Aaron Jay Kernis's "Goblin Market" (1995)

While ground-breaking female composer Ruth Gipps was certainly a significant figure in the history of musical settings of “Goblin Market,” Aaron Jay Kernis nevertheless stands out as the most prominent and successful composer to date to undertake a musical adaptation of this poem. Indeed, a few years after composing Goblin Market (1995), Kernis would become one of the youngest composers to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1998). Aaron Jay Kernis’s 1995 setting of “Goblin Market” for narrator and large instrumental ensemble is an impressive major work in which a dramatic reading of the unaltered and unabridged poem is precisely notated rhythmically in the musical score. Kernis’s strict rhythmic notation of the entire original text may well be the most detailed and sustained interpretation of the poem’s irregular metre to date.  

Kernis’s Goblin Market has been performed internationally, and it has also been distributed as a commercial cd, recorded by The New Professionals Orchestra, London, narrated by Mary King and conducted by Rebecca Miller (Goblin Market, Signum Records, 2011).

Sources:

Kernis, Aaron Jay. Goblin Market. Lyrics by Christina Rossetti, performance by The New Professionals Orchestra, conducted by Rebecca Miller, narrated by Mary King, Perivale, Signum Records, 2011.

Miller, Leta E. Aaron Jay Kernis. Champaign, IL, U of Illinois P, 2014.