John Kenneth Graham

American composer John Kenneth Graham (born July 261955 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana), studied at Southeastern Louisiana University and Louisiana State University, and writes orchestral tableaux of American legend and folklore. A traditionalist, his most representative works include the first four symphonies of a nine-symphony cycle. Other works include a Festival Mass in C Minor for choir, pipe organ and chamber orchestra, First Piano Concerto, numerous works for percussion and several large works for symphonic band. The recent performance of Lines After Bidart While Watching Television, arranged upon a poem by John Mulrooney, featured symphonic band and full choir with alto solo and is a commemorative to those who served in the relief of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Graham's aesthetic relies upon the use of tonal harmony, with poetic applications of both form and style. He freely makes use of traditional harmonic applications while at the same instance reaching the listener with fresh approaches to MusicAL structure and climactic timing. The crucial effort is always in the storytelling, which is why almost all of his music has some literary basis (Stuart 2006). Graham's main serious influences include Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Giovanni Gabrieli, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Respighi, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives and John Adams. His influences from various contemporary popular artists are considerable, primarily rock, progressive jazz and American folk music. He is a member of the international Delian Society.

Graham's lifelong artistic interest is in the creative use of sonata form to produce works which convey a tale. It is his habitual collecting of folktales, hobo stories, ghost stories and other Americana which informs the literary basis of most of his work. His music is organic, built up from motifs representing various emotional and philosophical constructs which hail back to the Latin Liber Usualis of 1896 and even historically to ancient Greek and Hebrew hymns. It is this hidden emotional language of music which has formed a sort of emotional syntax for western art music going back more than two millennia, and which is still heard in modern times. This emphasis upon motivic development of latent melody is evident in Graham's use of melismatic textures to convey both texture and motif (Melisma). The symphony is the principal form used by Graham for purposes of shedding light upon this universal musical understanding, yet in his other works one can detect the same style of craftsmanship.

The practice of melodic and rhythmic variation is taken up in a particular manner in Graham's work. Two guiding principles regarding the genesis of new thematic material are: (1) the use of the Golden ratio to determine poetic (emotional) climaxes to his work, and (2) the use of prime numbers to describe rhythmic limits to motifs, and to propel phrasing and overall musical structures forward throughout the work.

Graham has also written commemorative works for special occasions. In 1983, he conducted the Baton Rouge Concert Band in a performance of his symphonic poem Freedom's Defense for the occasion of the dedication of the Fletcher-class, WWII destroyer USS Kidd. This particular work included use of the actual guns aboard the vessel, reminiscent of Beethoven's Battle Symphony. The march setting at the climax of Second Symphony is drawn from Rangers Lead the Way, a Sousa-style military march arranged for band and field drums. It has been adopted by the U.S. Army Ranger Association as their official march.

His symphony cycle consists of nine works, each of which conform to a separate area of the United States at different seasons of the year. Four of these are complete, First Symphony (northeastern Missouri in The Spring), Second Symphony (southeastern Iowa in the summer), Third Symphony (about Yellowstone National Park during the fall), and Fourth Symphony (the Dakotas during the winter}. Other planned symphonies include Fifth Symphony (California during the spring}, Sixth Symphony (Nebraska during the summer), Seventh Symphony (Carolinas during the fall), Eighth Symphony (Virginia during the winter), and Ninth Symphony (about Louisiana during the spring). Thus, the cycle begins and ends in spring, and the final projected movement of Ninth Symphony will feature a choral setting of the Latin Dies Irae from the old requiem-style mass set against full orchestra and Dixieland jazz-band (Stuart 2006).

His works in the jazz-fusion style BLEND taut Latin rhythms and percussion, full use of horn lines and electronica, as well as his signature melodic gift and expressively poetic use of song-forms. These works make full use of jazz piano with influences from New Orleans-style blues to big band to third-stream rock.

See also

• Symphony
• Symphonic poem
• Piano concerto
• Orchestration
• Jack Kerouac
• Neal Cassady
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Carl Sandburg
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Delian Society

References

• Louisiana Naval War Memorial. 1983. Program notes for Freedom's Defense, included within program booklet for USS Kidd dedication and formal opening, August 27).
• Price, Anne [Advocate arts critic]. 2002. "Graham's Composing Takes Him All over Country". Sunday Advocate Magazine (Baton Rouge), (January 27).
• Stuart, Carol. 2006. "A Workingman's Composer". Livingston Parish [Louisiana] News (February 16).
• Zwerneman, Lynette. 2005. "Park Band, Choir to Perform Local Composer's Piece Tonight". Livingston [Montana] Enterprise (May 17).