RTP-area local music and culture

["Todd Morman" <tmorman AT nc.rr.com>]

> i'm trying to think of music written during wartime and under extreme
> duress (like a city under siege or something like that) and i can't
> think of anything. anybody know?

Great question. A quick google turned up
http://www.classicalnotes.net/columns/war.html, which includes cool tidbits:

"More pointed in intent and effect was Haydn's Missa in tempore belli (Mass
in Time of War), written in 1796 as Napoleon was advancing on Vienna, where
it was to be performed...Although in the normally carefree key of C major
and largely reflecting Haydn's irrepressible buoyancy, the opening and
closing sections are spiked with uncharacteristic (and, at the time,
sacrilegious) militaristic trumpet fanfares and tympani rolls...

"Dmitri Shostakovich wrote most of his 1941 Symphony # 7 in Leningrad during
the first two months of Nazi siege...The first movement depicts an attack;
in its infamous central episode a serene background is dispelled by a noisy
and annoying march that incessantly worms its way through the entire
orchestra with escalating intensity in a graceless and increasingly violent
bolero. While often criticized as far too long for its thin materials
(English critic Ernest Newman dubbed it as "so many degrees of longitude and
platitude"), its vapid, shrill persistence aptly suggests war's grueling
oppression..."

todd the last bit is good too morman