Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)
Psalm 24, La Terre appartient à l'Eternel (The Earth is the Lord's) (1916)
Scored for: four French horns, three trumpets, four trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, organ, and chorus
Performance time: 5 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 21, 2021; Carlos Kalmar, conductor

The story of Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) is equal parts inspiring and tragic. Born to a musical family, the talented young musician composed a number of masterworks during her short life before passing away at the age of 24. Her older sister, Nadia, who went on to become one of the most influential composition teachers of the 20th century, claimed Lili was “the first important woman composer.” Her statement is obviously hyperbolic, but had Lili lived a full life, who knows what glass ceilings she could have broken.

Lili’s father, Ernest Boulanger, was a moderately successful composer himself who taught singing at the Paris Conservatoire. He discovered Lili’s talent early on. From five years old, she began tagging along to Nadia’s music theory classes at the Conservatoire. The prodigy studied numerous instruments but ultimately settled on composition, seeing it as a familial rite of passage. In 1913, she became the first woman to win First Prize in the prestigious Prix de Rome, which had been awarded to the likes of Debussy, Bizet, and Berlioz. Her father had won in 1835, and Nadia had competed numerous times but only managed to eke out second place in 1908. Lili’s historic win for her cantata Faust & Hélène briefly catapulted her to fame. After winning the Prix de Rome, Lili devoted what little time she had left to coming to terms with her failing health through composition. She had had bronchial pneumonia as a toddler, which weakened her immune system and led to a lifelong battle with intestinal tuberculosis (now known as Crohn’s disease). Her highly emotional psalm settings, written in 1916, serve as acts of defiance against both her declining health and the First World War that raged around her.

Psalm 24 exemplifies Boulanger’s unique compositional voice in its modal inflection, colorful instrumentation, and special attention to text setting. The piece begins with a stirring brass fanfare in stacked open fifths that could be straight out of a Biblical epic. The tenors and basses make a declamatory pronouncement of God’s dominion over the Earth, accenting practically every word for maximum textual clarity. A more monastic section follows as the lower voices sing a mostly unison, chant-like melody with quiet support from the organ. This paves the way for a brief lyrical tenor solo accompanied by muted horns and harp. The upper voices enter at last in a return to the character of the opening fanfare. The harmonies become richer, and the rhythmic ostinato in the brass and the organ propel the piece across the finish line in a thrilling accelerando.

Jake Runestad (b. 1986)
Earth Symphony
Scored for: two flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, strings, and chorus
Performance time: 33 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Hailed as a “choral rockstar” by American Public Media, Jake Runestad (b. 1986) is in high demand as a composer and conductor, working with leading choral and instrumental ensembles across the United States and Europe. Runestad was commissioned to write Earth Symphony in 2021 by True Concord Voices and Orchestra of Tucson, Arizona. For the text, Runestad turned to poet, librettist, public artist, and film producer Todd Boss, marking the creative duo’s ninth professional collaboration.

Earth Symphony is a choral symphony in five movements. Given the scope of symphonic form, Runestad wanted to pick a consequential topic: “one of relevance and power, drawn from our beautiful and complex human experiences,” he writes in his program note. Runestad and Boss came up with the idea of telling a story from the perspective of Mother Earth as she charts humankind’s evolution, their eventual demise through her destruction, and her eventual recovery in their absence. Runestad hopes this personalized angle forces us to confront our role in the climate crisis. “By anthropomorphizing Earth herself,” Runestad writes, “Earth Symphony enables entry into our own ecological shame, guilt, responsibility, potential, and redemption, all from a wide-angled, time-telescoped lens, thereby asking our most immediately pressing environmental questions in an entirely new way.”

The first movement, “Evolution,” presents the musical themes of the symphony and outlines the sonic dissonance between Mother Earth, represented by the key of D major, and humanity, represented by E-flat major. Mother Earth calls humankind “Mirabilia,” her beloved, and is full of hope for the species “reborn as gods of reason.” However, humanity quickly reveals its true colors. The second movement, “Ambition,” tells the story of humankind’s fall from grace through the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and plummeted into the sea. Runestad conjures an atmosphere of antiquity by emulating the sounds of ancient instruments and quoting the Seikilos Epitaph, the oldest known complete musical composition, dating to the first or second century AD.

