Generation Loss On the Concert Program
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Less than a month later, Italian composer Luciano Berio premiered O King for mezzo-soprano and five instruments at Bowdoin College in Maine. His program note stated: “…this short piece is a tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King. The text simply consists of the enunciation of the black martyr’s name. The words and their components are submitted to a musical analysis, which is integrated into the structure of the piece. The voice enunciates the different phonetic elements of the name, which is gradually recomposed towards the end: “O Martin Luther King.” Berio would later orchestrate O King and insert it into his magnum opus, the five-movement Sinfonia composed in 1968–69 and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Sinfonia, an inimitable laboratory of musical and extra-musical referencing and political and topical engagement, succeeded in bringing Berio’s elegy to Martin Luther King, Jr. to a wider audience.1 With quiet forcefulness, O King memorializes the man who sought to bring about social and political change for African Americans, challenging the United States of America’s structure of racial discrimination and segregation—a legacy of slavery—through nonviolence and civil disobedience. At around the same time, Alvin Lucier created his unobtrusively countercultural piece of sound art, I Am Sitting in a Room. One could hardly call this experimental work “music composition”; it is more of an installation than anything else. This is a work of contemplation, repetition, and listening that functions through a simple ploy: a recording of Lucier reading a text is played in the concert
Saturday October 2
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