Kathryn Alexander is Professor of Composition at Yale University’s Music Department. She was recently awarded the Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters honoring her ‘outstanding artistic achievement.’ Additional major awards include: the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Composer’s Fellowship, the Roger Sessions Bogliasco Fellowship, and a Copland House Fellowship, among others. Her wide variety of works, both acoustic and technological, draw upon a range of disciplines, including literature, the visual and plastic arts, the sciences, and technology to develop formal schema that distill from the abstract rather than from literal, programmatic meaning. Rainbows Stretched Like Endless Reins explores the technical agility and timbral characteristics for the violinist/violin in a virtuosic solo setting. Though not programmatic, the work is inspired by the very colorful and intensely dramatic imagery evoked in Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat.
Photo: Michael Marsland