Ruggle's "Sun-treader"

Carl Ruggles, one of the most original voices in 20^th century American music, was a curmudgeonly man whose musical output totals just ten works, which he endlessly re-wrote and edited as close to perfection as he could.  His works, including Sun-treader, exhibit a freely evolving nontonal polyphony, through which he expressed his wish for freedom from the past.

Cowell's Piano Concerto

A native of Menlo Park, California, Henry Cowell is accredited with coining the term tone cluster, an effect he uses frequently in his Piano Concerto. Cowell specifies that the performer use the forearm or specially cut wooden sticks to play many adjacent notes at once, creating a dissonant cluster of sound.

Ives/Brant "A Concord Symphony"

Could the Great American Symphony, in fact, be a piano sonata by the great maverick composer Charles Ives? The composer Henry Brant, who also orchestrated music for Copland, spent most of his life orchestrating Ives’ great Concord Sonata into A Concord Symphony.

From the Archives: The de Waart Era

Edo de Waart (1941–) became the Symphony's music director in 1977 and saw the orchestra through two important transitions: the move to Davies Symphony Hall and the change from analog to digital recording technology. De Waart's tenure at the SFS is exhaustively documented via commercial recordings, broadcasts, and in-house archives. We'll hear the San Francisco Symphony undergo one of its most sweeping transformations, as it inaugurated Davies Symphony Hall with more than 20 new players.

Harrison Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra

Long-time Bay Area resident Lou Harrison was influenced by Eastern musical traditions. He and partner Bill Colvig built many of their own instruments, including an Indonesian gamelan. For his Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra, musicians perform on some of Harrison’s own specially created percussion instruments, most notably bells made out of oxygen tanks.

Mozart's Symphony No. 39

In the space of nine weeks in summer 1788, Mozart produced the last three of his symphonies, including Symphony No. 39. Started within a month after his opera Don Giovanni opened to a less than enthusiastic audience in Vienna, the symphony opens with a reflection on the opera’s overture.

From the Archives: The Ozawa Era

The Symphony returned to the recording studio in 1971 with Seiji Ozawa (1935–), first on Deutsche Grammophon, then on Philips. The Symphony began keeping recorded archives of its performances during Ozawa's tenure, thus preserving the sound of the Symphony in its day-to-day performances. We'll be hearing examples from those archives, together with commercial recordings and radio broadcasts.