Maslanka - Symphony No. 4
May 26, 2024
Mallory Thompson conducts the Symphonic Wind Ensemble in David Maslanka's Symphony No. 4. This marked Thompson's final concert as Northwestern Director of Bands.
About this Work
Symphony No. 4 was commissioned by a consortium of bands including the University of Texas at Austin, Stephen F. Austin State University, and Michigan State University. Inspired largely by the life and death of Abraham Lincoln and “the unshakable idea of the unity of the human race,” the work explores dialectic tension—alternately spiritual and irreverent, concordant and chaotic—reflecting the “tremendous struggle of opposites raging in the country” during the Civil War. Diverse musical material ranges from quotations of Bach chorales and the “Old Hundredth” (the hymn, still popular today, played as Lincoln’s coffin traveled from Washington, D.C. to its resting place in Springfield, Illinois) to worldly jazz riffs and otherworldly clarinet effects representing the innocent cries of the “blessed boys” from Goethe’s Faust.
Maslanka provides the following notes:
"The roots of Symphony No. 4 are many. The central driving force is the spontaneous rise of the impulse to shout for the joy of life. I feel it is the powerful voice of the earth that comes to me from my adopted western Montana and the high plains and mountains of central Idaho. My personal experience of this voice is one of being helpless and torn open by the power of the thing that wants to be expressed—the welling-up shout that cannot be denied. I am set aquiver and am forced to shout and sing. The response in the voice of the earth is the answering shout of thanksgiving, and the shout of praise…I have used Christian Symbols because they are my cultural heritage, but I have tried to move through them to a depth of universal humanness, to an awareness that is not defined by religious labels. My impulse through this music is to speak to the fundamental human issues of transformation and rebirth in this chaotic time."