With 2009 being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, conductor Susan Schirmer will lead the West Chester Symphony in a program to celebrate music of his era and inspired by his life.
“We’ll be doing a lot of Americana,” Schirmer said, “some folk tunes, some Stephen Foster, a piece called ‘An American Salute’ based on the Civil War tune ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home.’ There’s also a more recent piece called ‘A Prairie Song’ that has some good fiddling in it.”
Also in the program will be Aaron Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait,” which includes narration from some of Lincoln’s most famous speeches, including the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address.
“Copland, along with some other composers, was commissioned in the 1940s to write a patriotic piece in regard to the war effort,” Schirmer said. “It premiered in Cincinnati, so there’s also a local connection to the piece.
“It has been performed all over the world and in the score you can see his words translated into different languages,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of research on it and I found out that a lot of people have attributed it to helping start some revolutions.”
Indeed, according to an article on the National Endowment for the Humanities Web site, “a fiery young Venezuelan actress” narrated a performance in her home country .
Copland was present at the concert and later wrote that after the final lines “the audience of six thousand rose to its feet as one and began shouting so loudly that I couldn’t hear the end of the piece.”
As it turned out, that was the first public demonstration against military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who was soon was deposed in a 1958 revolution and sent into exile.
