On this eve of Labor Day, it’s an hour of American music courtesy of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
The Philadelphia-based Pultizer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon composed “On a Wire” for the new music sextet known as Eighth Blackbird. A concerto grosso of sorts for six soloists, the piece begins with the musicians gathered around an open-lidded piano, most of them bowing the strings. The composer asks the listener to imagine six blackbirds sitting on a wire.
We’ll follow that with “Q.E.D.: Engaging Richard Feynman,” by Michael Gandolfi. Feynman, the noted physicist and Nobel laureate, was as renowned for his wit as for his inquisitive mind. Gandolfi’s piece does not focus on scientific inquiry. Rather it takes as its starting point two anecdotes shared by the physicist in interviews with the BBC, which the composer discovered on YouTube. In performance, the video clips were shown to the audience preceding the work’s two sections. Understandably, these have been omitted from the recording.
The sections themselves are settings of texts by various poets illustrating a specific theme. The first concerns a challenge put by an artist friend of Feynman suggesting that as a scientist he cannot truly appreciate the beauty of a flower. Feynman counters that scientific knowledge, a greater understanding of the flower, only adds to its beauty, rather than detracts.
The second grows out of an anecdote concerning Feynman’s boyhood ignorance of the name of a certain kind of bird, a brown-throated thrush, and his realization that a name tells one nothing about the bird, but rather something about the people of various cultures who named the bird. He concludes, “Now, let’s look at the bird.”
Part One is titled “On Waking,” and includes settings of Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson and the Irish Republican poet Joseph Campbell. Part II, “Song of the Universal,” includes settings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Siegfried Sassoon.
The sung texts are mostly incomprehensible. However, it sure is nice to listen to.
Join me for an hour of Georgia peaches, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
