Announcing the upcoming release of my latest album, THE BRIDGE, a fantasy for viola and orchestra inspired by Hart Crane’s epic poem of America. A premiere recording with the brilliant violist, Brett Deubner and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by Marek Štilec. Available on streaming sites beginning on March 31, 2023.
A small, blue edition of Hart Crane’s masterpiece had been living in my library for decades. The thought of doing something musically with it popped into mind now and then, but I never quite mustered the courage to embark on such an ambitious project. However, with the onset of the COVID shutdown in early 2020, thoughts about the impact of isolation on everyone across the country and the importance of human connectedness, led me back to that little blue book – and as I re-read its fifteen poems, ideas for a musical portrayal sprang to mind.
For those so inclined, read the poem. It attempts to encapsulate the essence of America in the 1920s, as Crane experienced it, capturing the complexities of American history and American life – from its violent beginnings as the culture of native Americans was crushed by expanding European cultures, to the crass commercialism that erupted at the turn of the century, tempered by the buoyant optimism and hope for mankind in spirits like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and the American transcendentalists. Above all, the poem relies upon the Brooklyn Bridge as a metaphor for connection, spanning the myriad of events across time and geography that culminate in what America was like in Crane’s day as well as the promise of its future.
Crane’s poem attempted perhaps too much. The span of the Brooklyn Bridge became a symbol of everything connected to everything else – the past to the present, urban America to rural America, a vast dream of America from its pre-European existence to the bustling America of big, industrial cities and great railroads spanning the continent.
In this music, dedicated to my friend and long-time musical collaborator Brett Deubner, the solo viola is the voice of the Bridge itself, its rich middle range spanning between the low and high instruments, between the dark, swirling eddies of water the flow beneath the Bridge to the searing sunlight piercing the harp-like cables of the Bridge, while seagulls soar overhead. It also is the voice of the poem’s author, seeking redemption in a violent and crassly commercial world.
Reading the poems, it is apparent that Crane had a broad appreciation of music, as frequent references to songs and other music he had heard are to be found in the poems. As I planned out the score, I researched all of his musical references and fragments from those melodies can be found, scattered like leaves throughout the score, like apparitions from the past – a melody from a court composer to Ferdinand and Isabella, an Irish gig, bits of jazz and flashes of tunes from the 1920s.
As Crane, following in the path begun by Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot, attempted to write the great American poem for his century, THE BRIDGE is my attempt to write a great American symphony, one that speaks to the history and spirit of our country.
Composer: Stanley Grill
Conductor: Marek Štilec
Viola solo: Brett Deubner
Producer: Jiří Štilec
Recording Engineer: Václav Roubal
Graphic Design: Stanley Grill
Orchestra: Komorní filharmonie Pardubice
