Former Minot resident’s composition to premiere
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BISMARCK - The world premiere of “Prayer of Tagore,” a music piece composed by Dr. Emerson Eads for soloists, choir and orchestra will be performed by the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra Saturday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m. in the Belle Mehus Auditorium, Bismarck.
“Prayer of Tagore” is among music selections the orchestra will perform during a program called “From Darkness to Light.” The orchestra’s program pays tribute to the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and celebrates the 250th birthday of America.
Eads is director of Choral Studies at the Southern Illinois University School of Music in Carbondale, Ill. Prior, he was director of Choral Activities and assistant professor of music at Minot State University.
In program notes about “Prayer of Tagore” by Eads, he said:
“Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali--literally ‘song offerings’ is a collection of poems that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In ‘Gitanjali 35,’ Tagore imagines a world where the mind is without fear, where knowledge is free, where words come out from the depth of truth. The repeated “where” keeps the poem suspended. We move through a series of seven visions without knowing exactly where they lead. Only in the final line do we discover that Tagore has been offering a prayer.
“The line that first spoke to me was ‘Where words come out from the depth of truth.’ I built the piece around the sound of that ‘where.’ The opening and closing chord consists of two perfect fifths, stacked a semitone apart. The perfect fifth is among the most stable intervals in Western music; yet placed against its neighboring fifth, it becomes strangely unsettled. It is stable, but we do not quite know where it belongs. I think of it as the ‘where chord.’ The harmony makes audible what the poem leaves unanswered: where? The question remains open.
“Tagore wrote these words in the context of India’s struggle for independence, but their questions of fear, freedom, truth and human possibility continue to resonate – perhaps even more vividly today.”
Tickets for the program are available at the Event Center Box Office.