The Louisville Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma in Mammoth Cave.
Cave Art. The New Yorker, May 15, 2023.
Like many new-music enthusiasts of a certain age, I once spent long hours with the Louisville Orchestra's epic series of First Edition recordings, which ran from 1955 to 1992 and generated well over 150 albums. WHRB, my college radio station, had a complete collection of them, and they gave me a sense of the scope of compositional language in the postwar era. In preparing to write about the modern-day Louisville Orchestra, I revisited many of those discs and enjoyed immersing myself in the mid-century moderate-modern styles that the series tended to favor. A few works that stood out: Henk Badings's Seventh Symphony, Chávez's Fourth Symphony, Villa-Lobos's Erosion, Peggy Glanville-Hicks's The Transposed Heads (the first Thomas Mann opera), Jacques Ibert's "Louisville" Concerto for Orchestra, Darius Milhaud's Kentuckiana, and Luigi Dallapiccola's Variations for Orchestra, which, in my estimation, holds up better than Elliott Carter's congested work of the same title. There's also a fair amount of professional note-spinning, but the aim never was, as it never should be, to search out masterworks and nothing but. In retrospect, it's astonishing how much music both the orchestra and its conductor, Robert Whitney, were able to absorb.
For the fascinating history of the ensemble, I turned to three dissertations: Carole Birkhead's The History of the Orchestra in Louisville (University of Louisville, 1977), Jeanne M. Belfy's The Commissioning Project of the Louisville Orchestra, 1948-1958: A Study of the History and Music (University of Louisville, 1986), and Sandra Lee Fralin's The Role of the Louisville Orchestra in the Fostering of New Music, 1947-1977 (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2000). Belfy's The Louisville Orchestra New Music Project: An American Experiment in the Patronage of International Contemporary Music (University of Louisville Publications in Musicology, 1990) gives a selection of letters from commissioned composers; Belfy felt compelled, naturally, to include a reproduction of Lou Harrison's contribution, executed in his marvelous calligraphy. I also learned much from Owsley Brown's heartfelt documentary Music Makes a City, which I mentioned on this blog when it came out, in 2010. Deborah Ishlon's article "More Music Than Anywhere," which appeared in the July/August 1953 issue of High Fidelity, gives precious glimpses of the amazing, Varèse-loving Mayor Charles Farnsley in action. Later, when Farnsley served a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, he read obituaries for Varèse into the Congressional Record.
