This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” with the approach of Mardi Gras, we’ll hear music from and about New Orleans.
Henry F. Gilbert, a slightly older contemporary of Charles Ives, and a composer of the New England School, was concerned with introducing folk song and the vernacular to the concert hall. His interest in the music of African Americans, then considered controversial, is reflected in works like “The Dance in Place Congo,” from 1908, a programmatic piece on Creole themes, suggestive of the Sunday afternoon festivity of off-duty New Orleans slaves gathered in Congo Square.
We’ll also hear a piece by the Chicago area composer Edward Joseph Collins, actually titled “Mardi Gras,” from 1923. Collins described the work as “boisterous and bizarre by turns,” evocative of the spirit of Carnival, with its enormous masks and clowns on stilts, colored streamers, confetti, lurid lights, fantastic floats and grotesque costumes.
Three Creole Romantics will offer some insiders’ points of view, as we hear works by Edmond Dédé, Charles Lucièn Lambert, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk, all figures born in New Orleans.
I hope you’ll join me for “Louisiana Purchases,” tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6, or that you’ll listen to it as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
