Lilja

An orchestral fantasy on two traditional Icelandic songs: Lilja and Ólafur Liljurós

Writing Lilja: A Glance at Icelandic Music and Spirit

This piece was commissioned by the Martindale Center for the Study of Private Enterprise at Lehigh University.  It is influenced by a year of studying the musical tradition of Iceland and the effects of the 2008 banking collapse on Icelandic music and musicians, including a 10 day trip to Iceland for research.  This recording, along with an article I wrote about the process of writing the piece, were published in the 2011 edition of the Martindale Center’s Perspectives On Business & Economics.

The piece is organized into four short, continuous movements, and is based on two traditional Icelandic tunes.  The most prominently featured of these, for which the piece is named, is one of the best-known and most intriguing chants of medieval Iceland.   The chant is a setting of Lilja, a poem by fourteenth-century Icelandic monk Eysteinn Ásgrímsson, which summarizes the story of Christianity from Creation to the Final Judgment, ending with a prayer to the Virgin Mary. One of the most fascinating qualities about this chant is its tonal ambiguity; it doesn’t seem fall into any recognizable mode or tonality of the time. The second Icelandic tune used in this piece is a popular dance tune called Ólafur Liljurós, the text of which is particularly interesting as it represents the seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of Christianity and pre-Christian tradition, still a significant part of the Icelandic culture today.

I found one hallmark of Icelandic music and culture to be the preservation and anachronistic interaction of different traditions throughout time; as such, I decided to draw from several distinct styles that have played an important role in Icelandic music history, including Scandinavian chant, Catholic organum, Lutheran hymnody, nineteenth-century Romanticism, and twentieth-century techniques such as Minimalism and Serialism.

Lilja is meant to represent my own experience seeing Iceland and learning about the musical tradition and Icelandic people.  I hope listeners will hear the ice, wind, waterfalls, oceans, cliffs, mountains, geysers, volcanoes, and other exceptional sights that I had the privilege of experiencing in person.  But more importantly, I hope listeners will feel my excitement in discovering the beauty in what was previously strange and foreign.

Lilja was recorded and premiered by the Monocacy Chamber Orchestra on May 2, 2011 in Baker Hall of the Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh University under the direction of Paul Salerni.