"Paths of Peace" World Premiere

The Nashville Symphony Will Present the World Premiere of a new Symphony Commissioned by The Nashville Symphony and Thurston Moore

"Paths of Peace"
by MICHAEL ALEC ROSE
Dedicated to the Memory of Albert Schweitzer

October l5 - 7:00 pm
James K. Polk Theatre - Tennessee Performing Arts Center
Nashville, Tennessee

The Nashville Symphony has performed works by Michael Rose in the past and Alan Valentine, Executive Director of the Symphony, is ecstatic about the premiere of his first symphony, commissioned by Thurston Moore, Executive Director of Symposium 2000. Valentine said, "This will be an incredible two weeks in Nashville." The premiere of this work by the Nashville Symphony under the direction of a "special guest conductor", will come shortly after the Symphony's first appearance at Carnegie Hall.

Paths of Peace will be a work for large orchestra in five movements, featuring soprano and baritone soloists. The music travels along many paths, always searching and struggling for possibilities of peace and reconciliation, even when most vulnerable, embattled, or internally at odds.

Michael Alec Rose is Associate Professor of Composition at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University. He received the Victor Herbert/ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Publishers) award in 1985 and has received fourteen consecutive annual ASCAP awards since 1985.

Michael Alec Rose, the composer, writes:

Dr. Schweitzer's philosophy of peace should not have surprised me by its tough-mindedness, but it did. A man who chose to give up the comforts of his European youth, who likewise put aside his early and brilliant explorations of theology and music, all so that he could establish a hospital in remotest Africa I should have known that to such a man, there could be no easy way of knocking down the intractable obstacles to world peace.

In Schweitzer's thought, it is the wedding of uncompromising realism about human cruelty and undiminished faith in human compassion towards suffering that strikes me as so fine. His thought extends beyond wishful thinking; it is completely removed from sentimentality or metaphysical abstraction. His urgent call for "reverence for life" takes into account the bleak pessimism that tempts any student of history. Dr. Schweitzer was hopeful for the future of our race, but his hopefulness was not vague by any means: he sought actively, politically, materially, a radical transformation of the way we live and think and act. His philosophy was one of action, his life one of boundless activity, and his heart supremely capable of embracing paradoxes of the human condition that make so many other thinkers despair.

All through the composing of "Paths of Peace," I held the image of this hero somewhere in thought and let it do its unconscious work on me. After the symphony was completed, I opened up the pages of Schweitzer's own critical biography of J. S. Bach, the 250th anniversary of whose death we also commemorate in this concert. There, I discovered that what mattered most to Schweitzer about music was its symbolic power. The language he used to analyze Bach's cantatasrhythms of felicity, motives of grief, joy, terror, firmness, lassitude, tumult, exhaustion, and beatific peace may seem a bit quaint to us; but in fact, these descriptions faithfully reflect the musical aesthetics of Bach's own time.

I felt an eerie pleasure when I found Schweitzer's list of Bach's "characteristic ideas and feelings." It was like opening a bible at random and happening upon a verse that speaks with a special aptness to your life at that moment. For here I was looking at something very like an inventory for the symbolic ingredients of the five movements of the symphony I had just composed. I even took a shot at describing the opening movement using Schweitzer's set of terms, and it was just about on target. Here's how it goes:

The opening song unfolds in three waves, progressing from lassitude towards firmness, with transitions of tumult in between. This first song sequence gives way to another song, similarly shaped, but more joyful than the first. It is overtaken by the first, whose fourth wave leads to a rhythm that hovers near felicity, giving way at last to grief and terror. Peace of a sort follows, though it is a far cry from "beatific," really just a respite from the ongoing drama of the two main songs. In the last few minutes of the first movement, joy contends with exhaustion, and new advocates of firmness are heard from.