Next, “Destruction” depicts a series of harrowing ecological disasters through a barrage of brass, percussion, and woodwinds. Mother Earth grieves her ruination at the hands of her children in “Lament.” This poignant movement quotes another old melody, “When I Am Laid in Earth” (also known as “Dido’s Lament”), from Henry Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas. Finally, “Recovery” sees Mother Earth moving on and restoring balance now that the humans are gone. Runestad captures the stillness of outer space with a choir of tuned wine glasses, bowed vibraphone, and bowed crotales. Mother Earth sings of nature reclaiming man-made spaces—ivy growing over streets, seaweed covering drains, a whale swimming in an empty factory. Even after her devastation, she is not mad but wistful: “There shall come a day like the first day, so heavenly, so clear. Mirabilia, you would love it here.”

Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
The Planets (1914)
Scored for: four flutes including piccolo and alto flute, four oboes including English Horn, four clarinets including bass clarinet, four bassoons including contrabassoon, six French horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, organ, tenor tuba, strings, and female chorus
Performance time: 51 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: August 14, 1998; David Atherton, conductor

For most people, The Planets is the only composition by Gustav Holst (1874–1934) they can name. And it’s no wonder. As one of the most recorded British compositions, The Planets has infiltrated popular culture with countless quotes and allusions in television and film, from John Williams’s score to Star Wars to the children’s show Bluey. The popularity and familiarity of The Planets is deserved but overshadows not only the rest of Holst’s oeuvre but also the originality of the work itself.

Holst took a keen interest in astrology after meeting playwright Clifford Bax in 1913. Bax was knowledgeable about astrology, and Holst soon began casting horoscopes for friends. Holst explained in a letter, “As a rule I only study things that suggest music to me...Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely.” He began writing The Planets soon after, completing the first movement, “Mars, the Bringer of War,” in 1914 and the rest of the movements by 1917. The work saw its first private performance in 1918 and first full public performance in 1920, becoming an immediate hit, much to the reclusive composer’s surprise.

The evocative piece has invited many interpretations. For instance, although Holst completed “Mars” before the outbreak of World War I, it is easy to hear it as a harbinger of the horrific violence to come, with its crashing dissonances, blaring fanfares, and inexorable 5/4 march. Holst repeatedly denied this association. It is also tempting to view The Planets through the lens of Roman mythology, astrology, or astronomy. However, Holst’s work does not completely hold up to any one of these systems, as he reorders and omits planets and assigns qualities to the planets’ namesakes that differ from mythology. Instead, music theorists Táhirih Motazedian and Scott Murphy argue Holst took certain elements from each discipline to construct his own narrative—one where the interplanetary voyage is a metaphor for a metaphysical journey from the strife of earthly life to peaceful solitude in the great beyond.

The Planets has captured our imaginations and invited so many readings because of its musical diversity and invention. The terrifying clamor of “Mars” contrasts with the soothing “Venus, the Bringer of Peace,” with its soft undulating chords and romantic violin solo. “Mercury, the Winged Messenger” is a blithe scherzo, the simultaneous keys of E and B-flat capturing the elusiveness of the spritely god. “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” is thoroughly jovial, containing two dance tunes and a central maestoso melody Holst later extracted for use in a patriotic hymn, “I vow to thee my country.”

Holst’s most personal movement, “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age,” provides another stark contrast. Watching two older men in black robes solemnly toll the bells at Durham Cathedral inspired Holst to compose the haunting, oscillating flute chords that open the movement. The depiction of the slow march of time apparently hit too close to home for some patrons at a performance in 1920, as a number of older audience members reportedly left the concert hall in the middle of the movement. “Uranus, the Magician” has invited apt comparisons to Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in its galumphing portrayal of a magician. However, all is not what it seems. An exuberant cadence suddenly falls away to reveal an eerie pianissimo, presaging the remoteness of “Neptune, the Mystic.” Here, at the farthest reaches of the solar system, Holst deploys his most effective conceit yet—an offstage treble chorus representing the last echoes of human life as they fade into nothingness.

—Katherine Buzard