The ASO’s first concert at the new David Geffen Hall focuses on music of 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 the constellations above. Varèse took his inspiration for the work from topics of alchemy and astrology—in particular, from writings by 16th-century physician and practicing astrologer Paracelsus. Upon opening the printed score, inscribed is a quote that muses, and then concludes as follows:

“…there is still another star, imagination, which begets a new star and a new heaven.”

Varèse dedicated Arcana to Leopold Stokowski, who conducted the work’s world premiere in 1927. Its premiere followed a year that Varèse dedicated to working on this score alone, to bring its passages—imbued with new means of musical imagination—to life.

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, a leading exemplary of the “Lost Generation” of Jewish composers, suppressed or (as was the case with Schulhoff) physically eliminated during the Holocaust.

Another composer who sought to create a distinctly American sound on the concert stage was John Alden Carpenter. His work 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. Carpenter imaginatively depicts “the many movements and sounds of modern American life.”

The ASO’s Vanguard Series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.