Today, considering the day, I think I'll take the time to listen to a recording of one of America's finest symphonies, the First Symphony (in One Movement) of Samuel Barber, which Barber, born in 1910, composed when he was only twenty-six years old. Barber would go on to be a prolific composer, writing in a twentieth-century post-romanticism idiom, of which this is a masterful example. He died in 1981, at age 70.
The piece is formally in one movement, yet, musically, it's tripartite. It opens with an expansively grand theme that sounds like an aural panorama of the American West.
- At the 1:20 mark,
- the statement of a secondary, wistful, theme.
- At the 6:50 mark,
- the orchestra takes off on an easy gallop, but not without some Alan Ladd-like reluctant heroics.
- Around the 9:45 mark,
- John Williams must have been listening when he composed his Imperial Stormtrooper theme for Star Wars.
- Just past eleven minutes in,
- an oboe sings a lover's theme, lovely but elegiac, over strings.
- At about sixteen minutes,
- Barber reworks the opening theme as a passacaglia (think waltz without schmaltz) that grows in urgency.
- Barber brings all to a conclusion beginning at the eighteen minute mark,
- with string and woodwind crescendos building to several terse blasts, brassy and tympanic, like affirmations of what once had been American can-do and American must-do, virtues seemingly quaint in today's America.
Barber's First resounds like the discovery of America's once wide-open spaces: parts dangerous yet promising, parts brooding but without bathos, parts brash while contemplative, the whole expressing those contradictory characters as a unitary strength, something that once had been perceived as quintessentially American.
Today, while listening, I think I'll take the time to drink a fine American beer, pure and true, without artifice...
...and enjoy our Independence Day, while I can.
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