In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
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And Andrew, it sounds like you're not familiar with "Simple Gifts" or Copland. It has the same melody as "Lord of the Dance." It's a nice tune and ever since Copland used it in Appalachian Spring it has always had a special place in Americana.
It's possibly one of the most American pieces of music there is -- something written by an American, for Americans.
It was a perfect and appropriate tune to arrange for the occasion. The text is as follows:
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.
Our musical tradition was built and developed around religious music -- Puritan hymns, Shaker hymns, shaped Note hymn singing, spirituals, etc. There is a certain American "sound" or style that is embodied in Copland, and it is the direct influence of the music on which the US was built.
While there are many Big Names in the classical music tradition from the US, the true representatives of our musical culture are composers like Alice Parker, Moses Hogan, H.T. Burleigh, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and yes, Copland.
Hello,
Am I alone in being disturbed by how similar Williams's treatment of Simple Gifts to that of Copland? The first appearance of the tune in the clarinet in the same register; the lightly bustling accompaniment...
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James Primosch