Updated: Feb 27, Arthur Honegger stamps our tickets as we board a powerful steam train. John Adams straps us—terrified—into an Italian sports car. Maurice Ravel brings us to a bloodthirsty drama near a Spanish factory.
Guillaume Connesson exploits the power and brilliance of a musical machine: the saxophone. Then there is Albert Roussel. Escaping the sound and fury of this technology, Roussel retreats to his isolated seaside French home to rediscover the old-fashioned symphonic form. Long ago, as we manipulated the natural world—making weapons and tools from stone, developing cooking processes—our brains grew larger, our thinking became more sophisticated.
Is this concert an indictment of inhuman machines, driving us away from ourselves? Born March 10, , Le Havre, France. Died November 27, , Paris, France. The first machine is a train. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the industrial revolution changed society forever.
Powering this change—taking us across plains and mountains and rivers—was the steam train. To artists, the train represented modernity, change, the future. Hundreds of composers wrote pieces inspired by these machines, thrilled and terrified by their sound. Arthur Honegger spent thousands of hours traveling by train as a student in Paris. The piece was an instant hit. Scoring : piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, bass drum, cymbals, tam tam, tenor drum, strings.
Performance time : Approximately 7 minutes. Born February 15, , Worcester, Massachusetts. The next machine is an Italian sports car. There are the player pianos in Century Rolls , the oil tankers of Harmonielehre , the record player in The Chairman Dances , the atom bomb at the end of Dr.
