Look Who it Was Random video

Naxos Backstage | Michael Daugherty on Tales of Hemingway's Literary Inspiration

1,700 views · Published 27 September 2016 · 3:21 · Indexed 4 November 2026

Channel: Naxos Music · 2016 · Music

Watch on YouTube

Tales of Hemingway for cello and orchestra was commissioned by the Nashville Symphony and a consortium consisting of: the Asheville Symphony, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the El Paso Symphony Orchestra, the Erie Philharmonic, , the Redwood Symphony, the South Florida Orchestra, and the Virginia Symphony. The world premiere was on April 17, 2015, with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero,with Zuill Bailey, solo cello, at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, Nashville, Tennessee.

Tales of Hemingway evokes the turbulent life, adventures, and literature of American author and journalist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).  His terse, direct, accessible writing style, combined with a mastery of dialogue and brilliant use of omission and repetition, made him one of the most influential and original writers of the 20th century. Hemingway’s distinctive body of work was also informed by his larger-than-life experiences. 

In his youth in Oak Park, Chicago, Hemingway was surrounded by music, where his mother was a prominent music teacher and he played the cello in school orchestras. Hemingway’s family owned a remote summer home on Walloon Lake near Petoskey, Michigan, where hunting, fishing, and camping were a family ritual. As an adult, Hemingway’s passion and expertise for deep-sea fishing in the Florida Keys and Cuba, big game hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, and boxing were legendary.

Hemingway experienced the horrors and ironies of war as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I (1918) and as a journalist on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War (1937) and World War II (1944-45).  In the 1920s, Hemingway was part of Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation” in Paris and haunted the bars and cafés with F. Scott Fitzgerald. During his lifetime, many of his works were made into Hollywood films, and his journalism and literature was syndicated in magazines and newspapers around the world, making Hemingway an international celebrity and a household name.

More from this channel