Ether Game

Eric Ewazen was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1954. He studied at Eastman and Juilliard under such noted composers as Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, Gunther Schuller, and Joseph Schwantner. He has won a number of awards, including the BMI Award, the George Gershwin Prize, the Howard Hanson Prize, and the Bernard Rogers Award. A trombonist, Ewazen has composed a number of works for solo brass instruments, brass ensembles, and band. He was commissioned to write a symphony for wind ensemble to commemorate the bicentennial of West Point.

Charles Ives has been presented to the world as a wild-eyed modernist. Indeed, many of his works are highly experimental, sharply dissonant, and challenging to the listener. What is often overlooked is the fact that early in his career Ives pursued a very traditional musical path. He had been a church organist since his youth. He had hoped, like John Knowles Paine or Horatio Parker, to parlay this success into a broader career as composer and academic. In 1902, Ives produced the cantata The Celestial Country, patterned after his teacher Parker’s famous oratorio Hora novissima. Although the cantata received favorable reviews, Ives abandoned career aspirations in music, keeping it as an active avocation while becoming a successful businessman.

The English poet, composer, theorist and physician Thomas Campion did not earn his living as either a professional musician or a poet, but with his work as a doctor. His musical reputation mainly rests on his airs, for which he wrote both music and poems. After John Dowland , he was the most prolific of the English lute-song composers with well over 100 songs to his name. Today he is well known as a composer-poet, having received more critical attention from 20th-century commentators than most of his contemporaries, including Dowland. He was also an important exponent of the Stuart masque and a conspicuous theorist of both poetry and music.

In November 1910, Puccini set sail for America for the premiere of The Golden Girl of the West, the first world premiere ever held at the Metropolitan Opera House. No expense had been spared. The cast included Emmy Destinn and Enrico Caruso, and was conducted by Toscanini. To all appearances the opera was a triumphant success, with the composer receiving 55 curtain calls, but the critics were guarded. Although Puccini declared it his best opera to date, it failed to enter the general repertory; nor until late in the century did it estimate at its true worth.

After Debussy’s death in 1918, Ravel was generally regarded as France’s leading composer. Recognition by the French state led to his being offered the Légion d’Honneur in 1920, a decoration he publicly refused. But this new-found status had the result of alienating him from some of his colleagues, in particular from Satie and the younger generation, including some of Les Six. Ravel emphasized his isolation by moving west of Paris, where he lived with his cats and was looked after by his housekeeper until his final illness. His house, with its original furnishings, is now a museum in his honor.

After composing the giant work Fontane di Roma, Ottorino Respighi was interested in writing for smaller ensembles. Some years later, he produced his Trittico Botticelliano, based on three paintings by Botticelli that hung in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. One of those was the one entitled L’adorazione dei Magi, which depicted the meeting of Melchior, Casper and Balthazar with the Holy Family. The story of their journey, guided by the Star of Bethlehem, and the bestowing of their gifts, were well known to the composer, and he added these ingredients to his musical picture. Respighi also used the hymn tune Veni Emmanuel at the beginning to depict the faith of the Wise Men, and concluded his musical picture with Melchior, Casper and Balthazar returning to their homes in the east.

The reign of the mythical Assyrian queen Semiramis was marked by great achievement as well as incredible treachery. According to legend, Semiramis founded the ancient city of Babylon , which later became one of the most important cities of the ancient Near East when Hammurabi decided to make it the capital of his own kingdom. Semiramis murdered her husband King Nino in order to become queen, and after a long reign, it is said that she vanished in the form of a dove. This magical event caused her to be worshiped as a deity afterward. Her colorful life was the subject a play by Voltaire upon which Rossini based his last, and perhaps finest, opera. The splendor of the ancient city of Babylon, ruled over by Queen Semiramis, proved to be a fitting way for the great composer to close one phase of his career before beginning another.

The word Arabesque is from an Italian term meaning “Arabian in fashion”. In the world of architecture, an Arabesque is an ornament or style that makes use of fruit, flowers, or foliage and sometimes animal figures to produce an intricate pattern of interlaced lines. Found in many Middle Eastern buildings, the delicate beauty of the Arabesque soon became synonymous with an ethereal quality in general, like that found in Claude Debussy’s musical compositions. The two Arabesques have become some of Debussy’s most popular compositions, a fragile expression of the composer’s fascination with the exotic East!

As a young man, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht went to work for the great German director Max Reinhart from 1924 to 1933, and it was during this time that he began his collaboration with the composer Kurt Weill. Together, the pair produced several works for the stage, their most successful being The Threepenny Opera. When Nazism spread across Germany, Brecht was forced into exile but returned to East Berlin in 1949 to stage one of his plays at Max Reinhart’s old theater in the city’s Soviet sector. This led to his founding of the Berliner Ensemble, and his permanent return to Berlin. Until the end of Brecht’s life, the Berliner Ensemble and the staging of his own works took up the playwright’s time until his death from in 1956.

The 1987 film The Witches of Eastwick, based on a novel by John Updike, featured Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Susan Sarandon as modern day witches, and Jack Nicholson as the Devil. Calling himself Daryl, Nicholson was the unintended result when the three ladies attempted to concoct the perfect man. Since the Devil can be all things to all people, he was exactly what the women were looking for, and his odd appearance, oversized clothing and active eyebrows only seemed to add to his appeal. Accompanied by operatic selections such as Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”, mixed with an original score by John Williams, the darkly comic events of John Updike’s novel turned film translated very well to the big screen, and became one of 1987′s most popular movies.