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.”
Cartoonist Peter Bagge takes on the life of another independent woman in Credo, his biography of pioneering libertarian Rose Wilder Lane (also known for being the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder).
In our latest "Missed Connections," Helen Chapple, Saul Blair and Graham Hinton reunite to talk about how a humanitarian trip to Africa 50 years ago changed the trajectory of their lives.
A new HBO show takes on the life of Anne Lister, a real-life British landowner of the 1830s whose voluminous coded diaries detailed her extensive — and sometimes open — love affairs with women.
Ilaria Tuti's crime thriller, set in the mountains of northern Italy, stars a classic odd couple of cops: A gruff, aging, unhealthy veteran detective and her young whippersnapper of a partner.
Author Anna Merlan's recitations are chilling, as are her warnings that fringe beliefs tend to go mainstream — and how their rise is seen against a resurgence in nationalism and white supremacy.
Charles Nix, Mitch Goldstein, and Sarah Hyndman talk to NPR's Scott Simon about a recent face-lift to the typeface Helvetica, which recently got its first redesign in 35 years.
To celebrate the centennial of the modern-dance pioneer's birth, dancers at theaters in London, New York and Los Angeles performed a total of 100 solos that the master choreographed.
Duanwad Pimwana is one of Thailand's preeminent female writers, and this newly translated story collection — while not uniformly flawless — lets readers watch her grow into a true master of the form.
Moms perform heroic tasks every day, but they rarely get portrayed as superheroes. Fast Color tells the story of three generations of black women and the supernatural powers they inherit.
A century after the birth of quantum mechanics, no one is sure what it is telling us about the nature of reality — and Lee Smolin's book adds to a stream of excellent works on the topic.
