Race for the Sky and I never saw a moor by Richard Pearson Thomas (b. 1957)

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, New Yorkers left their apartments and offices and took to the city streets.  Together they lit candles, prayed, sang, created art, wrote messages, and left poems on the walls, fences, and sidewalks of the city. They left a shape and form of our personal and collective experiences in art, words and ideas.

Three poems written during this outburst of expression form the backbone of Race for the Sky. The first, To the Towers Themselves, anonymously penned, was retrieved by the NYC Parks Department, probably from the area around Union Square. The second, How My Life Has Changed, was written by visual artist Hilary North, who was also an employee of Aon Corporation which was located in the South Tower. Ms. North was late to work that day, as the election polls in Brooklyn were taking unusually long. The third, don’t look for me anymore, was found posted at the Wailing Wall in Grand Central Station. The poet was Alicia Vasquez, a Westchester County resident who worked in a midtown Manhattan law firm. All three of these poems were featured in the long-running exhibit Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning at the New-York Historical Society in 2002, now on the web at www.citylore.org.

Lisa Radakovich Holsberg commissioned Race for the Sky after being inspired by the Missing exhibit. The premiere of Race for the Sky took place on the first year commemoration of the attacks on September 11, 2002, at the New-York Historical Society, with soprano Lisa Radakovich Holsberg, violinist Kirsten Davis, and composer Richard Pearson Thomas at the piano.

Since the premiere in 2002, Ms. Holsberg has performed Race for the Sky throughout the NYC metropolitan region, including the 2003 People’s Poetry Gathering, Park Avenue United Methodist Church Concert Series, Long Island University, festivals Songfest in California and the Icicle Creek Chamber Music Festival in Washington state, and the 48th National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) National Convention in New Orleans in July 2004. September 11, 2005 brought the first orchestrated performance of To the Towers Themselves featuring the Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra with Ms. Holsberg and violinist Katie Kresek at the dedication of the Westchester County Memorial The Rising. In the summer of 2005, the score for Race for the Sky was published by Classical Vocal Reprints, and Ms. Holsberg’s CD Race for the Sky with LeAnn Overton, piano, Katie Kresek, violin, and Karla Moe, piccolo, was released in November 2005.

Pianist and composer Richard Pearson Thomas’ songs are popular choices for many contemporary singers such as Audra McDonald, Sanford Sylvan and Kurt Ollman. His compositions have been performed by the Boston Pops, Covent Garden Festival, Houston Grand Opera, and others. His symphonic works The Ghosts of Alder Gulch and Harmonia Sacra were premiered by the Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir of the famed Riverside Church in New York City. He is Composer-in-Residence of the Gold Opera Project, Young Audiences/New York, and his work with children was singled out for praise by President Clinton when Young Audiences/New York was awarded the 1994 National Medal of Arts. A graduate of Eastman School of Music, he pursued Advanced Studies in Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television at the University of Southern California.

I never saw a moor is one of six Emily Dickinson poems set in Richard Pearson Thomas’ song cycle At last, to be identified! which was published in 1992. It is a song of faith. Emily Dickinson, in her inimitable way, reveals the conviction and vision of the artist in this poem, testifying to her own understanding of truth.

At the River by Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

The great American composer Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900. He received his first exposure to the “radical modern music” of Charles Ives and Maurice Ravel in 1921. At this time, he traveled to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, becoming her first American student. After three years he returned to New York with his first major commission, to write an organ concerto for the American appearances of Madame Boulanger. His Symphony for Organ and Orchestra premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1925.

Copland’s music was influenced by the sounds of his time, particularly the jazz movement in the United States and the neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky. By 1936 he began to incorporate the sounds of folk tunes of the American people into his works. Among his most significant works are the ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), his musical setting of Lincoln’s words, A Lincoln Portrait (1942), Fanfare for the Common Man (1943), and Appalachian Spring (1944). Appalachian Spring, with its classic variations of the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts,” earned Copland the Pulitzer Prize.

