The Memorials for Orchestra
The Five Memorials for Orchestra were written to commemorate the lives of
four people as well as the victims of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade
Center in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington.
Memorials 1 and 2 are not included simply because I've not yet brought either
up to date. The first is for my parents who died in 1989 (my mother) and 1990
(father.) The second is for my sister who passed away in 1982.
Memorial 3 is for Mason Martens, a musician in the Episcopal Church as well
as a music editor who passed away in 1991. His battles with clergy, choir
directors and others in the church were legendary.
The form of the work is a minuet and trio with coda. The near-atonal first
and third sections show his difficult personality but the contrasting tonal
trio, based on a fragment of one of his works, shows his more convivial side.
Memorial 4 was for a friend from the YMCA, Peter McCabe. (His brother Charles
was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for many years.) It is in the
form of a nineteenth century overture. I've not used the "Danny Boy"
tune to represent his Irish-American background but because it was a favorite of
his and he sang it often in his high tenor voice. His happy-go-lucky personality
is mirrored in the rather jaunty music of the beginning.
The origins of the tune, also known as "Londonderry Air" are
shrouded in mystery (It's possibly Scottish.) but the words were definitely
written by an English lawyer, Frederic Edward Weatherly (1848-1929) and
published in 1913.
Memorial 5 9/11/01 was put into its present form after I witnessed the
collapse of the second tower of the World Trade Center from a nearby window and
I believe that no further description is necessary.
Edward Gold
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Memorial 3
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Memorial 4
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Memorial 5
