In addition to my teaching and my own compositional work, I am currently involved in a project dealing with the music of Zemlinsky. As he's on my mind these days, and it's been nearly 9 years since he last came around on the CCM, I thought we'd revisit him this month.

The recording here includes one of Zemlinsky's most famous works, his Lyric Symphony, but I thought I'd use a much less-known work for this month's sample, the Symphonic Songs, op. 20. The work is wonderful, but strange. Influenced by jazz, but showing little in the way of obvious musical reference to it, Zemlinsky is presenting his interpretation on a fad which was sweeping through Germany and Austria at the time: a fascination with African-American poetry. (This in 1929, decades before the sounds of Robert Johnson, et al., will stir the imagination of a generation of British rockers). Here, Zemlinsky sets, in translation, moving poems by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Frank Horne. Not insignificantly, the recording itself (beautifully brought to life by the powerful voice of Sir Willard White) is part of a series of recordings under the theme, "Entartete Musik", that is "Degenerate Music" – music which was suppressed by the Nazis. Alas, Zemlinsky was only one of many whose wonderful music suffered this fate.

Enjoy this month's clip, as Hughes, through Zemlinsky, ruminates on being a "Bad Man."