Hartford Symphony Orchestra - Beethoven’s Violin Concerto - Carlos Simon (Born April 13, 1986 in Atlanta, Georgia)

Carlos Simon (Born April 13, 1986 in Atlanta, Georgia)

Fate Now Conquers (2020)

World Premiere: October 8, 2020
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes with 1 doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Duration: 5 minutes

Carlos Simon was named Kennedy Center Composer-in-Residence in April 2021 and recently extended his tenure through the 2026-2027 season. Simon’s music was first heard at Kennedy Center in April 2018, when then Resident Composer Mason Bates included the string quartet An Elegy: A Cry from the Grave (2015), honoring the lives of shooting victims Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, in his “JFK Jukebox” series. The following year, Washington National Opera, as part of its American Opera Initiative, commissioned a one-act opera from Simon, and his Night Trip, with a libretto by Sandra Seaton, was premiered in January 2020. During his residency, Simon will compose and present music for the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera, act as an ambassador for new music, and participate in educational, social impact, community engagement, and major institutional initiatives. With the 2024-2025 season, Simon also begins a three-year tenure as Resident Composer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the first in the long history of that ensemble.

Carlos Simon, born in Atlanta in 1986, grew up playing organ at his father’s church, immersed himself in music in high school, earned degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College, and completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Evan Chambers and Grammy-winning composer Michael Daugherty. Simon also studied in Baden, Austria and at the Hollywood Music Workshop and New York University’s Film Scoring Summer Workshop. He taught at Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta before being appointed in 2019 to the faculty of Georgetown University, which also commissioned him to compose Requiem for the Enslaved, a multi-genre tribute to commemorate the 272 enslaved men, women and children sold by the University in 1838. Requiem for the Enslaved was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for its 2022 recording on Decca.

In addition to his opera, Simon has composed works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo voice, chorus, concert band and film, several of them on commissions from such noted organizations as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra; the gospel-influenced Amen! (2017) was commissioned by the University of Michigan Band in celebration of the university’s 200th anniversary. He has also performed as keyboardist with the Boston Pops, Jackson Symphony and St. Louis Symphony, toured Japan in 2018 under the sponsorship of the United States Embassy in Tokyo and US/Japan Foundation performing in some of the country’s most sacred temples and important concert venues, served as music director and keyboardist for Grammy Award-winner Jennifer Holliday, and appeared internationally with Grammy-nominated soul artist Angie Stone. Simon received the 2021 Medal of Excellence of the Sphinx Organization, which is dedicated to promoting and recognizing Black and Latinx classical music and musicians. His additional honors include the Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Award, Theodore Presser Foundation Award, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Award, fellowships from the Sundance Institute and Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music, and a residency at the 2021 Ojai Festival.

Fate Now Conquers was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra to pair with a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony on a concert in March 2020. That concert was postponed by the pandemic and the work was premiered digitally on October 8, 2020 under the direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Simon wrote of it, “Fate Now Conquers was inspired by a journal entry from Ludwig van Beethoven’s notebook written in 1815:

Iliad. The Twenty-Second Book
But Fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share
In my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit
And that some great deed shall beget that all lives shall inherit.

“Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, I have composed musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate — jolting stabs, coupled with an agitated groove with every persona; frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of free-flowing running passages depicting the uncertainty of life that hovers over us.

“We know that Beethoven strived to overcome many obstacles in his life and documented his aspirations to prevail, despite his ailments. Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from the Iliad, in the end it seems that Beethoven relinquished himself to fate. Fate now conquers.”