Hector Berlioz
| March to the Scaffold (from Symphonie Fantastique) | ||
| October 24, 2008 | ||
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Hector Berlioz wrote an amazing symphony called "Symphonie Fantastique" It was a piece written at the height of the Romantic Period in music. It is a Symphony that follows the drug-induced dreams of an artist. There is a movement called "March to the Scaffold" where the artist drema he is being chased for a crime. He really doesn't know what the crime is.... but that doesn't matter to the music.... you hear the chase in the music, he hear his squeal of anguish as he is brought to the guillotine and you hear the heavy blade fall on to his neck and then 2 bass notes which symbolize his head flopping onto the ground. Berlioz was THE composer that represented the Romantic period in music where composers tried to put their feelings, visions, emotions, and sensations into their compositions. Other composers of this period are Franz Liszt, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and many others. I hope you enjoy this movement from Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique....March to the Scaffold. I hope it inspires to go and get the entire Symphony.... it is something EVERY musician needs to have in their library. Mr. Randazzo |
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Faculty Contributor - Mr. Massaro
Listen To: "Lincoln Portrait"
Lincoln Portrait
Some ten days after news of the attack on Pearl Harbor had circulated throughout the country, the conductor André Kostelanetz wrote to Jerome Kern, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland with a commission. He hoped for three works that would have “a correlated idea in that they are to represent a musical portrait gallery of great Americans.” Kostelanetz suggested George Washington, Paul Revere, Walt Whitman, Robert Fulton, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth as suitable subjects to memorialize in music. Thomson chose Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York City, along with the journalist Dorothy Thompson, his colleague at the Herald Tribune. Copland proposed Walt Whitman. But Kern had already selected Mark Twain, and because Kostelanetz did not want two writers in the group of three portraits, Copland turned to Lincoln.
Lincoln was a fitting subject for Copland's musical portrait, which he began to write in late February 1942. Unlike Thomson and Kern, who composed purely instrumental portraits, Copland wrote for speaker and orchestra.
As Copland explained, he chose passages not for their familiarity—although the Gettysburg Address is used at the end—but for their contemporary relevance. All of his selections evoke the political and moral challenges to American democracy posed by slavery in the Civil War and fascism in World War II. The narration for Lincoln Portrait speaks eloquently on the subject of slavery, but it also can be seen to reflect a contemporary concern for economic justice and to support the international fight against fascism. In the manuscript drafts for the narration, Copland cobbled together the following from an 1860 letter that Lincoln wrote to his friend Henry Asbury and an address Lincoln delivered that same year at the Cooper Union in New York City: “The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats. . . . Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Copland quotes Lincoln to cast the Civil War as one battle in a continuing struggle for freedom.
Copland quotes music as well as text in Lincoln Portrait, setting two traditional American tunes: the eighteenth-century ballad “Springfield Mountain” and Stephen Foster's minstrel song “Camptown Races.” First to appear is “Springfield Mountain.” The tune and its setting exemplify Copland's pastoral idiom. The use of these American folk songs evoke nostalgia, a longing for home tinged with a sense of loss. In one musical phrase, Copland establishes a sense of Lincoln's time and place, long ago in rural America.
Aaron Copland - read more about: Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was one of Americas great composers. His music achieved a balance between modern music and American folk styles. Along with composing music he was an accomplished pianist. As his interest in compostion waned towards the end of his life (1960's on) he conducted more than he wrote music. Queens College in City University or New York named their music school for him: The Aaron Copland School of Music