Made In America
4 – 5:30PM
Octandre, the angular, urban, and confrontational work for wind ensemble by Edgar Varèse, epitomizes the intransigence of 20th century modernism.
Mother and Child, a lullaby for string orchestra written by Varèse’s student, William Grant Still, embodies the complete opposite of Octandre. It is sentimental, traditional, and vernacular.
Three Places in New England, by Charles Ives, somehow fuses these two disparate worlds (the modern and the vernacular) together. Ives, America’s musical alchemist, creates a world in which rugged modernism and familiar folk melodies inhabit the same world, creating an experience that is neither exclusively urban, nor exclusively pastorale, but instead, feels cosmic, universal, humane, and all-encompassing.
Sang Song’s Hoarding Behaviors for Soprano and Ensemble, which is inspired by the tragic case of Homer Collyer and Langley Collyer, commonly known as the Collyer Brothers. When they died in 1947, it was discovered that their Harlem townhouse contained more than 140 tons of junk amassed over several decades. Song finds instances of (quasi) hoarding behaviors in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (a set of 33 variations when Beethoven was commissioned to write just one), J. M. W. Turner’s bequest to the National Gallery (a heap of 20,000 drawings and sketches) and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (a collection of 133 elegies with a total of 2,916 lines), and turns them into a musical reflection on human frailty as evidenced by the Collyer Brothers. Hoarding Behaviors is commissioned by Fromm Foundation at Harvard University.
All four works on this program were and are conceived, written, and premiered in America.
PROGRAM
Octandre (1923)
Edgard Varèse
for chamber ensemble
Mother and Child (1943)
William Grant Still
for string orchestra
The Housatonic at Stockbridge (1921)
Charles Ives
for soprano and piano
Three Places in New England (1903-1929)
Charles Ives
for chamber orchestra
Intermission
Hoarding Behaviors (2022-2023) WORLD PREMIERE
Sang Song
for soprano and 11 instruments
Sharon Harms, soprano