Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Novels and stories:

• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861).
• Cynthia Voigt, Homecoming (Aladdin, 2003).
• Eric Nguyen, Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel (Knopf, 2021): “The question of how to define home persists throughout. Is it a place? A person? A state of mind?”
• Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Songs for the Flames: Stories (Riverhead Books, 2021): “The protagonists of these stories don’t know one another but the writer-narrator knows all of them, and he seeks, through their lives and his own acts of archival imagination, something crucial about himself and the long, troubled past of his homeland, Colombia.”
• Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois: A Novel (Harper, 2021): “. . . a young Black woman has to figure how to craft a life that is joyful and whole against the backdrop of the American South, where the land is a minefield of treasures and tragedy.”

Visual Arts

• Norman Rockwell, Christmas Homecoming (1948)
• Norman Rockwell, Homecoming Marine (1945)
• Norman Rockwell, The Homecoming (1945)
• Norman Rockwell, Homecoming
• Norman Rockwell, Homecoming (1924)
• Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 9 (1910)
• Vincent van Gogh, Village Street and Steps in Auvers with Two Figures (1890)
• Isaac Levitan, Golden Autumn, Village (1889)
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Hills of Trouville (1885)
• Claude Monet, Zaandam (1871)
• Gustave Courbet, The Homecoming (1854)

Music: songs and other short pieces

• John Denver, Country Roads

Film and Stage

• Great Expectations, adapted from Charles’ Dickens novel, about a man who “almost (but not quite) forgets his modest origins as the foster son of kindhearted blacksmith Joe Gargery”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Bedřich Smetana, Má Vlast (My Country): here are links to performances conducted by Talich, Oundjian, Kubelik and Netopil.

Other works:

• Sibelius, Finlandia, Op. 26 (1899)
• Ives, Symphony No. 2 (1910), offering a wealth of homespun images from the United States.
• Glazunov, The Kremlin, Op. 30 (1890): a symphonic poem “revealing the heart of Russia in the great monuments of the Kremlin, its palaces and cathedrals . . .” [Teresa Pieschacón Raphael, from the notes to this album]
• Howells, String Quartet No. 3, “In Gloucestershire” (1923)
• Howells, Concerto for String Orchestra (1938)
• Harty: An Irish Symphony (1904, rev. 1915 & 1924)
• Lamond, Ouvertüre "Aus Dem Schottischen Hochlande", Op. 4
• Ginastera, Panambí, Op. 1 (1937) (ballet) and Panambí Suite, Op. 1 (1937): “a young man’s statement about his country’s heritage” [Simon Wright, from the notes for this album]
• German, Symphony No. 2 in A minor, "Norwich" (1893)
• German, Welsh Rhapsody
• Falla, 4 Piezas Españolas (1909)
• Liszt, Hungaria (Poème symphonique No. 9), Op. 103 (1854)
• Atterberg, Symphony No. 4 in G Minor, "Sinfonia Piccola", Op. 14 (1918): draws on Swedish folk music
• Glinka, Syphony on Two Russian Themes in D minor
• Gould, American Ballads
• Dvořák, My Home Overture, Op. 62, B125a (1881)
• Raga Desh (Des) is a Hindustani classical raga for late evening. The word “desh” means “country” or “province” (performances by Banerjee, Parvez Khan and Zia Mohiuddin Dagar).
• Guastavino, Flores Argentinas (Flowers of Argentina)
• Florence Price, Symphony No. 3 in C Minor (1938), set against the backdrop of the Great Depression in the 1930s
• Dutilleux, Piano Sonata (1948): “. . . a lucid and overtly personal amalgam of French pianistic traits stretching back some seven decades . . .” [Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone magazine, November 2021 issue, p. 60.]
• Anders Koppel, Mulberry Street Symphony: “Each of the seven movements of Mulberry Street Symphony is a dramatic piece that tells a story in sound. The cinematic opening track, ‘Stranded in the City,’ conveys the sights and sensations of an immigrant's arrival into New York City during the latter part of the 19th century.”

Songs of Robert Burns: songs written by various composers, based on lyrics from the poet.

Albums:

• George “Montana – A Love Story”
• Steven Halpern, “Ancient Echoes”
• John Finbury, “American Nocturnes – Final Days of July”
• Ex Silentio, “Lethe” (In the Courts of the Orient)
• Ex Silentio, “Mneme”
• Art “Turk” Burton, “Ancestral Spirits”
• Alchemy Sound Project, “Afrika Love”
• Brian Landrus Orchestra, “Generations”
• Fernando Garcia, “Guasábara Puerto Rico” “. . . relishing the tussle of folkloric cross rhythms . . . makes this . . . a masterful mash-up of interlacing meter.” [Michael Jackson, Downbeat magazine, June 2018 issue, p. 74.]
• Australian Art Orchestra, “Hand to Earth”: “ . . . the core of this new project is the ancestral manikay (song cycles) of the Yolgnu people, the Aboriginal custodians of a 40,000-year-old oral tradition based in south-east Arnhem Land.” [Sent Jordan, Gramophone magazine, November 2021 issue, p. 91.]
• Ros Bandt, “Glass & Clay”, evoking the distant past
• The Crossing, “Seven Responses” “will challenge artists and audiences alike to explore our relative distance from, or closeness to, music across centuries, cultures, and continents.”
• William Goldstein and Lawrence Juber, “Musings”
• Romina Lishka, Dorothee Mields and Hathor Consort, “Heinrich Albert’s Pumpkin Hut”, a whimsically titled album of vocal selections from the early 1600s, during the 30 Years War
• Catalyst Quartet, “Uncovered, Volume 2: Florence B. Price”: the composer’s heritage is foremost in these chamber works from an African-American composer of the middle twentieth century.
• Amaro Freitas, “Sankofa”. Freitas says: “The symbol of the mystical bird, which flies with its head back, teaches us the possibility of going back to our roots, in order to realize our potential to move forward. With this album I want to bring a memory of who we are and pay homage to neighborhoods, names, characters, places, words and symbols that come from our ancestors. I want to celebrate where we come from.”
• Armen Donelian, “Sayat-Nova: Songs of My Ancestors”: “Sayat-Nova . . . has long been recognized as one of the greatest poets and troubadours to emerge from the Caucasus region. . . . Armenian-American pianist Armen Donelian has prepared a deeply felt - and often strikingly beautiful - tribute to this distant master.”

Poetry

Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born, / Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother, /After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements, / Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas, / Or a soldier camp'd or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner in California, / Or rude in my home in Dakota's woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring, /. Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess, / Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy, Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of mighty Niagara, / Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull, / Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze, / Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk, / And heard at dawn the unrivall'd one, the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars, / Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.

[Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-92), Book II: Starting from Paumanok.]

Other poems:

• Pablo Neruda, “Lost in the Forest”
• Seamus Heaney, “Anahorish”
• John Keats, “Happy Is England”