Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

This may be something of a cheat, since Tone Poem Tuesday has always featured orchestral music, and this week all we have is a solo piano work. But what a work it is, juxtaposing traditional melodies with interesting sound effects, … Continue reading →

I’ve featured the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) before, and with good reason: he was a fine composer whose work deserves to be better known. Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer of mixed race (a white mother and a Creole father). … Continue reading →

David Baker (1931-2016) was a Black composer who was a deeply skilled jazz musician and teacher whose career spanned decades, first as a jazz musician playing the trombone. An automobile accident left him unable to play the trombone, so he … Continue reading →

Last week I featured a work by Florence Price, and this week I’m going to do it again, because Price was a fascinating composer whose work is increasingly captivating me. This is a three-movement orchestral transcription of an earlier piano … Continue reading →

Florence Price was a Black composer who lived from 1887 to 1953. Her work was always held in fairly high regard–she was the first Black woman to have a work performed by a major symphony orchestra, in 1933, when her … Continue reading →

This, by Black composer William Grant Still, is one of the most evocatively titled works I’ve ever heard, and I only heard it for the first time yesterday. Its title makes clear why I am featuring it today, after I … Continue reading →

Three works today. I leave as an exercise to the reader what the composers have in common.  

An interesting piece today that I had forgotten about, by American composer Frederick Shepherd Converse. Converse lived from 1871 to 1940, and he was a fairly prolific composer who wrote in a late-Romantic style, not unlike Richard Strauss, but his … Continue reading →

In honor of yesterday’s 40th anniversary of the major eruption of Mt. St. Helens, a musical work devoted to that very mountain. Alan Hovhaness was an American composer of Armenian descent, and he was very prolific, eventually producing over 500 … Continue reading →

Wow, am I stretching the idea of a tone poem to the breaking point today. This isn’t even an entire work, just an excerpt from one…and it’s not even a complete excerpt, just a part of the excerpt! Let me … Continue reading →