I ask the listener to bear in mind that the foregoing description is an obvious exaggeration. The emotional states of music can never be pinned down so readily. My point is that this first movement is drawn as Schweitzer claims that Bach's cantatas are drawn as a landscape of themes cast in various shades of feeling, more or less at odds with each other, which in the course of their interactions show some inklings not only of compatibility, but of actual and absolute identity with each other.

The second movement is an elegy, a meditation on the sweetness and the grief of memory. A song, taught to me by two elegant ladies who learned it as little girls in synagogue in Germany in the 1930s, has a ghostly presence in this movement, and tries to materialize; but the risk of bearing false witness or invoking false sentiment is very great, and the reverence for lost life is an almost unbearable burden for music to sing. Still, to refrain from singing would be worse. These words "burden," "refrain" are also musical terms for melodic constancy, or intermittent repetition. The tale must be told, ever and again. I hope the two ladies, who have my heartfelt thanks, will be pleased by the telling.

The third movement celebrates Dr. Schweitzer's life most directly. It is clear to me that wherever he went, whatever he did, the world was a better place, more alive, fraught with hope, transparent with possibilities, always, endlessly with work of the greatest importance to be done. He placed the highest premium on the freedom and well-being of the individual living thing, of whatever color or culture, or even species. The various interlocking dances of this movement move to a vision of peace that is the enemy of quiescence, the foe of resignation and despair: the movement is here, the time is now, humanity is ripe, peace is in reach, hold out your hand.

The fourth movement brings together two texts of very different character and spirit. The soprano voice sings the last portion of Osip Mandelstam's poem "Whoever Finds a Horseshoe," and the baritone voice sings the last portion of Norman Nicholson's poem "A Turn for the Better." Mandelstam is felt by many poets and critics to be the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century. He was a Jew who had a deep love for the ethos of ancient Greece, and this combination made him a natural enemy of Stalin, who hounded him ultimately to his death in the Soviet labor camps. Norman Nicholson was a Christian poet of rural England, who often sang of the joys and tensions of small-town life in the twentieth century. In the poem I've chosen, Mandelstam offers up a shattering lament for his age, all the more haunting for its strangeness and opacity. Nicholson gives us a paraphrase of a scene from the infancy gospel called Protovengelium, an amazing moment when time stops and the world has a chance to start anew, all because of the birth of a child. The specific Christian context for this poem seems to me to be the very last thing that the poem is about. All I have to do is remember the first cry of my own daughter to recognize that hope starts over again when every child comes into the world. But Mandelstam's words both undermine Nicholson's vision and give it a sharper voice: redemption can no longer be a parochial matter of doctrine, removed from the ravages of history. (It pleases me no end that Nicholson's paraphrase is of an apocryphal gospel.) Hope must paradoxically embrace horror, as Nicholson embraces Mandelstam in this movement, as the wondering baritone joins the grieving soprano.

Nicholson's cry of a child is a summons for the fifth movement. The desire for peace, called into action, may require a kind of innocence, but Schweitzer shows how much must be suffered before such innocence can be achieved. The children of Blair School of Music's advanced Suzuki program join the orchestra in this finale, and their innocence is pitted against the orchestra's knowledge and experience (this is the fifth movement, after all!). In the end, the paths to peace are both sunlit and thorny. They lead us up, and there is no end to them.

"Paths of peace" is a phrase adapted from the classic maxims of the rabbis, where it is part of a description of the Torah, or God's teaching: "its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace." What the Torah teaches about peace can be found by many paths. Dr. Schweitzer showed us a very compelling one. Music offers another, tragically estranged from or distorted by politics, but somehow infinitely resourceful to the human spirit. I hope that my symphony can serve its turn.

My thanks to Thurston Moore for making the commission of Symphony No. 1 possible, and to Alan Valentine, Executive Director of the Nashville Symphony, for believing in this project from the start. I am grateful to Maestro Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony for their generous encouragement and support of my music.

This site is part of the Hague Appeal for Peace webring.
[ Previous | Next | Random Site | List Sites ]