Now is the Time, Sunday 13 Feb 2011

by | Feb 12, 2011 | new music, Now is the Time, Radio, WRTI | 0 comments

My contemporary American music program Now is the Time airs every Sunday night at 10 o’clock on WRTI-HD2. Listen on HD radio or online here. The complete schedule and more information are here.

Coming up this Sunday night:

Feb 13 2011. The Wider View

David Snow. Winter

Wendy Mae Chambers. Organism from Symphony of the Universe

H. Leslie Adams. The Wider View

On the eve of Valentine’s Day, Now is the Time begins in winter and ends with intimations of spring. The appropriately-named composer David Snow shares with us his haunting Winter for trumpet and piano. The second movement from the Symphony of the Universe by the always engaging Wendy Mae Chambers is called “Organism.” She wrote for a big-band jazz ensemble to be recorded in the cavernous Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and the results are stunning.

The song cycle The Wider View comes from the romantic and lyrical pen of H. Leslie Adams. Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and others lead to the final “Love Rejoices” by James Dillet Freeman. “…O love, come close and circumscribe me round / With love’s dear otherness, encompass me / In bonds so fair for when I am bound by love / on ev’ry side, / Then I am free. / O love, you are the only narrow door through which myself can reach to the yet more. / And Love Rejoices, Love Rejoice!”

How’s that for a lead-in to Valentine’s Day?

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