Gabriel Weber
Staff Writer
The Music School Festival Orchestra plans to take audience members all the way to the galaxy for a bird’s-eye appreciation of the “grandeur and miracle that is this place we call home,” said School of Music Artistic Director and MSFO Conductor Timothy Muffitt.
Setting the tone for the summer, the MSFO opens its season 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater with “three highly diverse works — diverse in terms of era, the composer’s background and musical style,” Muffitt said.
Coming together as an orchestra that has never existed before, the musicians are “finding each other, musically, artistically and personally, so this is a good program for that: It’s
highly varied,” Muffitt said.
Following the tradition of starting with a classical-era symphony, the MSFO will begin with Wolfgang Mozart’s Symphony No. 31, also known as the “Paris Symphony,” followed by Patrick Harlin’s “Earthrise” and ending with William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2, also known as “Song of a New Race.”
In 1778, 22-year-old Mozart emerged in front of the public after last performing as a child prodigy to premiere “Paris” in its namesake city and even included fireworks in his performance to amuse the audience.
Still composed “Song of a New Race” in 1936 as an expansion of his Symphony No. 1, known as the “Afro-American Symphony.”
What the MSFO looks to do is “realize Mozart’s style and try to find all the unique and special energies” of such a “musical genius,” Muffitt said.
“We as musicians are stepping into another era and trying to bring that era back to life in the 21st century,” he said.
Still employs a rich tradition in African-American music dubbed the call-and-response technique.
“That creates a great dynamism in the work, where you feel that there’s constant motion and changes in direction. It is very much like a lively conversation,” Muffit said.
Also conductor of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra, Maestro Muffitt premiered “Earthrise” while Harlin was composer-in-residence. However, Harlin has constructed a new version fitted for the larger bandwidth of the MSFO, so this will be the first time this rendition has been played for the public — and he will be here to witness it.
“It’s one of the great new works of this century,” Muffitt said. “It’s really an awe-inspiring work — the power, grandeur and fragility of it.”
As a composer, Harlin aims to adjust how music is conceptualized. To create the lighthouse effect in the piece, instruments change as the conductor’s hand acts as a beam from a lighthouse, instead of instruments changing on a beat pattern.
“It’s a really cool moment in the piece where I imagine Earth coming into focus while things float and time shifts in a different way,” Harlin said.
Inspired by the first-ever photograph of Earth from space taken in 1968 by astronaut William Anders — also referred to as Earthrise — Harlin intends to take the audience to space. Exiting the atmosphere is notoriously violent, until reaching sudden zero gravity and freezing temperatures.
“As you get up into this weightlessness, I orchestrate the piece with colder instruments,” Harlin said.
Seeing our home surrounded by such great vastness offered a sort of “collective epiphany that this is our spaceship in the greater universe,” Harlin said. “Earthrise” premiered mid-pandemic, when “we were really siloed from one another,” he said, and living with the dichotomy of that disruption along with the “wonder, awe and beauty of the world” gives a similar bird’s-eye view perspective.
“The piece is really about this idea of traveling outside of something — in this case, our atmosphere — to get a perspective on what it is that we have, what we share and what we find valuable,” Harlin said. “Zooming out erases the artificial boundaries that we set up, this state or this country; when you zoom out, it allows you to connect to the world in a way that is harder than when you’re just standing in New York.”
