Liederabend LXII: Violet City - Queer Life in New York , 1920-2020

The Liederabend—literally, "evening of song"—dates back to the 1800s, when musicians and lovers of music would gather at someone's home, and one or more singers and a pianist would perform the songs of composers of the day. In the field of classical music, these songs are referred to as "art songs," and the German art songs are called "Lieder." In Germany, the great age of song came in the 19th century. German and Austrian composers had written music for voice with keyboard before this time, but it was with the flowering of German literature in the Classical and Romantic eras that composers found high inspiration in great poetry, sparking the genre known as the "Lied."

The tradition of the art song composition continues today, with composers from all corners of the world setting poetry in many languages, scored for voice and piano. The NEC Liederabend series presents songs in a variety of languages—not only German—dating from the 19th century up to the present day.

Tonight's program will offer songs by Virgil Thomson, John Corigliano, Ned Rorem, Martin Hennessy, Daron Hagen, and others, with texts by Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Richard McCann, Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, and others.  JJ Penna is the program coach.

View the concert program here.

This concert celebrates New York at the intersection of art and sexual identity, the metropolis as a magnet and sounding board for the queer community in the last century. The composers and writers represented here - some openly gay, some not - have been embraced as freedom fighters for gay rights: From Gertrude Stein’s liberating experiments with language to Walt Whitman’s open-armed overtures of self-expression, Bob Dylan’s hymns of social justice, to the generations of artists living and writing through the terrors of the AIDS crisis. The songs on this program are invitations to live and love out loud, to reveal one’s true nature in its most fully realized form. 

This is an in-person event with a private stream available to the NEC community here: https://necmusic.edu/live.