Note: Due to original recording and/or condition when digitized: audio cuts in and out and other audio errors throughout part 4.

Part 1: Video showing the reception held prior to the first concert of the 9th Other Minds Festival which was dedicated to “An Evening with Ned Rorem”. March 5, 2003. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, CA. Footage shows attendees, Other Minds staff and other crew working the event as well as the composers’ score exhibit. Charles Amirkhanian makes announcements and introduces the festival’s attending composers. San Francisco’s mayoral candidate Tom Ammiano shares a few words before Ned Rorem is honored by the California Senator, Mark Leno by way of Anna Damiani who reads a framed resolution from the California State Assembly being presented to Rorem. Amirkhanian gives thanks to Other Minds supporters, and Pamela Wunderlich in larger than life costuming slowly moves through the crowd and who will make different in-character appearances during intermissions throughout the festival.

Part 2: A video recording of the pre-concert conversation with Ned Rorem and Charles Amirkhanian. The first concert of the 9th Other Minds Festival was dedicated to “An Evening with Ned Rorem”, on March 5, 2003 at 7:00pm. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, CA.

Ned Rorem discusses the development of his piece “Evidence of Things Not Seen” which had its West Coast premiere that evening. Rorem also talks about French composer and friend Francis Poulenc, as well as what it was like working as a copyist for Virgil Thomson. Charles Amirkhanian asks for his impressions of the Djerassi Residents Artists program, where the composers get to convene and share their work and ideas for several days before the festival performances.

Part 3: A video recording of the first half of the first concert of the 9th Other Minds Festival. “An Evening with Ned Rorem”. March 5, 2003, 8:00pm. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, CA. This concert was dedicated to Ned Rorem’s piece “Evidence of Things Not Seen” and was followed by a tribute to the late Lou Harrison with a performance of “King David’s Lament” featuring the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.

Before the San Francisco Opera Center Singers take the stage, Charles Amirkhanian makes announcements and introduces the composers of the festival as they line up on for a photograph taken by the festival’s photographer John Fago.

Ned Rorem: Evidence of Things Not Seen (1997) (West Coast Premiere)

“For decades I’ve dreamed of an Art of the Song, a glorified chamber piece for four solo voices with piano, to be presented as an entire program. The challenge would be less musical than theatrical. A composer always has musical ideas or he wouldn’t be a composer; but when he proposes to link these abstract ideas to concrete words - words by authors who never asked to be musicalized - he must find words which (at least for him) need to be sung. If these words are intended for a cycle rather than for a single song then there must be a sense (at least for him) of inevitability in their sequence, because the same song in a different context takes on new meaning. If the chosen words are by different authors, then these authors must seem to share a certain parenting (at least for him) even though they may be separated by centuries. (I say “words” rather than “poems,” since many of the texts I use are prose.)

The order of songs relies on subject matter. The opening group, Beginnings, is just that - songs about moving forward, and the wistful optimism of love, with a concluding hymn-text from the eighteenth century to be sung by a congregation in the morning. (Although an atheist, I am sincere in my dozens of settings of so-called sacred texts; I do believe in Belief, and in the great art, starting with the Psalms of David, that has sprung from religious conviction.) The second group, Middles, about coming of age, horror of war, romantic disappointment, concludes with another hymn, this one for evening. The last group, Ends, about death, concludes with an admonishment from William Penn, echoing a definition of Faith in Corinthians II: ‘Look not to things that are seen, but to that which is unseen; for things that are seen pass away, but that which is unseen is forever.” - Ned Rorem [Excerpted from the composer’s notes reprinted in the concert program.]

Part One: Beginnings

1. From Whence Cometh Song? (Theodore Roethke)

2. The Open Road (Walt Whitman)

3. 0 Where Are You Going? (W. H. Auden)

4. The Rainbow (William Wordsworth)

5. How Do I Love Thee? (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

6. Life in a Love (Robert Browning)

7. Their Lonely Betters (W. H. Auden)

8. His Beauty Sparkles (Paul Goodman)

9. Boy With a Baseball Glove (Paul Goodman)

10. A Glimpse (Walt Whitman)

11. I Am He (Walt Whitman)

12. Love Cannot Fill (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

13. The More Loving One (W. H. Auden)

14. Hymn for Morning (Thomas Ken)

Part Two: Middles

15. I Saw a Mass (John Woolman)

16. The Comfort of Friends (William Penn)

17. A Dead Statesman (Rudyard Kipling)

18. The Candid Man (Stephen Crane)

19. Comment on War (Langston Hughes)

20. A Learned Man (Stephen Crane)

21. Dear, Though the Night (W. H. Auden)

22. Requiescat (Oscar Wilde)

23. Is My Team Ploughing? (Alfred Edward Housman)

24. As I Walked Out One Evening (W. H. Auden)

25. The Sick Wife (Jane Kenyon)

26. Now Is the Dreadful Midnight (Paul Goodman)

27. Hymn for Evening (Thomas Ken)

San Francisco Opera Center Singers; Mark Morash and Monica Vanderveen, piano

Funded in part by Fred Levin & Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation.

[Notes taken from the original printed program.]

Part 4: Second half of the first concert of the 9th Other Minds Festival. “An Evening with Ned Rorem”. March 5, 2003. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, CA.

Ned Rorem Part III, and and In Memoriam Lou Harrison.

Ned Rorem: Evidence of Things Not Seen (1997) (West Coast Premiere) (Cont.)

Part Three: Ends

28. He Thinks Upon His Death (Julien Green)

29. On an Echoing Road (Colette)

30. A Terrible Disaster (Paul Goodman)

31. Come In (Robert Frost)

32. The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the

Water (William Butler Yeats)

33. End of the Day (Charles Baudelaire)

34. Faith (Mark Doty)

35. Even Now (Paul Monette)

36. Evidence of Things Not Seen (William Penn)

San Francisco Opera Center Singers; Mark Morash and Monica Vanderveen, piano

Im Memoriam Lou Harrison (1917-2003)

King David’s Lament (1941; choral version 1985; arr. by Christi Denton 2003) (San Francisco Premiere)

Lou Harrison composed King David’s Lament for Jonathan in October 1941. In 1985, he revised the work and incorporated it into "Three Songs" for male chorus. Baritone John Duykers and duo pianists Robert Krupnick and Donald Cobb premiered the original version at the Oakland Museum on March 19, 1972. The Three Songs were premiered on September 28, 1985 by the Portland Gay Men’s Choir, with Gilbert Seely conducting.

The text is from II Samuel 1:26. The version that Lou Harrison has set reads: “Now I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan; Dear and delightful you were to me, Your love surpassing the love of women. Now I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan.”

Harold Gray Meers, tenor; Mark Morash & Jake Heggie, piano four hands; San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Kathleen McGuire, conductor. Members of the Other Minds Audience are encouraged to join in half way through at the conductor’s signal.

Pamela Wunderlich will be appearing tonight as Willis, et pied à terre, and A Middle Eastern Jewel for Lou Harrison.

[Noted taken from the original printed program.]

For additional information see California Revealed.

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