There was more stylish primitivism in Bartok's First Piano Concerto, composed a year after the Varèse.
Blake's long prophetic poem "The French Revolution," composed a year after "Reflections on the Revolution in France," and with Blake's usual combination of long, boring oracular bits and sharp, sweetly stabbing images, is (as the Blake scholar William Richey once pointed out), beneath the fog, a point-by-point critique of and answer to the Burke of the "Reflections".
Much of his score could have been composed a hundred years ago".
But there is also a sharper harmonic edge here that gives the music a kinship with Eisler's "Kleine Sinfonie," composed a few years later.
By the end of these works, composed a few years before Feldman's death in 1987, I was left wanting more, not less.
The concert finished with a very different Prokofiev work: the rowdy "Scythian Suite," composed a few years after the boisterous 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in Paris.
Composed a few years after the Vietnam War, "Variations" did not question patriotic fervor but its star-spangled attitudes, just as Charles Ives did in the accompanying music, a deconstruction of "God Bless America".
We might be able to predict the exact physical configuration of the writing in a text that will be composed a million years from now in a language entirely unknown to us.
As Nordstrom wrote in an unpublished memoir composed after a year of therapy: "My grandmother spent most of her time lying in bed amongst her large collection of dolls, wearing layers of housedresses, rarely taken off, and her Dodgers baseball cap; my grandfather spent most of his time in his basement workshop where he made hundreds of miniature sailing ships in bottles.
Ms. Beglarian's "I'm Worried Now, but I Won't Be Worried Long" (2010), though composed only a year after "Night Psalm," inhabits a different universe: electronic sound, a droning cello line and tactile, rhythmically solid harp writing form the backdrop for a soulful, almost folk-song-like soliloquy for the violin, played here with a rich, deep sonority by Miranda Cuckson.
The hero is a writer, having for fifty years composed a column, "El Diario de La Paz," for the local newspaper; he reads and cites books, favoring the Roman classics, and keeps a collection of dictionaries; he listens carefully to classical music, and supplies the titles of his selections.
