Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis studied composition in San Francisco, Manhattan and at Yale with John Adams, Jacob Druckman, Morton Subotnik, and Charles Wuorinen. He employed rigorous compositional processes until the early 1980s when a growing sense of intuitive freedom became increasingly evident in his work and his style took on a new transparency and emotional eloquence. His is a truly eclectic musical language and he is as happy incorporating Latin rhythms and rap into his music as he is paying harmonic tribute to the Romantic masters and Hildegard von Bingen.

Mr. Kernis has received the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Stoeger Prize, a Rome Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, BMI Prizes, ASCAP Awards and multiple Grammy nominations. He currently serves as Director for the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute and has served as Composer-in-Residence for Astral Artists, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Public Radio, American Composers Forum, and as New Music Advisor of the Minnesota Orchestra for a decade.

Mr. Kernis has taught composition at the Yale School of Music since 2003, and was invited to join the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011.

About Effortlessly love flows:

Ecstatic Meditations is a set of four pieces composed in 1999. The texts are taken from Vliessende Iieht miner gotheit (Das f1ießende Licht der Gottheit), or The Flowing Light of the Godhead, by Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210–c. 1285 C.E.), a medieval mystic, Beguine, and Cistercian nun, whose book describes her visions of God. Effortlessly love flows, is the first of the set.

The texts of Kernis’s settings emphasize a sensual relation between the soul and God. In the first and third pieces, the author invokes the image of God’s love playing the soul of man as an instrument and inviting the soul to dance. The second and fourth movements describe a dialogue between the soul and God as lovers. The composer develops these themes with rich harmonies and pulsating dance rhythms in music that “bears the unmistakable stamp of a wildly fertile musical imagination … with rich poetic imagery.” This complete set was named by the National Endowment for the Arts as an American Masterpiece of Choral Music. The complete set of Ecstatic Meditations have been recorded by the Volti Chamber Choir on the Innova label, and individual movements have received multiple recordings.