I hope that worked, I’m always a bit nervous about embedding video playlists.

Anyway: Carlos Simon is a composer who originally hails from Atlanta, GA. He completed doctoral work at the University of Michigan and has since enjoyed a varied career of composition and performance; according to his bio he is currently on the faculty at Georgetown University, and he served recently as Composer-in-Residence at what was the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I don’t know what Dr. Simon’s current status is regarding that, since the Kennedy Center has been one of many Grounds Zero for our current President being a complete and utter calamity, but that post was a great honorific at one time. Dr. Simon has had a number of his works recorded, and he has been performed by quite a few of the finest music ensembles in America.

The work featured above, Tales: A Folklore Symphony, is “a four-movement piece for orchestra that explores African American folklore as well as Afrofuturist stories.” Dr. Simon’s website has an entire page devoted to this work, so I recommend going there for more! He even provides a perusal copy of the score which you can explore virtually as you listen. It’s a fascinating, inventive, energetic, and emotional work that plays out fascinatingly over its four movements.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means I’m going to take a quick break from American Black composers. (Sadly, a brief attempt to locate Irish Black composers did not turn up much of anything at all. I did not dig super-deeply, though.) We’re going to dig back to the music of one Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo-Irish composer whose music has been overshadowed since his lifetime (1852-1924) by the likes of Edward Elgar and the British masters who followed. Stanford’s music is lyrical and Romantic, and it’s always pleasing. Not necessarily pleasant, as he brings a lot of good Romantic fire to his work, but pleasing. I’ve never heard a work of Stanford’s that left me thinking anything other than, “I’m glad I heard that.” This work is a good example. Stanford wrote six tone poems that he called “Irish Rhapsodies”, and this is the fourth of those. It is subtitled “The Fisherman of Lough Neagh”, and what a wonderful work it is–brooding and melodic and, in the end, just wonderfully triumphant.

As I was listening to this work, I read that George Bernard Shaw criticized Stanford’s music as lacking passion. I’m not sure what Shaw was listening to when he said that, because it sure as hell wasn’t this.