West Meets East

My Program: Part 1: Exoticism

Rameau: Suite from Les Indes Gallantes – Les Sauvages

Rossini : Overture from Il Turco en Italia

Rimsky-Korsakov: The Festival at Bagdad from Scheherezade

Saint-Saens: Bacchanale from Samson & Delilah

Part 2: Contact

Ravel: Empress of the Pagodas from Mother Goose Suite

Colin McPhee: Tabuh-Tabuhan

Bernstein: Halil

Kevin Puts: Falling Dream

The case for my program: This is a program that looks at Western music that was inspired by the Eastern culture.

The first half is made up of pieces from the standard orchestral repertoire that claimed inspiration from Arab culture, based on little or no actual research or contact by the composer.

The second half is made up of pieces by composers that, one way or another, actually encountered eastern cultures and were influenced by them.

The first five pieces need little introduction.

Colin McPhee was born in Toronto and moved to New York. In the 1930s he travelled to Bali and became a crucial voice in the preservation of Balinese indigenous music. Tabuh-Tabuhan fuses Balinese rhythm and melody with American orchestration.

Leonard Bernstein wrote Halil in memory of a young Israeli flutist who was killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

The American composer Kevin Puts’ says this about his piece Falling Dream:

“The piece was written in the months immediately after 9/11. Its composition was initially inspired by news footage I saw in which a couple leaped from one of the burning towers holding hands. For months I was incapable of getting the image out of my head. It was so poetic in both its horror and beauty that I almost couldn’t justify a musical reaction to it. However I eventually found a way to illustrate the experience in extreme slow motion by creating a counterpoint of two slowly descending melodies, heard first at the beginning of the work. Episodes fade in and out of this slow descent like memories, but the illusion I wanted to create is that the falling never really ceases.”