The Trumpets of Summer (1964)
For the quatercentenary of the birth of William Shakespeare, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) commission Beckwith to write a piece to represent this event. Instead of doing the obvious and using text from Shakespeare's works as a libretto, he composed this work with the intention of conveying the experiences one may have with Shakespeare in Canada and his effect on Canadian culture. Some of these aspects include “rather seedy touring company performances”, “a Stratford opening night,” and exploring the use of Shakespeare more recently in television and even comic books.
He collaborated on the text with a young Margaret Atwood, who was only a doctoral student at the time. The prologue proceeds to ask the audience why they came ("Was it to see / An unreal man, saying / words / words words words / that we can't understand / Or was it to see / A real man dying / slowly behind this mask of speech?"), followed by trumpets meant to imitate the traditional call to the audience indicating the start of a play.
Read more about this topic: John Beckwith (composer), Selected Works
Famous quotes containing the words trumpets and/or summer:
“Here was a little of everything in a small compass to satisfy the wants and the ambition of the woods,... but there seemed to me, as usual, a preponderance of children’s toys,—dogs to bark, and cats to mew, and trumpets to blow, where natives there hardly are yet. As if a child born into the Maine woods, among the pine cones and cedar berries, could not do without such a sugar-man or skipping-jack as the young Rothschild has.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)