Category: Sweetness and Light

You don’t have to strong-arm anyone into liking Armstrong Gibbs. It’s impossible not to fall in love with the easy charm and seductive melody of his light music classic “Dusk.” Sure, he also wrote works on a grander scale, such as the “Odysseus Symphony,” for soloists, chorus and orchestra, clearly cut from the same cloth as that of “A Sea Symphony” by his teacher, Ralph Vaughan Williams. But it’s this atmospheric slow waltz, composed in 1935 and requested by Princess Elizabeth – later Queen Elizabeth II – for performance on her eighteenth birthday, that is his best-known music.

Enjoy this crepuscular classic this morning on “Sweetness and Light,” as part of a playlist organized around the observation that the days grow precipitously shorter.

Soon, it will be as if morning runs into evening. So it’s not by accident that we’ll also hear Alexander Alyabyev’s “Morning and Evening Overture.” I’ll even toss noon into the mix with Franz von Suppé’s “Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna.”

But twilight will be here before you know it. In addition to the Gibbs miniature, we’ll also delight in “At Dusk” by Second New England School luminary Arthur Foote.

Finally, seemingly out of left field, and because I say so, we’ll listen to Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 6. Sibelius was once asked by a journalist to provide a motto for his new symphony. The composer responded, “When shadows lengthen.” It could be argued it’s not a “light” piece, exactly, but it is ravishingly beautiful, and it’s not played all that often. So there!

The days grow short, but hopefully the music will be long on enjoyment, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/