The most famous of his song compositions were written in the 1950’s, his song cycle Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson and his two sets of Old American Songs. The song heard here, At the River, based on an old American hymn tune, is one of the Old American Songs. These arrangements of folk tunes are popular and widely performed to this day.

Songs of War by Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Charles Ives was a great American experimenter in sound. Carrying on his father’s traditions of musical exploration and innovation (his father was the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army during the Civil War and a professional musician in his town of Danbury, Connecticut), Charles Ives composed with tone cluster, polyrhythms, polychords, and polytonality. Ives was a musical prophet, as these elements would become the recognized hallmarks of the avant-garde decades later.

Although he is now widely recognized as the first great American composer, Charles Ives was unappreciated in his time. He published at his own expense a collection of 114 of his songs for voice and piano in 1922, and distributed the books for free at the New York Public Library. His music has a “Yankee” sensibility, reflecting humor, wit, forthrightness, and a deep passion for the ideals of freedom and music.  For Ives, music was a symbol of human life and spirituality. Ives was a populist and spoke and out frequently against political hypocrisy. Ives was also a dedicated pacifist.

The Songs of War date from 1917, and are a direct response to the ravages of the First World War. Popular war songs from “The Great War” as well as songs from the Civil War are quoted liberally throughout the three songs, uncannily using propaganda to reveal the realities of war. In Flanders Fields is a setting of a poem by Canadian war poet John McCrae (1872-1918). The music quotes, in addition to “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” the French national anthem “La Marseilleise” throughout the song. The music and the text paint the picture of the famous poppy fields of Flanders that flowered in such color because of the enormous carnage of battle that soaked the soil in human blood. He is There! is similar to the march of a small town band, with the soldiers about to leave for battle marching in the town parade. Ives quotes thirteen borrowed tunes in this song, among them “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Reveille,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” and in the obbligato instrument, “Dixie.” Tom Sails Away is a stream of consciousness memory of childhood, when “Tom” was a baby in his mother’s arms. All is “right” with this memory of the everyday routine of gardens, whistles, and father’s daily return home from work in the mill – until the disclosure that “Tom” became one of the soldiers who sailed away for “Over There,” the European front destination as well as the title and refrain of a popular WWI song.

How Could I Ever Know? from The Secret Garden by Lucy Simon (b. 1943)

Composer Lucy Simon was born to the New York family of Richard Leo Simon, the publisher and founder of Simon & Schuster. She is the older sister to the popular vocal artist Carly Simon. Lucy Simon began singing at 16 with sister Carly as the Simon Sisters, and went on to win two Grammys for her In Harmony albums, as well as a Tony nomination for The Secret Garden.

The Secret Garden opened on Broadway in 1991 for a run of 706 performances. Both writer Marsha Norman and young actress Daisy Eagan received Tony Awards. Based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden tells the story of a lonely little girl, Mary Lennox, who is left orphaned when her parents die of a cholera epidemic in India. Mary is sent to England to live with her uncle in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. There, Mary learns the secrets of the sad manor to which she has come to live:  the sorrow of her uncle Archibald Craven, who lost his beloved wife Lily in childbirth, and the existence of her bedridden cousin Colin, who is wrongfully made to believe he is frail and will soon die. Mary, through her individual spirit and independent mind, manages to break through the walls of sadness in this house and find her aunt Lily’s “secret garden” – and there, through the nurturing of that neglected and wild garden, bring about the restoration of life and hope to her grieving uncle and his son.

At the height of Archibald’s despair and grief, his dead wife Lily appears to him in a vision, singing How Could I Ever Know? as she begs his forgiveness for leaving him, and counsels him to return home to their child and remember their love.

New Words from In the Beginning by Maury Yeston (b. 1945)

Composer and lyricist Maury Yeston won his second Tony Award in 1997 for Best Score with the Broadway production of Titanic, his first award in 1982 for Nine. Both musicals also were awarded Tony Awards as Best Musical for their respective years. Other successful theatrical endeavors include Grand Hotel and Phantom. The song New Words is from his musical In the Beginning, a biblical comedy featuring a book by David Hahn.

