Freedom From Fear

Contemporary American music for wind band continues to offer a rich combination of colour and variety. David Maslanka was one of the most prolific and admired of all wind band composers, and in Liberation he utilises plainchant in a moving exploration of death, the afterlife and the continuance of hope. Inspired by Walt Whitman, Aaron Perrines In the Open Air, In the Silent Lines creates a rich sense of space, while Kevin Walczyks moving Symphony No. 5: Freedom from Fear Images from the Shoreline is unified by its themes of adoption, segregation and immigration.

On October 24, 1929, America met the greatest economic devastation it had ever known. In this first installment of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from Fear, Kennedy tells how America endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of that unprecedented calamity.

Even as the New Deal was coping with the Depression, a new menace was developing abroad. Exploiting Germany's own economic burdens, Hitler reached out to the disaffected, turning their aimless discontent into loyal support for his Nazi Party. In Asia, Japan harbored imperial ambitions of its own. The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression eventually had to shoulder arms in another conflict that wreaked worldwide destruction, ushered in the nuclear age, and forever changed their way of life and their country's relationship to the rest of the world.