George Frederick McKay: Epoch - An American Dance Symphony

George Frederick McKay composed Epoch, which has lain forgotten for virtually seventy years, as ‘An American Dance Symphony’. This new art form was to express in colourful music, costumes and dance scenes, utilizing the latest techniques in lighting and stagecraft, the spirit of four great American poets: Edgar Allan Poe, Sidney Lanier, Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, as well as the flow of history through romantic, pastoral, pioneering and industrial episodes. Epoch was first performed in 1935 during the Great Depression, with severe social-political turmoil brewing on many fronts, and McKay’s music, like the 1927 silent movie Metropolis, warned of a dawning robotic and polluted modern industrial society, in contrast to a peaceful, natural existence. The lyrical Pastoral depicts idyllic nurturing hillsides, streams and bays, while Machine Age Blues expresses a dark prospective future, with explosive, sardonic mechanical fury.