NOTE: MY WIFE AND I ARE TRAVELING DURIN THE WEEK OF 5/9, SO I WILL NOT GET A CHANCE TO POST MY COMMENTS UNTIL NEXT WEEK -- SO THIS SELECTION IS FOR THE WEEKS OF 5/9 AND 5/16. My wife and I are now back from our travels. We had a wonderful time on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and we were able to get in a few days of bird-watching at the Assateague Island National Seashore. Check out some of the many varieties of birds we saw, HERE. Since returning home, I’ve been able to listen to Gustav Holst’s “Walt Whitman Overture” several times, and I’ll state now that I did enjoy it very much. As you can see, it earned a yellow light saber on my scale: The overture is an exuberant piece with great parts for the low strings and the entire brass section to the point that portions of this work could make a thrilling soundtrack for a Star Wars or Star Trek type of blockbuster. As a matter of fact, the piece came close to earning green on my scale except for one thing -- it’s a tribute to Walt Whitman.
Walt Whitman? Really? This Wagnerian opus caught me off guard as I tried to connect the music in some way to Walt Whitman. To be honest, toward the end of the piece I expected the legendary ghost ship from the Flying Dutchman to sail by or Brünnhilde and the Valkyries to swoop in. Whitman’s poetry is characterized by extensive free verse and no strict meter. He celebrates the diversity of America and the average citizen. He honors the working class, and he finds beauty in the ordinary and the unremarkable. Whitman celebrates the American experience, and he displays a strong sense of optimism. Holst's work does not represent Whitman in any of these ways. Well, it does exude optimism, but more like a soundtrack might signal a dramatic and victorious climax in an action-packed movie. Back in 2019, I happened to catch an exhibit about Walt Whitman at the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. I wrote about it HERE. A feature of the exhibit was the inclusion of videos from a documentary series called “Whitman Alabama,” “an ongoing project that brings the poem (“Song of Myself”) to life through the voice of Alabama residents.” I wrote about that portion of the exhibit HERE -- and the videos -- filmed and produced by Jennifer Crandall -- really captured the essence of Whitman’s poetry. The videos in Crandall's series are HERE -- though it doesn’t look like the series is quite complete -- and they are well worth your time. Each of the short films is beautiful and meaningful. A review in The New Yorker stated that the “project shows, deliberately and sometimes unexpectedly, the varied face of a region that is often thought to be homogenous, and a Whitmanesque alchemy materializes: every subject comes off both as an individual with a clear political identity and as part of an indivisible whole.” Alas, such magic does not occur with Holst’s overture. Maybe if it had been written later in his career Holst could have captured more of an essence of Whitman? Written in 1899, this was one of Holst’s first pieces, and he seemed more eager to emulate Wagner than capture the spirit of the poet. Take a listen to Holst’s work and let me know what you think. Do you hear Whitman in this overture? Also, if you get a chance to explore Jennifer Crandall’s “Whitman Alabama,” let me know what you think of that too.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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