music (a post now held by Melvin Kangas) over the years at Finlandia University brought considerable fame to the school.
Karen and I have worked with one another throughout our many years together. The exact focus of what we were working on has shifted over time, changing with circumstance. But Karen's interest in heritage, the significance of one's origins and, hence, of one's self-awareness, has always been a central factor. Recently, she set out to ensure that the formative influence her mother had had upon her would be memorialized by an endowed scholarship at Finlandia University, a Finnish-Lutheran institution in Hancock, Michigan. Nor did she neglect her father. The scholarship honors them both and she specified that it should go to someone who has "shown dedication." No intent could have been more characteristic of her ways.
Karen decided to bring attention to the existence of her scholarship by planning a set of concerts in Michigan's Upper Peninsula for the Summer of 1998. I was her one-man support staff, doing whatever was necessary to insure that those events realized her aims. It was demanding work and satisfying in unfamiliar ways.
With these few words I want to indicate how rewarding an experience it was to watch, as it were, to listen from offstage as she and her musical companions went about their common task.
Musical performance is for Karen the most natural and revealing medium of communication, of release. I hear things in the shaping of her phrases, in the articulation of their inner detail, and, more, in the vibrancy of the sound stream itself, that touch me in the deepest ways that music can. Whether in a modest composition of Dowland's, a moving tribute her father wrote on loss, a Rachmaninoff song, or the rhapsodic fancies of George Crumb's Vox Balaenae, she is a gripping singer of wordless messages.
My comments are, as must be admitted, those of an accomplice. My interest in Karen's enterprise is deep and personal. But I am clear about the difference between the routine – if admirable – and the remarkable. There were many among her listeners whose eyes teared over at the tug of her lyricism. I was one of them.
– Roger Reynolds, 19 August 1998
This page last modified 4 April 2006.