War and Reconciliation

BIOGRAPHY

Theodore Morrison began composing at the age of forty-two, more than twenty years after he was well established as a conductor specializing in large works for voices and orchestra, as well as music for chamber orchestra. Over the past three decades he has composed an epic choral symphony and a number of other large works. He has created a substantial body of shorter pieces including an overture for wind ensemble, chamber works for woodwinds and strings, a sonata and a set of variations for organ, several works for chorus and organ, four song cycles, and many smaller choral pieces and songs. His music has been performed throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand.

Commissioned by the Choral Arts Society of Washington, the five-movement symphony War and Reconciliation on American Civil War poems by Walt Whitman was the most extensive of Morrison’s works prior to his opera Oscar. The piece is scored for large orchestra, tenor and baritone soloists with symphonic chorus, and was reviewed in The Baltimore Chronicle as “delicately sculptured with a decisively pungent harmonic language … (War and Reconciliation) wended its way from moments of great tranquility to the savage encounters of drum-beats, blaring brass, and choral forces driven to the ultimate in terms of dynamic nuances. There were moments of almost mystical beauty.”