This afternoon I was introduced to William Grant Still's Poem for Orchestra while listening to KTEP, the NPR affiliate in El Paso, Texas. The piece evokes postwar Hollywood, and in response my brain projected a ten-and-a-half minute trailer on the inside of my head for some old black and white melodrama I've never seen, and only exists in the nostalgic vapors wafting up the nostrils of my imagination with each swell of music, complete with large captions like DANGER!, FOREIGN INTRIGUE!, and TRAGIC TEMPTATION WEARS A FEMALE MASK! splaying across the screen at visually-opportune moments.
In keeping with its silver screen aroma of yesteryear, Poem for Orchestra builds to a dark and cynical crescendo that cajoles my mind into seeing THE END in gigantic letters, with Filmed in Hollywood, U.S.A. in smaller script below, overlaying the final image depicting a denouement where most questions have been answered, and justice of a sort has been served, but with an evil little curl of smoke escaping from Pandora's Box before it is closed once again, portending moral accounts yet to be paid up.
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