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.”
In his latest book, Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag uses his ghostly photorealism to create an alternate America overcome by an addiction to technology, by drought, by war and loss and loneliness.
The creator of the hit show about a trans woman and her family says patriarchy and white supremacy have a hold on storytelling in Hollywood — and other people want a chance to speak.
Kingsolver's new novel opens with a family suffering a slew of disappointments — job losses, aging parents and kids returning home — then jumps back in time to draw subtle parallels with the past.
Like protagonist Starr Carter, Amandla Stenberg grew up in a black neighborhood, but attended an overwhelmingly white school. She stars in the adaptation of the novel about a fatal police shooting.
Tahereh Mafi's new novel follows a young Muslim teenager in the years just after 9/11, and what happens when a popular boy in her class falls for her — will she choose love, or self-preservation?
In Mother of the Maid, Glenn Close returns to the New York stage to portray a 15th-century peasant woman with a remarkable adolescent daughter she loves — and can't protect.
An exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art finds political power in dizzying patterns from the Kuba Kingdom — located in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Author and musician Jeff Jackson's new novel paints a nightmarish world where the debate over authenticity and selling out has lead to an epidemic of musicians being killed on stage, mid-performance.
Concerned about keeping toxic art supplies around his kids, Jason Logan began making his own all-natural inks. He shares his process in a new book — and on a gathering expedition in Washington, D.C.
Michael Myers is back and, so is Laurie Strode. Jamie Lee Curtis was 19 when she starred in the original Halloween. This sequel ignores the others to focus on what has happened to Laurie since 1978.
