On February 13th, from 10 to 11 pm, listen online at wrti.org or on WRTI HD-2 to Kile Smith's Contemporary American Music show, Now is the Time. Works by David Snow, Wendy Mae Chambers, and H. Leslie Adams will warm you up for Valentine's Day.The show begins in winter and ends with intimations of spring. The appropriately named composer David Snow shares with us the haunting Winter for trumpet and piano. The second movement from the Symphony of the Universe by the always-engaging Wendy Mae Chambers is called "Organism." She wrote for a big-band jazz ensemble to be recorded in the cavernous Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and the results are stunning.
The song cycle The Wider View comes from the romantic and lyrical pen of H. Leslie Adams. Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and others lead to the final "Love Rejoices" by James Dillet Freeman. "...O love, come close and circumscribe me round / With love's dear otherness, encompass me / In bonds so fair for when I am bound by love / on ev'ry side, / Then I am free. / O love, you are the only narrow door through which myself can reach to the yet more. / And Love Rejoices, Love Rejoice!"