Description

The Gospel of Beauty for Solo Piano (2019)

I. Church of the Open Sky
II. Too late, too late to enter that golden gate
III. Walking into Kansas

For Kuang-Hao Huang

Duration: 27 min.

World Premiere: Kuang-Hao Huang, piano, October 30, 2019, Ganz Hall, Chicago.

Full Performance:

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THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY

Being the new “creed of a beggar” by that vain and foolish mendicant Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, printed for his personal friends in his home village—Springfield, Illinois. It is his intention to carry this gospel across the country beginning June, 1912, returning in due time.

I

I come to you penniless and afoot, to bring a message. I am starting a new religious idea. The idea does not say “no” to any creed that you have heard…. After this, let the denomination to which you now belong be called in your heart “the church of beauty” or “the church of the open sky.” … The church of beauty has two sides: the love of beauty and the love of God.[16]

II
THE NEW LOCALISM

The things most worth while are one’s own hearth and neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful and the holiest in the world. The children now growing up should become devout gardeners or architects or park architects or teachers of dancing in the Greek spirit or musicians or novelists or poets or story-writers or craftsmen or wood-carvers or dramatists or actors or singers. They should find their talent and nurse it industriously. They should believe in every possible application to art-theory of the thoughts of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. They should, if led by the spirit, wander over the whole nation in search of the secret of democratic beauty with their hearts at the same time filled to [17]overflowing with the righteousness of God. Then they should come back to their own hearth and neighborhood and gather a little circle of their own sort of workers about them and strive to make the neighborhood and home more beautiful and democratic and holy with their special art…. They should labor in their little circle expecting neither reward nor honors…. In their darkest hours they should be made strong by the vision of a completely beautiful neighborhood and the passion for a completely democratic art. Their reason for living should be that joy in beauty which no wounds can take away, and that joy in the love of God which no crucifixion can end.

— Vachel Lindsay