The Summer 2015 edition of SYMPHONY (the quarterly magazine published by the League of American Orchestras) was timed to be available for the League’s annual conference (which just took place in Cleveland). The contents have now been published online as well.
This issue of SYMPHONY contains my feature on composers who are drawing on their Arabic, Turkish, and Iranian roots to enrich America’s orchestral life.
My new essay on Sergei Prokofiev’s fantastic and way-underplayed Third Symphony is now up on San Francisco Symphony‘s web site for the program Michael Tilson Thomas is conducting next week. Thank you, MTT, for championing this work!
Music depicting the ravings of demonic possession, eroticized spiritualism (or spiritualized eroticism), medieval witchcraft and sorcery, and a convent of nuns whipped into mass hysteria—no, it’s not the score to a Stephen King film but a work that has a decent claim to being Sergei Prokofiev’s operatic masterpiece: The Fiery Angel (Ognenniy angel in Russian). A labor of love—and great frustration—The Fiery Angel also served as the source for his Third Symphony (even including much of its orchestration). Prokofiev wrote that he considered the latter “to be one of my best compositions.”
To prepare for a new essay, I spent some of last week immersed in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s breakthrough composition from 1910, A Sea Symphony – also known as the First Symphony (though he didn’t get around personally to numbering the first three of his nine symphonies).
While it has its weak moments, I wish this work were performed more often, but it’s never really caught on with American audiences, and the score poses a huge challenge for the chorus. By a remarkable coincidence, A Sea Symphony premiered exactly one month after Mahler’s Eighth (that incredible amalgam of medieval Church hymn and the final scene of Faust). Both works represent unclassifiable hybrids of cantata, symphony, and oratorio, taking the “model” of Beethoven’s Ninth to new extremes. And five years before that, Debussy’s La mer was first performed in Paris. (There was also a growing body of sea-oriented compositions by Vaughan Williams’s compatriots.)
For Vaughan Williams, though, the real impetus wasn’t to somehow paint the sea in orchestral-choral terms but, instead, to give shape to the oracular insights he’d gleaned from his immersive reading of Walt Whitman. He chose texts from Leaves of Grass that use the sea to figure the human soul’s yearning for “restless explorations” and the like:
O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Covered all over with visible power and beauty,
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.
(Talking about our favorite VW symphonies, my friend Q said, “I think I often want Sibelius to be more pastoral, and Vaughan Williams less so, in the matter of symphonies.”)
What would a composer who was setting out today to write an ambitious work inspired by the metaphorical possibilities of the sea come up with, I wonder? Would it even be possible not to take account of the dire state of the oceans? There’s no escaping it, from the ongoing radioactive leakage at Fukushima to this recent study by Australian scientists concluding that “humans have put so much plastic into our planet’s oceans that even if everyone in the world stopped putting garbage in the ocean today, giant garbage patches would continue to grow for hundreds of years.”
William Gardner Smith wrote the story of a Black writer who, like Smith himself, moved to Paris to pursue a freedom he couldn't find in America. New York Review Books is releasing a new edition.
Vance played attorney Johnnie Cochran in The People v. O.J. Simpson. Now he takes to the pulpit as Aretha Franklin's father, Rev. C.L Franklin, in Genius: Aretha. Originally broadcast April 21, 2021.
The new film Nine Days — at its essence, a reminder to celebrate every moment you're given — is both deep and fun. Here are three other movies that ponder the meaning of life.
This hour, journalist Saleem Reshamwala gives us a tour of surprising people and places — Lima, Nairobi, and prehistoric New Jersey — to inspire new perspectives on travel and cultures.
"Animation has been critical to the MTV brand from its inception," says MTV Entertainment president Chris McCarthy. The network helped bring adult and experimental animation into the mainstream.
Jamie Tartt has fallen on hard times and asks to return to AFC Richmond in "Lavender," the second episode of the second season. Meanwhile, Ted continues to struggle to trust Dr. Sharon.
The British-born singer is, after years of successful but imbalanced collaborative work and four Grammy nominations for her last record, finally and fully at the creative helm of her career.
Scholars have a mantra: Shakespeare is universal and his works are for everyone. But for Black actors and audiences, does an implicit whiteness in the Bard's canon hinder access and identification?
After a silent year in which artists were sent grants instead of invitations to perform, the beloved festival was determined to go on this year, as carefully as possible. And how possible is that?
