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.”
It's wedding season! For this week's Call-In, Mandy Len Catron, author of the new book How to Fall in Love with Anyone, answers your questions about love and relationships.
Diksha Basu's new novel was inspired by the explosion of wealth she saw in 1990s India. She says money is a complex thing, and it takes a while for her characters to see that.
A family curse, a resurrection and a vengeful witch are at the center of Elle Cosimano's Southern Gothic chiller The Suffering Tree. But the book elides its setting's history of racial violence.
Known for his on-court outbursts, McEnroe famously yelled, "You cannot be serious!" at one official. Now, decades later, he says it's a "miracle" if he goes a full day without hearing that line.
When Dr. Vanessa Grubbs fell in love with a man whose kidneys were failing, he'd been waiting for a transplant for years. Her book explores the ways racial inequity is embedded in the system.
We'll ask the comedian three questions about the Australian psychedelic rock band. Izzard has a new book called Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens.
Anne Helen Petersen's new book is a thoughtful consideration of several public women — from Nicki Minaj to Hillary Clinton — who've run up against the invisible expectations our culture has of them.
David Leveaux's new film follows exiled German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II as he realizes that the new Germany of National Socialism has nothing at all in common with the Germany of his memories.
Don Winslow's new novel is packed with crooked cops and crookeder crooks, all defending their territories and trying to maintain a status quo where everyone earns, everyone eats and no wars break out.
Daniel Day-Lewis says he is no longer going to act. Weekend Edition guest host Melissa Block remembers an interview she had with him that might shed some light on what he'll do next.
