ian who doesn’t agree with his state’s political stance, and so is leaving for the north. ‘Bound to Be’ is an extremely ironic view of emancipation by a black character, and yet another view of freedom-as-abandonment is portrayed in ‘All I Ever Known.’ There’s extreme pathos in ‘Hallie-Ann’ and upbeat joy in ‘Jumping the Broom’ as slaves were finally allowed to marry. For me, one of the strongest numbers is ‘I Walk Away’ as a black Union soldier chooses not to take revenge on a white Confederate.” Overture to Reflection
As it ponders the Civil War at a distance of 150 years, the nation observes the bicentennial of another American conflict, one that began with a declaration of war against Great Britain signed by President James Madison on June 18, 1812. Baltimore, because of its association with Fort McHenry and the inspiration it gave to Francis Scott Key in the writing of The Star Spangled Banner, is strongly identified with the War of 1812. And it was Baltimore native Philip Glass to whom a consortium of U.S. and Canadian organizations turned for an orchestral piece commemorating that war. His Overture for 2012 was commissioned by the Toronto and Baltimore symphony orchestras, the City of Toronto, the Maryland State Arts Council, and Toronto’s Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity. It was premiered simultaneously by the Toronto and Baltimore symphonies on June 17 of this year under their respective music directors, Peter Oundjian and Marin Alsop. In Baltimore the premiere took an upbeat tone as part of a “Star-Spangled Sailabration” that included a parade of tall ships and naval vessels in the harbor and a flyover by the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels. Glass’s overture shared the bill with music from John Williams’s film score to The Patriot; an Armed Forces Medley performed with the U.S. Navy Band Sea Chanters Chorus; “The Streets of Baltimore” as arranged by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (and performed by his Celtic rock band, O’Malley’s March); and, of course, The Star-Spangled Banner. As for the new Glass work, Baltimore Sun critic Tim Smith wrote, “Except for a few dark brass chords, Overture 2012 does not seem to be concerned with any past unpleasantness. The 75-year-old Glass, a guiding light in the genre known as minimalism, has fashioned an upbeat score that americanorchestras.org
churns along steadily and engagingly.” Toronto had a considerably more provocative take on the War of 1812. Aside from the premiere of Glass’s Overture to 2012, the Luminato Festival featured a large-scale art installation on the grounds of Toronto’s Fort York, which had fallen to U.S. forces during the war. The installation consisted of 200 A-frame tents, each depicting an aspect of the war’s impact on civilian life gleaned from research into real-life stories of family, love, loss, survival, patriotism, collaboration, and betrayal. And in conjunction with the Royal Ontario Museum, the festival carried discussion of the war further with a June 8 forum entitled “The U.S. Has Coveted Canada Since the War of 1812.” According to organizers of the forum, at issue was “whether the invasion continues to this day—not with muskets and cannons but with political ideas and cultural values, movies and television, and fast-food chains and resource-hungry corporations.”
Hampson; and Mount Rushmore for chorus and orchestra, a Pacific Symphony commission inspired by South Dakota’s iconic mountain sculpture of four American presidents. It was in researching the latter that Daugherty came up with the idea for an orchestral work commemorating the Trail of Tears. “Mount Rushmore was sculpted into a mountain considered sacred to the Indians of that area,” he says. “I thought at that time I’d like to look at American history from another point of view.” In Trail of Tears it’s a Native American point of view, but not specifically Cherokee. The wordless protagonist is the flute soloist, who must employ a variety of contem-
Native Concerns
While the War of 1812 was a milestone in U.S. history, its overall impact on society was far less profound than that of the countless battles waged by the nation’s rulers against indigenous North Americans. These included not just small-scale, localized wars but mass displacements such as the infamous Trail of Tears during the regime of President Andrew Jackson, in which the U.S. Army forcibly marched more than 15,000 Cherokees from their ancestral lands in the South to the “Indian territory” in what is now Oklahoma. That sorrowful episode from 1838-1839 is captured in a recent work for solo flute and chamber orchestra by Michael Daugherty. His Trail of Tears Flute Concerto was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and the Ann Arbor (Mich.), Delaware, Omaha, and Tupelo (Miss.) symphony orchestras. It was premiered March 25, 2010, by flutist Amy Porter and the Omaha Symphony under Music Director Thomas Wilkins. Daugherty, a self-proclaimed history buff, says his catalogue now includes “about 100 pieces that reflect various aspects of American history or American icons.” Trail of Tears followed hard on the heels of two other works of his that are rooted in American history: Letters from Lincoln, written for the Spokane Symphony and baritone Thomas
Composer/conductor Kermit Poling and narrators Archie McDonald and Gail Beil following the Marshall Symphony Orchestra’s February 2011 premiere of Poling’s Civil Warinspired work No Sound of Trumpet Nor Roll of Drum.
porary techniques—tongue flutters, note bending, large jumps in its lightning-quick passage work—to evoke a range of emotion. As Daugherty indicates in the program note on his website, the nostalgic first movement (“where the wind blew free”) was inspired by a quotation from the 19thcentury Apache leader Geronimo. The second movement, “incantation,” meditates on the passing of loved ones and the hope for a better life in the world beyond. The third and final movement, ‘sun dance,’ evokes a spectacular Plains Indian ceremony. “Banned for a century by the U.S. government,” he writes, “the dance is now practiced again today. I have composed a fiery musical dance to suggest how reconnecting with rituals of the past might create a path to a new and brighter future.” Though the work was conceived from the outset as a flute concerto evoking Native American history, Daugherty chose not
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