Monthly Playlist: September 2023
Autumn is fickle, a beautiful season of transition. As the air crisps, leaves change, and lighting flickers from the bright summer yellows to the crepuscular winter purples - the nature surrounding us inspires us to look inward. Longing, loss, reflection, nostalgia, remembrance – these are just a sampling of the inward emotional color palette as we take stock of what is around us before moving into winter.
In my own culture Yom Kippur is the most solemn holiday on the calendar. After bright New Year celebrations, the ritual of Yom Kippur is to reflect on the mistakes, remembrances, and failures of the year and to seek forgiveness from those we have wronged. This remembrance and forgiveness ritual leaves space to rebalance our lives for the coming new year. Thus, Autumn has always held a special place in my heart for taking stock, though that feeling permeates the nature around us too.
In honor of the Autumnal Equinox, here are works that inspire a mix of these many emotions: from simple melodies to grand philosophical statements, all contemplative.
- SP
1. Robert Schumann // Farewell from “Forest Scenes”
A fond farewell to warm summer forests, with just a hint of nostalgia - the perfect launch into an autumnal mood.
2. Margaret Bonds // Poème d’Automone from “Songs of the Seasons”
Wistful music for the leaves falling off the branches.
“But soon/the winter winds/will strip their bodies bare” – from Langston Hughs’s Poème d’Automone
3. Kaija Saariaho // Nocturne
Kaija Saariaho only recently died this year, quite suddenly of cancer. Fitting for autumn with its shifting light, weight, and colors is this beautiful remembrance of fellow composer Witold Lutosławki. She wrote it over a 6 day period after his own sudden passing.
4. Gustav Mahler // The Lonely One in Autumn from “Songs of the Earth”
Mahler wrote Songs of the Earth as a way expressing his own premonitions of death. While he lived for another two years after the composition was finished, just before he started composing he learned he had an incurable heart issue. He wrote in a letter “If I am to find my way back to myself, I have got to accept the horrors of loneliness…now, at the end of my life, [I] have to learn again to walk and stand.”
“Blue Autumn mists hover over the lake/Each blade of grass stands frosted/As though an artist had strewn jade-dust…
I often weep in my loneliness/Autumn lingers too long in my heart/Sun of love, will you not shine again, gently to dry my bitter tears?” - from Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte
5. Imogen Holst // The Fall of the Leaf, III Poco adagio
This was her favorite of her own compositions – a lament for the trees becoming bare based on a 16th century melody.
“Far in the woods, these golden days/Some leaf obeys its Maker's call/And through their hollow aisles it play/With delicate touch the prelude of the Fall” – from Henry David Thoreau’s “The Fall of the Leaf”
6. Leoš Janáček // No. 8 Unutterable Anguish and No. 9 In Tears from “On An Overgrown Path”
These two contrasting moods filled with anguish and nostalgia were composed shortly after Janáček’s beloved daughter Olga died. The first tries to put into music what can’t be expressed in words: the horror of his grief. The second a more direct attempt to reconcile the death of his daughter. In a letter he wrote about the second: “Perhaps you will sense weeping in it, warm love with the premonition of death.”
7. Charles Ives // The Unanswered Question
Amid a tranquil backdrop of nature (the beautiful melodic strings), The “Perennial Question of Existence” is asked by the trumpets to the universe. How is this question answered? What is the argumentative answer? Is it ever resolved? Nature goes on.
8. Ricard Strauss // At Sunset from “Four Last Songs”
If the rest of this playlist is about remembrance, reflection, and loss – this is about the acceptance of these emotions and rebalancing in the face of them. Strauss was at the end of his life. This was his reconciliation with his imminent death, finding beauty in these last moments.
“Through sorrow and joy/we have gone hand in hand/we are both resting from our travels/now above the quiet land.” – from Joseph von Eichendorff’s “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset)