The final song of the day for this week is Andrea Clearfield’s arresting You Bring Out the Doctor in Me from the 2013 AIDS Quilt Songbook. The AIDS Quilt Songbook (AQSB) is an ongoing, collaborative song cycle that had its initial premiere in Alice Tully Hall in 1992, a truly desperate time for New York and many other cities hit hard by the AIDS epidemic. The project was conceived by the late HIV-positive baritone William Parker as a way to raise money and awareness, as well as to sing songs specifically about the disease, something which had not been done in classical music before then. At that time there were no medications to fight this disease, and a feeling of hopelessness and rage infused the original collection of songs with an undeniable power.
Read MoreWritten for soprano/conductor/force of nature Barbara Hannigan, and the Berlin Philharmonic, let me tell you is a song cycle by Dutch composer Hans Abrahamsen on texts from British writer Paul Griffiths 2008 novel of the same name which takes the 481 words Ophelia speaks in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and creates a first-person narrative. The work is […]
Read MoreThe third song this week is the long-form cycle Bīdād (بیداد) “Injustice” by Persian music master vocalist and instrumentalist Mohammad Reza Shajarian (محمدرضا شجریان), and the late Persian composer and santour (a Persian hammered dulcimer) virtuso Parviz Meshkatian (پرویز مشکاتیان).
Read MoreMy second choice this week is the tongue-in-cheek song “The Jazz Discharge Party Hats,” by another American, and wearer of many hats, Frank Zappa, from his 1983 release The Man from Utopia. Zappa wrote music in all genres from rock to orchestral, and was noted for the theatrical nature of many of his works and wild lives shows, his embrace of the avant-garde (in both America and Europe), and his staunch political and social stances which often clashed with established norms.
Read MoreMy first selection is Jewish-American songwriter Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” as performed by the incomparable Nina Simone from her 1974 release A Portrait of Nina. Meeropol penned the initial poem in 1937, under the name “Bitter Fruit,” in reaction to Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. Meeropol eventually set the poem himself as a protest against lynchings and violence toward people of color and changed the title to what it is is today.
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