Monday , March 18 2024
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has a surpassing ability to set tightly packed texts to expressive music using the combined vocabularies of tradition, modernism, and even the jazz age.

Music Review: Lewis Spratlan – ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’

Lewis Spratlan Hesperus is PhosphorusHesperus is Phosphorus, a major new choral work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlan, sets a series of texts loosely connected by a celestial theme to appropriately expansive music scored for the chamber choir The Crossing and the six-piece Network for New Music Ensemble. Ranging from a two-line quote from physicist Richard Feynman and an equally brief New Testament passage to poems by A. R. Ammons and Adrienne Rich and lengthy prose selections from the work of David Eagleman, the texts evidently inspired the composer to great imaginative heights.

For example, the eerily triumphant “Unity” uses Ammons’s poem “Guide” to reflect the suite’s overall theme, the ancients’ realization that Hesperus, the evening star, and Phosphorus, the morning star, are one and the same: the planet Venus. “You can’t come to unity and remain material…how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes from one foot to the other.” Two feet, same body. Spooky and transcendent, the music suggests the breadth of space as well as the fire of the stars.

The composer’s impeccable choral touch ties disparate elements and moods together throughout the nine-movement suite. Elements of “The Afterlife II” hint at classical oratorios (Mendelssohn in particular), medieval monophony, and 12-tone modernism in a grand fusion.

Lewis Spratlan Hesperus is PhosphorusAlso featuring fine solo voices and exciting, pinpoint playing by the Ensemble, as in the dark seventh movement (“Falling”), the dense but accessible music repays repeated listening. Spratlan has a surpassing ability to set tightly packed texts to correspondingly expressive music using the combined vocabularies of tradition, modernism, and even (as in “Stepping Backward”) the jazz age. The descriptive melodies and rhythms he builds for the imagery of the final movement, “The Afterlife III,” are a notable case in point: as your atoms recombine after your death, “your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulonimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river pebble gliding around an eddy.” The music is as lively and varied as those images.

Hesperus is Phosphorus is out on Innova Recordings.

 

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About Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Publisher and Executive Editor of Blogcritics as well as lead editor of the Culture & Society section. As a writer he contributes most often to Music, where he covers classical music (old and new) and other genres, and Culture, where he reviews NYC theater. Through Oren Hope Marketing and Copywriting at http://www.orenhope.com/ you can hire him to write or edit whatever marketing or journalistic materials your heart desires. Jon also writes the blog Park Odyssey at http://parkodyssey.blogspot.com/ where he is on a mission to visit every park in New York City. He has also been a part-time working musician, including as lead singer, songwriter, and bass player for Whisperado.

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