Donald Joyce

One of the outstanding problems of the biologist, whether he be beginning student or specialists, is that of understanding technical terms. The best way to understand and remember technical terms is to understand first their component parts, or roots.

Stabbings, shootings, genocide, torture, abduction, robbery, serial killing and mass suicide are just a few of the horrific crimes explored in Great Crimes and Trials. True stories carefully researched and reconstructed with actual archive footage. Cases which have become almost legendary in the annals of crime and detection.

But Yesterday is Not Today is a survey of the American art song over a period of almost fifty years. Eight composers are represented here, the well known (Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles, and Roger Sessions) and the not-so-famous (Theodore Chanler, John Duke, Israel Citkowitz, and Robert Helps). The choice of composers and songs illustrates the variety and vitality of a genre that in a previous generation could count among its exponents Leontyne Price, Phyllis Curtin, and Jennie Tourel. The songs encompass the broadest spectrum of emotions couched in musical language that mirrors their joy, sorrow, sadness, nostalgia, and humor. They are sensitively interpreted by two of the genre’s most authoritative exponents, baritone Donald Gramm and soprano Bethany Beardslee. The accompanying 32-page program booklet by Ned Rorem contains one of the best available essays on American song as well as brief critiques of the composers and the songs, all written in his lucid and elegant style.