Professor Ian Krouse’s “50th Birthday Celebration” is not a party in the ordinary sense of the word. There probably won’t be cake, it costs $7 for UCLA students to attend, and Feb. 14, the date of the event, isn’t the music department chair’s birthday.
Instead, the party planned is a celebration of music composed by Krouse, to be performed by his friends and colleagues, including professors and students of the UCLA Department of Music.
Krouse is quick to point out that the purpose of the event is twofold.
“This program is, as much for me as it is for my audience, a chance to take stock of who I am at this point in my life,” he said, “and to celebrate simultaneously these wonderful musicians who have been so instrumental and crucial in helping me develop as an artist.”
The planned program serves as a brief retrospective of Krouse’s life as a widely acclaimed composer, with works ranging from over 20 to only a few years old.
Performed in chronological order from oldest to newest, the selected compositions were carefully chosen to collectively reflect Krouse not only as a musician, but also as a husband, father, friend and lover of literature.
The program begins with “Music in Four Sharps,” a work based on a song by Elizabethan lutanist John Dowland and to be performed by Professors Peter Yates, Lorenz Gamma, Paul Coletti and Antonio Lysy, as well as music graduate student Lindsey Strand-Polyak.
“(The composition) draws on historical traditions of repeated ground-based pieces but is updated in Ian Krouse’s very unique, harmonic language,” Strand-Polyak said.
She added that the repetitious nature of this Elizabethan piece is “used to induce a trance-like and celebratory state” and will thus fit in well with the event.
The program’s second section, entitled “At the Edge of Firelight,” features two works commissioned by the Debussy Trio, whose harpist Marcia Dickstein has known Krouse since he tutored her in music theory as a graduate student.
In the intervening years, the Debussy Trio has commissioned more than half a dozen works from Krouse.
“We’re really good friends,” Dickstein said. “He writes so well for my instrument … I’m always asking him to write for the harp and to write for the Trio.”
“At the Edge of Firelight” is comprised of two Japanese children’s songs, called “Hora Nero, Nen Nero,” or “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” and “Hitori De Sabishii,” or “Alone and Sad.” Both are set to Krouse’s original music and were inspired by Krouse’s wife, Chika Krouse, who was born in Japan, and their three children.
The Debussy Trio will also be performing in the third section, called “Cinco Canciónes Insólitas” or “Five Peculiar Songs,” a collection of works that meld Krouse’s interest in early 20th century Spanish popular music with his long exposure to the literature of Spanish poet Federico GarcÃa Lorca.
The lyrics will be sung by mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán, who also collaborated with Krouse in the 2005 production of “Lorca, Child of the Moon,” a full-scale opera that premiered at UCLA.
“”˜Cinco Canciónes Insólitas’ was a way to celebrate my long-standing friendships with musicians like Suzanna Guzmán, who began building “˜Lorca, Child of the Moon’ with me 20 years ago,” Krouse said.
The program concludes with “Invocation”, another tribute to a lengthy friendship, this time between Krouse and Maryanne Kim, also a UCLA alumni and former student of Krouse.
Krouse, after being “spellbound” by a recital featuring Kim and soprano Jessica Rivera (who will also be performing at the event), requested that Kim supply three of the four poems for “Invocation.”
The only stipulation given was that the songs could share a common theme of love, but not typical love.
“I’m not a young man anymore. I’m in my fifties. I want to do something that resonated with me at this point in my life, having been married, having had children, having lived a full life,” Krouse said.
He added that he wanted to set music to poems that “were ambiguous and interesting and complicated.”
The poems selected were written by William Shakespeare, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Japanese poet and architect Tachihara Michizo, and Korean poet Sowol Kim.
All struck a personal chord with the composer.
“The poem by Shakespeare represents me, the Neruda poem represents Maryanne, the Michizo poem represents Jessica and the Japanese poem represents my wife,” Krouse said.
But with such a multifaceted program, his own life and work will be the night’s unifying feature.
“I have a sense of my musical voice being a thorough line enabling me to connect those different works. You also discover (that) if you go through them, there is a definitive narrative quality,” Krouse said.
Still, Krouse is quick to redirect attention from himself to the musicians performing his works.
“I’m just sharing who I am at this point of my life. With these musicians, I couldn’t be in better hands,” Krouse said.
The good feeling is reciprocated.
“Everybody should have friends like Ian. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it’s been 25 years,” Dickstein said. “It’s been a pleasure.”