The end of summer can be a time of reminiscence, sentiment, and undefined yearning. The limpid air, the lambent, silvery light of late August imbue one with a sense of nostalgia, swaddled in the gentle melancholy of an idyllic dream. How I feel for the young ‘uns straining against the inescapable vortex of another school year.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear music by four composers who indulged in musical reminiscences of childhood.
William Schuman grew up to become President of Lincoln Center – and one of our country’s most respected symphonists – but his “American Festival Overture” (1939) is permeated by a three-note call-to-play (“Wee-Awk-Eee!”) recollected from his boyhood.
Haskell Small’s “Visions of Childhood” (2011) is a piano cycle in the Robert Schumann “Kinderszenen” mode, again a mature artist reflecting on halcyon days. The suite falls into ten brief movements: “A Long Time Ago,” “Playing Rough,” “A Little Story,” “Feeling Lonely,” “School’s Out,” “Haunted House,” “Frolicking,” “Look at Me!,” “Roller Coaster,” and “Lullaby.”
Charles Ives may have been a radical innovator, but his music is often infused with a nostalgia for the New England of his youth. His Violin Sonata No. 4 (1906-1915, revised in 1942) bears the subtitle, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting,” a programmatic work that balances hymn tunes and rowdy boyhood high jinks.
Finally, as he entered his eighth decade, George Crumb embarked on a remarkably productive Indian Summer, which resulted in no less than seven volumes of “American Songbooks,” the last completed in 2011, when the composer was 82 years-old. Each volume consists of deeply personal treatments of folk songs and hymns Crumb recollected from his formative years in West Virginia.
We’ll hear selections from “American Songbook III: The River of Life” (2008). By employing his characteristic shades and cross-hatchings by way of an assortment of ear-tickling percussion effects, the composer provides his own commentary on the time-worn source material, lending it both unsuspected depth and an aura of timelessness.
It’s a far cry from “Kinderszenen.” I hope you’ll join me for “Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be” – 20th and 21st century composers look back on childhood – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
