Twentieth Century

Remembering Composer Stephen Paulus

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American composer Stephen Paulus passed away yesterday due to complications from a significant stroke he suffered last year. He was 65 years old. Paulus leaves behind a wide range of works, including three violin concertos. William Preucil recorded the first concerto with conductor Yoel Levi and the Atlanta Symphony in the early 1990s. That recording also features the thrilling, eleven minute adventure for orchestra, Concertante, written in 1989 (find on iTunes). In addition …

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Music and Humor

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Leonard Bernstein masterfully explored the subject of humor in music in one of his Young People’s Concerts. The episode takes listeners on a musical tour from Haydn and Rameau to Brahms, Mahler, Prokofiev and Shostakovich and offers insight into why we find certain music funny. To this day, no one has done more for music education than Bernstein. Watching these programs, which originally aired on CBS in the late 1950s, you can sense Bernstein’s passion and …

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Autumnal Mahler

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Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) is as much a symphony as a song cycle. It’s a seamless integration of voice and orchestra lines, as if the vocal line is just another instrument. Mahler incorporated the voice in his Second, Third, Fourth and Eighth Symphonies. Many of his songs became the seeds of symphonic movements. But The Song of the Earth, completed in the final years of Mahler’s life …

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Christopher Rouse’s First Symphony

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From the first, haunting strands of its spine-chilling opening, Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 1 inhabits a world of darkness and terror. Its titanic forces rise out of, and then sink back into, an atmosphere of seemingly perpetual gloom. It shows us the strange beauty embodied in brooding darkness, hopelessness and despair, and concludes without delivering the kind of reassurance we would like. Completed in the summer of 1986, the work was written for the …

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Music Inspired by Scotland

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Tomorrow all eyes will be on Scotland. A referendum will determine whether the ancient and mysterious land of rugged mountains, long, picturesque Lochs and remote castles will remain a part of the United Kingdom or become an independent country. Throughout its tumultuous history (which included the arrival of the Romans around 71 AD, and later, Catholic-Protestant religious wars in which the Scots sometimes fought alongside the French), Scotland has maintained a separate …

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Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major

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Great composers are never born out of the smug, comfortable bubble of academia. School has its place when it comes to perfecting the essential technical craft of composition (Beethoven studied with Haydn). But in the end, the greatest composers largely have been outcasts. Their bold, exciting and disruptive visions are usually misunderstood and rejected by the ruling establishment of the day. They hear things that others cannot. The story of Maurice Ravel’s String …

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The Atlanta Symphony: A Tradition in Jeopardy

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You could almost hear the classical music world’s collective groan on Sunday as the Atlanta Symphony became the latest orchestra to impose a lockout on its musicians. The lockout went into effect after both sides were unable to agree to a contract by an 11:59 Saturday deadline. This follows last year’s fifteen month long Minnesota Orchestra lockout, which resulted in the departure of the music director, executive director and numerous musicians. At Adaptistration, …

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