Yeston’s music also covers a variety of styles. His Cello Concerto was premiered by Yo Yo Ma, and his album Goya – A Life in Song featured Placido Domingo and Gloria Estefan. Goya included the song Till I Loved You, a top-40 Barbra Streisand hit. He was commissioned by the Kennedy Center in 2000 to compose An American Cantata – 2000 Voices, a choral symphony in three movements for the National Symphony Orchestra and 2000 singers, conducted by Leonard Slatkin and premiered on the steps fo the Lincoln Memorial. His crossover song cycle, December Songs, was commissioned for Andrea Marcovicci by the Carnegie Hall Corporation in honor of Carnegie Hall’s Centennial Season, and the premiere was held at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1991. He was born in 1945 in Jersey City, New Jersey.

What More Do I Need? from Saturday Night by Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930)

Theatrical giant Stephen Sondheim was born in 1930 in New York City. At the age of 10, he moved with his mother to rural Pennsylvania, where he became closely acquainted with his neighbor, the famous lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts, he received the Hutchinson Prize which allowed him to study with composer Milton Babbitt.

In 1956, Stephen Sondheim was approached by Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents to write the lyrics for West Side Story, and then in 1958 was asked to do the same for Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne. In 1962, the first production with both lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, opened on Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Musical, the first of many major awards for Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim’s theatrical career includes the shows Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Side by Side by Sondheim, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Passion, and others.

The song What More Do I Need? was originally written for the show Saturday Night, which was to have been produced in 1955 but was abandoned when producer Lemuel Ayers passed away. It then reappeared in the 1987 York Theater production of the Sondheim revue Marry Me a Little at the off-Broadway Church of the Heavenly Rest. In 1997,more than 40 years after it was written, the first full production of Saturday Night opened at the Bridewell Theatre in London.

Race for the Sky and I never saw a moor by Richard Pearson Thomas (b. 1957)

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, New Yorkers left their apartments and offices and took to the city streets.  Together they lit candles, prayed, sang, created art, wrote messages, and left poems on the walls, fences, and sidewalks of the city. They left a shape and form of our personal and collective experiences in art, words and ideas.

Three poems written during this outburst of expression form the backbone of Race for the Sky. The first, To the Towers Themselves, anonymously penned, was retrieved by the NYC Parks Department, probably from the area around Union Square. The second, How My Life Has Changed, was written by visual artist Hilary North, who was also an employee of Aon Corporation which was located in the South Tower. Ms. North was late to work that day, as the election polls in Brooklyn were taking unusually long. The third, don’t look for me anymore, was found posted at the Wailing Wall in Grand Central Station. The poet was Alicia Vasquez, a Westchester County resident who worked in a midtown Manhattan law firm. All three of these poems were featured in the long-running exhibit Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning at the New-York Historical Society in 2002, now on the web at www.citylore.org.

Lisa Radakovich Holsberg commissioned Race for the Sky after being inspired by the Missing exhibit. The premiere of Race for the Sky took place on the first year commemoration of the attacks on September 11, 2002, at the New-York Historical Society, with soprano Lisa Radakovich Holsberg, violinist Kirsten Davis, and composer Richard Pearson Thomas at the piano.

Since the premiere in 2002, Ms. Holsberg has performed Race for the Sky throughout the NYC metropolitan region, including the 2003 People’s Poetry Gathering, Park Avenue United Methodist Church Concert Series, Long Island University, festivals Songfest in California and the Icicle Creek Chamber Music Festival in Washington state, and the 48th National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) National Convention in New Orleans in July 2004. September 11, 2005 brought the first orchestrated performance of To the Towers Themselves featuring the Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra with Ms. Holsberg and violinist Katie Kresek at the dedication of the Westchester County Memorial The Rising. In the summer of 2005, the score for Race for the Sky was published by Classical Vocal Reprints, and Ms. Holsberg’s CD Race for the Sky with LeAnn Overton, piano, Katie Kresek, violin, and Karla Moe, piccolo, was released in November 2005.

