You’ve read the headlines, heard the great radio news reports on WOSU 89.7 NPR News, watched the debates (don’t remind me) and, having seen and heard enough about Election 2016, you’ve cast your vote.
So, what will you do with your Tuesday evening, now that all is said and done for another four years?
Here’s a suggestion: Turn off the TV, curl up in fetal position with a, um, healthful beverage and listen to The American Sound on Classical 101, this evening at 7.
Living up to the great democratic ideal of individuality, this evening’s program really does have something for everyone. There will be buckets of great dance music, so if you’re an extroverted type, take the music to heart, take to your feet, burn off some of that nervous energy while you wait for the election returns to come in like clowns in a phone booth – I mean, to ring like the resounding voice of Liberty herself – and get your groove on to John Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances, Jacob Weinberg’s fabulous klezmer hit The Maypole and other fun tunes.
If you’re more of a bookish sort, then you’ll be thrilled to know that that great American humorist and political philosopher Mark Twain will also make an appearance on tonight’s program. Twain, who once opined that “the political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet,” would have been tickled, I think, to see so many of us gorging on the fodder and folderol of Election 2016.
This evening on The American Sound enjoy Felix Kraemer’s Mark Twain Mazurka, a piece inspired as much by Twain’s piquant wit as by the writer’s fondness for stogies.
And in case Election 2016 has you pining for a simpler time, a time when America was frontier towns and one-room school houses, a time when gentlemen wore hats and ladies curtsied, a time with a chicken in every pot, a car in every backyard, yada, yada, you’ll get to enjoy all that tonight with Don Gillis’ Symphony No. 7: Saga of a Prairie School. Never mind that the piece is really about the founding of a university in Texas, a state that to this day dreams of running away from the United States of America.
As Election Day circles the drain - I mean, winds down - celebrate our great American democracy, the worst form of government except all the rest, as Winston Churchill famously remarked. Join me in a post-election party on The American Sound tonight at 7, and highly resolve that this nation shall have a new birth of great music, and that music of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Or at least from your radio.
