Luminato
Music Director Peter Oundjian leads the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Philip Glass’s Overture to 2012, concluding the Luminato Festival’s War of 1812 events, June 2012.
Civil Strife
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” These stirring words were spoken by President Abraham Lincoln on March 4, 1861, during his first inaugural address. Less than six weeks later, Confederate forces fired on their enemies in the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, ushering in the most wrenching internal conflict in American history. Today the “mystic chords of memory” are finding expression in musical compositions marking the sesquicentennial of that war. One of these new works is Kermit Poling’s No Sound of Trumpet Nor Roll of Drum. Poling, a conductor and violinist in addition to his work as a composer—he’s music director of the South Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, associate conductor of the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra, and until recently served as Shreveport’s concertmaster— scored No Sound for orchestra and two narrators, one male and one female. “Our intent was to create a piece that didn’t imply any favoritism to one side or the other,” says Poling. “It doesn’t celebrate the war. It just acknowledges that the war happened, that it was horrible, that the experience was a tremendous change in our country and something that shouldn’t be forgotten.” The instrumental writing, harmonically conservative and often soothingly
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melodic, complements a text that is elegiac and reflective rather than martial in character. The piece opens with Lincoln’s abovequoted words from 1861, and ends with an equally famous passage (“With malice toward none and charity for all…”) from the president’s second inaugural address, delivered March 4, 1865, as the war was drawing to a close. No Sound takes its title, and some of its most moving text, from a memoir by Joshua Chamberlain, the Union Army general who accepted the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Other textual sources include the wartime letters of infantrymen and wives on the home front. No Sound was commissioned jointly by the Marshall Symphony Orchestra in eastern Texas and a neighboring organization in Louisiana, the Shreveport Summer Music Festival. Marshall premiered the piece under Poling’s direction on February 27, 2011, and the composer conducted it again that spring in Shreveport as part of the festival orchestra’s annual Memorial Day concert. The following February Poling brought No Sound to his own South Arkansas Symphony, discussing the new piece in several interviews that aired locally on public radio and including it in SAS’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. concert. Additional performances of No Sound have included one by the Parma (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra, and a performance is scheduled for next May by the Susquehanna Symphony Orchestra (Bel Air, Md.). Another new work occasioned by the Civil War sesquicentennial is Rappahannock County, a 90-minute theatrical song cycle with music by Ricky Ian Gordon and a libretto by Mark Campbell. Co-commis-
sioned by the Virginia Arts Festival, Virginia Opera, the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for the Arts, and Texas Performing Arts at the University of TexasAustin, it had its first performances at the Harrison Opera House in Norfolk, Va., in April 2011. The Richmond and Austin premieres took place that September. Unlike the Poling work, Rappahannock County evokes a specific region and depicts the war both topically and chronologically. As Gordon explained in a Times-Dispatch interview shortly before the Richmond premiere, librettist Mark Campbell “wanted to keep it in Virginia and suggested narrowing it down to Rappahannock County. By setting it in one county, we were setting a limitation that made it all manageable.” Drawing its text from diaries, letters, and other contemporary accounts, Rappahannock County focuses largely on issues of slavery and emancipation. Backed by a seventeen-piece chamber Trail of Tears orchestra, five singers— would appear three in roles designated as to be just Caucasian, two as Africana dramatic American—portray 30 difflute concerto ferent characters, both real devoid of and imagined, who express political or a range of emotions and historical political viewpoints. They significance. might be ancestors of peoBut audiences ple living in Rappahannock who have heard County today. composer Judith Ilika, director of Michael performance promotion at Daugherty Theodore Presser Comspeak from the pany, the work’s publisher, stage about notes that “many aspects the piece have of the war are treated in come away Rappahannock County. with something ‘Farewell, Old Dominion’ more. is sung by a white Virgin-
symphony
FALL 2012