Pianist and composer Richard Pearson Thomas’ songs are popular choices for many contemporary singers such as Audra McDonald, Sanford Sylvan and Kurt Ollman. His compositions have been performed by the Boston Pops, Covent Garden Festival, Houston Grand Opera, and others. His symphonic works The Ghosts of Alder Gulch and Harmonia Sacra were premiered by the Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir of the famed Riverside Church in New York City. He is Composer-in-Residence of the Gold Opera Project, Young Audiences/New York, and his work with children was singled out for praise by President Clinton when Young Audiences/New York was awarded the 1994 National Medal of Arts. A graduate of Eastman School of Music, he pursued Advanced Studies in Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television at the University of Southern California.

I never saw a moor is one of six Emily Dickinson poems set in Richard Pearson Thomas’ song cycle At last, to be identified! which was published in 1992. It is a song of faith. Emily Dickinson, in her inimitable way, reveals the conviction and vision of the artist in this poem, testifying to her own understanding of truth.

At the River by Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

The great American composer Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900. He received his first exposure to the “radical modern music” of Charles Ives and Maurice Ravel in 1921. At this time, he traveled to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, becoming her first American student. After three years he returned to New York with his first major commission, to write an organ concerto for the American appearances of Madame Boulanger. His Symphony for Organ and Orchestra premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1925.

Copland’s music was influenced by the sounds of his time, particularly the jazz movement in the United States and the neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky. By 1936 he began to incorporate the sounds of folk tunes of the American people into his works. Among his most significant works are the ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), his musical setting of Lincoln’s words, A Lincoln Portrait (1942), Fanfare for the Common Man (1943), and Appalachian Spring (1944). Appalachian Spring, with its classic variations of the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts,” earned Copland the Pulitzer Prize.

The most famous of his song compositions were written in the 1950’s, his song cycle Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson and his two sets of Old American Songs. The song heard here, At the River, based on an old American hymn tune, is one of the Old American Songs. These arrangements of folk tunes are popular and widely performed to this day.

Songs of War by Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Charles Ives was a great American experimenter in sound. Carrying on his father’s traditions of musical exploration and innovation (his father was the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army during the Civil War and a professional musician in his town of Danbury, Connecticut), Charles Ives composed with tone cluster, polyrhythms, polychords, and polytonality. Ives was a musical prophet, as these elements would become the recognized hallmarks of the avant-garde decades later.

Although he is now widely recognized as the first great American composer, Charles Ives was unappreciated in his time. He published at his own expense a collection of 114 of his songs for voice and piano in 1922, and distributed the books for free at the New York Public Library. His music has a “Yankee” sensibility, reflecting humor, wit, forthrightness, and a deep passion for the ideals of freedom and music.  For Ives, music was a symbol of human life and spirituality. Ives was a populist and spoke and out frequently against political hypocrisy. Ives was also a dedicated pacifist.

The Songs of War date from 1917, and are a direct response to the ravages of the First World War. Popular war songs from “The Great War” as well as songs from the Civil War are quoted liberally throughout the three songs, uncannily using propaganda to reveal the realities of war. In Flanders Fields is a setting of a poem by Canadian war poet John McCrae (1872-1918). The music quotes, in addition to “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” the French national anthem “La Marseilleise” throughout the song. The music and the text paint the picture of the famous poppy fields of Flanders that flowered in such color because of the enormous carnage of battle that soaked the soil in human blood. He is There! is similar to the march of a small town band, with the soldiers about to leave for battle marching in the town parade. Ives quotes thirteen borrowed tunes in this song, among them “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Reveille,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” and in the obbligato instrument, “Dixie.” Tom Sails Away is a stream of consciousness memory of childhood, when “Tom” was a baby in his mother’s arms. All is “right” with this memory of the everyday routine of gardens, whistles, and father’s daily return home from work in the mill – until the disclosure that “Tom” became one of the soldiers who sailed away for “Over There,” the European front destination as well as the title and refrain of a popular WWI song.

