Land of the Northern Frog

1. Morning
2. Afternoon
3. Evening
4. Night, on the Edge of the Underworld

“Land of the Northern Frog” is a fantastical imagination of a day in the life of my great-grandfather, the Estonian violinist, composer and teacher August Kiiss. As a young man, August spent the summers of 1908 and 1909 traveling around south-eastern Estonia, transcribing folks songs—in particular, the centuries-old regilaul (runic songs) that are a core feature of Estonian identity. 35 years later, during WWII, August, my grandmother, and two-year-old mother, escaped Estonia—my grandmother had turned a picture of Stalin upside down on her high school classroom wall and the occupying Soviet authorities had put her on a list to be sent to Siberia. I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, speaking Estonian with my mother and English with my father. As is the case in many diasporic communities and families, my sense of Estonian history and culture was patchwork, powerful but full of holes. I first came across my great-grandfather’s folk song transcriptions during a trip to Estonia in 2008—they had been housed for a century at the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu, Estonia. And as I began work on this piece, I thought of those transcriptions and tried to imagine what my great-grandfather’s travels across Estonia would have been like.

Combining melodies drawn from these archival transcriptions, family stories, and fantasy, the piece unfolds like a musical fairy tale: in the first movement, August travels across the Estonian countryside on the back of a rickety wagon, daydreaming and strumming his violin like a guitar, with herding calls and snippets of folk melodies heard all around. As August arrives in his childhood village, the movement concludes with a rush of joy and a peaceful exhale. In the second movement an Estonian folk melody is heard in the strings while the bassoon embodies August, hurriedly moving his pen across paper, as he transcribes the notes of the melody. A passing group of musicians play a rollicking dance tune and as they disappear into the distance August is left alone with the wind and trees. He hears, perhaps in his head, a quiet but wild version of the folk song that opened the movement, an ancient, shamanistic memory coming into the present. Evening comes with the third movement, the peaceful, flickering June twilight giving way to crickets, frogs and a lyrically yearning melody. The fourth movement begins with a bassoon cadenza as night arrives and August stumbles into a strange, misty nether land on the edge of the underworld. August follows a procession of spirits and leads them in the singing a Saint Marten’s Day (All Hallows Eve) song. Deep underground in the chambers of the slumbering Põhja Konn (“Northern Frog”), a monster of Estonian lore who is seen sometimes as a protector and sometimes as a destroyer, August hears a strange and wild music, resembling the folk tune from the second movement, but with a sound of its own. Wondering whether this music is a glimpse of a deep, forgotten past or a distant future, August returns to the surface and finds his way to his sweet home, full of youthful optimism and unaware of the triumphs and tragedies that will befall Estonia and its people over the next 100 years. “Land of the Northern Frog” was co-commissioned by A Far Cry and Redlands Symphony and was written with great appreciation for bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann.