Program #46, March 29 2001: Unthemed / Big hits of the twentieth century series, part III.

Since the summer of 2000, whenever there has been a fifth Thursday during the month, Prisms has looked back at some of the most well-known, popular, prominent, and/or accessible (yet still interesting) works of the 1900s -- juxtaposing them against one another in an effort to recreate more of their native musical context than can typically be represented on conventional classical radio. This time, I chose to juxtapose three subthemes: machines, jazz, and spring. We began with a quick throw-in of Leroy Anderson's delightful The Typewriter (in honor of this evening's computer problems here at the station), worked through a couple of older pieces celebrating the dynamism of (relatively) new forms of transportation, and segued through George Antheil into a variety of pieces grafting jazz motifs into classical composition, culminating in Duke Ellington's great jazz/classical/gospel synthesis, Black, Brown and Beige. From there we finished up with two pieces focusing on spring -- with hope they will warm things up a little bit here in the Pacific Northwest (it is 40° as I write)!