How Could I Ever Know? from The Secret Garden by Lucy Simon (b. 1943)

Composer Lucy Simon was born to the New York family of Richard Leo Simon, the publisher and founder of Simon & Schuster. She is the older sister to the popular vocal artist Carly Simon. Lucy Simon began singing at 16 with sister Carly as the Simon Sisters, and went on to win two Grammys for her In Harmony albums, as well as a Tony nomination for The Secret Garden.

The Secret Garden opened on Broadway in 1991 for a run of 706 performances. Both writer Marsha Norman and young actress Daisy Eagan received Tony Awards. Based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden tells the story of a lonely little girl, Mary Lennox, who is left orphaned when her parents die of a cholera epidemic in India. Mary is sent to England to live with her uncle in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. There, Mary learns the secrets of the sad manor to which she has come to live:  the sorrow of her uncle Archibald Craven, who lost his beloved wife Lily in childbirth, and the existence of her bedridden cousin Colin, who is wrongfully made to believe he is frail and will soon die. Mary, through her individual spirit and independent mind, manages to break through the walls of sadness in this house and find her aunt Lily’s “secret garden” – and there, through the nurturing of that neglected and wild garden, bring about the restoration of life and hope to her grieving uncle and his son.

At the height of Archibald’s despair and grief, his dead wife Lily appears to him in a vision, singing How Could I Ever Know? as she begs his forgiveness for leaving him, and counsels him to return home to their child and remember their love.

New Words from In the Beginning by Maury Yeston (b. 1945)

Composer and lyricist Maury Yeston won his second Tony Award in 1997 for Best Score with the Broadway production of Titanic, his first award in 1982 for Nine. Both musicals also were awarded Tony Awards as Best Musical for their respective years. Other successful theatrical endeavors include Grand Hotel and Phantom. The song New Words is from his musical In the Beginning, a biblical comedy featuring a book by David Hahn.

Yeston’s music also covers a variety of styles. His Cello Concerto was premiered by Yo Yo Ma, and his album Goya – A Life in Song featured Placido Domingo and Gloria Estefan. Goya included the song Till I Loved You, a top-40 Barbra Streisand hit. He was commissioned by the Kennedy Center in 2000 to compose An American Cantata – 2000 Voices, a choral symphony in three movements for the National Symphony Orchestra and 2000 singers, conducted by Leonard Slatkin and premiered on the steps fo the Lincoln Memorial. His crossover song cycle, December Songs, was commissioned for Andrea Marcovicci by the Carnegie Hall Corporation in honor of Carnegie Hall’s Centennial Season, and the premiere was held at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1991. He was born in 1945 in Jersey City, New Jersey.

What More Do I Need? from Saturday Night by Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930)

Theatrical giant Stephen Sondheim was born in 1930 in New York City. At the age of 10, he moved with his mother to rural Pennsylvania, where he became closely acquainted with his neighbor, the famous lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts, he received the Hutchinson Prize which allowed him to study with composer Milton Babbitt.

In 1956, Stephen Sondheim was approached by Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents to write the lyrics for West Side Story, and then in 1958 was asked to do the same for Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne. In 1962, the first production with both lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, opened on Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Musical, the first of many major awards for Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim’s theatrical career includes the shows Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Side by Side by Sondheim, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Passion, and others.

The song What More Do I Need? was originally written for the show Saturday Night, which was to have been produced in 1955 but was abandoned when producer Lemuel Ayers passed away. It then reappeared in the 1987 York Theater production of the Sondheim revue Marry Me a Little at the off-Broadway Church of the Heavenly Rest. In 1997,more than 40 years after it was written, the first full production of Saturday Night opened at the Bridewell Theatre in London.