“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
Taking to heart the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, I’ll attempt to break with tradition by actually planning in advance my radio show for tomorrow on WPRB.
February 12 is Lincoln’s birthday. We will honor our 16th president and look ahead to the three-day weekend with music inspired by Lincoln and also George Washington (whose birthday is February 22), for whom, after all, the holiday, known in the colloquial as Presidents Day, was coined.
A conflict arises in that while combing my collection I’ve also come across a number of interesting pieces written for other presidents, such as JFK, Nixon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Chester A. Arthur. Do I include them, or do I follow a strict Lincoln-Washington regimen? Decisions, decisions. A house divided against itself cannot plan!
If it comes down to an Iowa-style coin toss, one thing is certain: you can still count on plenty of presidential music, with works like George Antheil’s “McKonkey’s Ferry (Washington in Trenton),” Roy Harris’ Symphony No. 6 “Gettysburg,” Virgil Thomson’s “Parson Weems and the Cherry Tree,” John Lampkin’s “George Washington Slept Here,” Paul Turok’s “Lincoln and Liberty,” and selections from John Williams’ score for the Steven Spielberg film, “Lincoln.”
We’ll be doing our best to get you in the mood for the white sales, tomorrow morning from 6 to 11 ET, on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, on Classic Ross Amico.
To tide you over, here are a couple of links to extremely rare symphonies inspired by Lincoln, neither of which, to my knowledge, has ever received a commercial recording:
Daniel Gregory Mason’ Symphony No. 3 “Lincoln” (1936)
Jaromir Weinberger’s “Lincoln Symphony” (1941)
Yes, that’s the same Weinberger who composed “Schwanda the Bagpiper!”
#AbrahamLincoln
