Michael Alec Rose
Vanderbilt Wind Symphony Performs Music by Michael Alec Rose
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 18
Where: Blair's Ingram Hall
Flat Rock Cedar Glade, located just outside Murfreesboro, is the largest cedar glade preserve in Tennessee, an 800-acre natural area that’s home to several endangered plants and a number of rare amphibians, reptiles and birds.
This evening, the Vanderbilt Wind Symphony will perform Flat Rock: Three Glades for Wind Ensemble by composer Michael Alec Rose. A longtime professor at the Blair School of Music, Rose has been drawn to Flat Rock since it first opened as a natural preserve in the 1990s.
“Through all the seasons of the year, Flat Rock is a spiritual home to me, a wilderness surrounded by trailer homes, my unlikely local Sinai, right at the geographical center of Tennessee,” Rose writes in his program note. “It is most lovely, and most visited in the spring, when it bursts with that rainbow of rare wildflowers … But I like it best in the blistering summer and the soggy winter, when its inhospitable heart beats with pure solitude and simple wonder.”
Rose says his music celebrates Flat Rock’s vitality and is meant to serve as a sonic bridge between the area’s prehistoric past, when it was submerged beneath an ocean, and the present. “The exquisite fragility of Flat Rock’s ecosystem — on the border between human wasteland and ecological miracle — is something best captured in music,” Rose writes.
Tonight’s free concert also features Philip Sparke’s Dance Movements along with two works by composer Jack Stamp: The first, Rolette’s Deception, is named for Joseph Rolette, a 19th century Minnesota politician who absconded with legislation that would have made St. Peter the capital of the state. The second, The Final Beguine, plays off of Cole Porter’s ever-popular jazz standard “Begin the Beguine.”
