Tapping into the Twenties focuses on music by composers who came of age in the 1920s. Chief among them was Edgard Varèse. Varèse’s symphonic poem Arcana (1925-27) explores the mysterious and powerful nature of constellations. Varèse’s pupil, William Grant Still, found inspiration in the blues and spirituals of Black Americans. In his best-known work, the Afro-American Symphony (1930), Still represents the experiences of the African diaspora, from the sorrows of the past to hope in the future. Among the first composers to recognize the expressive potential of jazz in the 1920s was Austro-Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. Blending freely improvisational, jazz-influenced passages with Neoclassical elements, along with repetitive patterns that foreshadowed Minimalism, Schulhoff’s Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra (1924) demonstrates the compositional range and versatility of this unjustifiably neglected composer. John Alden Carpenter's Skyscrapers (1923-24), with its language of jazz and popular tunes, blends seamlessly with an idiom of dissonances and frenetic, asymmetric rhythms made modern in the 1920s.

PROGRAM
John Alden Carpenter: Skyscrapers (1924)
Erwin Schulhoff: Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, Op. 43 (1923)
Soloist: Orion Weiss, piano
Edgard Varèse: Arcana (1925-27)
William Grant Still: Symphony no. 1 ‘Afro-American Symphony’ (1929-30)

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