Professor's Music Performed at National Opera Center

Distinguished Professor of English and Music Lawrence Kramer's composition "Two Impressions" was featured in a violin concert by Claudia Schaer and Helen Lin at the National Opera Center on October 2.

Lin and Schaer with Professor Kramer

“Two Impressions” is comprised of two compositions — “Ripple and Gleam” and “Clowd Shadows.” About the latter, Professor Kramer explains, “Cloud shadows are best seen from the air. Travelers on the window seats of planes can often descend from a visual blank slate above the cloud cover to observe clouds drifting and casting their shadows over the landscape, revealing their shapes and producing a perfect mirror effect wedding light to darkness at a distance. The same phenomenon is occasionally visible from high ground--I'm thinking particularly of a hill with a panoramic view of the countryside a few miles from my home in New York’s Hudson Valley--when the clouds find the right shapes and the sun the right position and above and below once again mirror each other. The music gradually evolves toward such a moment, with its rich array of metaphorical suggestions, over the course of about ten minutes.”

Professor Kramer has won several music competitions, and his compositions have been performed all over the world. In addition to his work as a composer, Professor Kramer is the author of several volumes of music criticism, including The Thought of Music (2016), which won the 2017 ASCAP Virgil Thomson Award, and the forthcoming The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (2019).