BART Cop Smashes Drunk Dude's Head Through Glass
Asm. Tom Ammiano On Glass Breaking BART Cop
Don't Dump Unwanted Stuff On City Sidewalks
Daisy Does the 49ers: Green Bay Tops SF
Help Children Have a Merry Xmas While Receiving a Lap Dance
Off the tops of our heads, we can't think of too many classical/chamber pieces written in honor of our fair city. This one, 1973's "San Francisco Polyphony," is by Hungarian-born composer György Ligeti who's most famous for scoring parts of Stanley Kubrick films like 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut. It's, like, dissonant and you can't exactly dance to it. But we welcome any imaginative suggestions for what all that scary ruckus is around 3:50 -- Embarcadero Station at rush hour?
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Ligeti!
This is a great piece, commissioned by The San Francisco Symphony in 1973, back when it was conducted by Seiji Ozawa.
Among the other classical works inspired by the City is Symphony No. 1 in F minor: "A Symphony of San Francisco," commissioned in 1936 to celebrate the arrival of Pierre Monteux as music director (a post he would hold until 1952, making him the longest-serving SFO music director ever). And the composer of "A Symphony of San Francisco"? None other than Meredith Willson, who would go on to write the Broadway classic The Music Man more than twenty years later. True fact!
Okay so I know almost no one really cares about Meredith Willson's early work, but here's a review of the "Symphony of San Francisco" from Time magazine of 27 April 1936:
Interesting! The piece was given its world premiere by the SF Symphony at the War Memorial Opera House on 1/8/1975, with Seiji Ozawa conducting. Here's what Ligeti himself wrote about it, from our program notes: "I was happy in this city--one of the most beautiful and most poetic cities of the world--and I felt the peculiar 'genius loci' of San Francisco environment and of the people living in it. Very indirectly, filtered through the texture of this music, you will feel the presence of the San Francisco atmosphere, of the low clouds sailing slowly from the ocean and falling like a soft curtain over the city, of the presence of water and salt everywhere, of the strange mixture of gaiety and loneliness of people in the streets, of the student musicians between red bricks of the old chocolate factory, of watching the turning of the cable car on a corner of Market Street, of the feeling you have when you park your car on a hilly street, of the view of red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge appearing very suddenly and very close behind a fog."
Jean Shirk
San Francisco Symphony