Classical Music | Ensemble Music

Recorded on 10/06/2010, uploaded on 10/06/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Overture No. 2 in G Major, from Six Overtures in Seven Parts     Maurice Greene

"Doctor Greene has gone to the Devil!" Thus spoke Handel of his colleague, Dr. Maurice Greene, some of whose music will be heard on this evening's program. While it is thought that Handel and Greene had become estranged by the time Handel said this, indeed, the Devil in question was the eponymous tavern in London where a musical society met and heard music in the tavern's Apollo Room!

The ancient Greek deity, Apollo, has been associated in one form or another with music since antiquity. The son, in myth, of Leto and Zeus, Apollo was initially incorporated into the Greek pantheon by way of Asia Minor and he bore the epithet, "Lykeios." If one takes this to mean "Wolf-god," then Apollo might originally have been a god of shepherds—shepherds in mythology seem frequently to be playing upon instruments while minding their wooly charges, and this explains the deity's connection to music. In Homer's Iliad, he is the lyre-god who accompanies the song of the Muses, and by the 5^th century BCE, he came to be known as the most brilliant of the twelve Olympian gods. Apollo is also associated with all that is balanced, ordered and logical—Plato, for this reason, includes the kithara (lyre) in his list of "instruments of Apollo." For the Romans, Apollo embodied the most important criteria of music as a performing art—perhaps proof of this is his siring of the demi-god, Orpheus, the father of all musicians.