A Tully Recital Inspired by World War I

Horrific as war is, it has often inspired art. Four years ago, at the centennial of the beginning of World War I, Peter Dugan (BM ’11, MM ’14, piano) and John Brancy (BM ’11, Graduate Diploma ’13, voice) made their professional debut as recitalists with A Silent Night: A WWI Memorial in Song concert at the Kennedy Center (and then a tour and a recording). Now, in time for the 100th anniversary of the end of that war, the two are premiering another concert, this one called Armistice: The Journey Home. The first outing will be as the 20th annual Alice Tully Vocal Arts Recital on April 5.

Brancy and Dugan recently spoke about their plans. “For the Silent Night concert we wanted to do something relevant that would resonate at a deeper social level; and it also made sense to honor all this great music and poetry and amazing stories of composers who’d fought in the war,” Dugan said. “And now here we are four years later approaching the end of the centennial—we wanted to do something that was still related to our earlier program but with a different spin.”

One inspiration for the upcoming concert was a letter that composer Ralph Vaughan Williams—who was 41 when the war broke out but volunteered anyway—wrote his friend Gustav Holst, who was about the same age but was rejected when he tried to enlist. “The letter said that he misses home but he also dreads the thought of returning to normal life,” Dugan said. “It summed up what we’re trying to explore with this program—that longing for something normal, beautiful, good while having to come to terms with all the atrocities you’ve witnessed.” This concert, Dugan added, is “less about the war and more about timeless themes of searching for meaning and peace.”

In addition to works by Vaughan Williams and Holst, they’ll perform a set of songs by Schubert and a promising young composer named Rudi Stephan, who was killed while fighting for Germany in 1915. The pairing, Dugan noted, “sets up this multigenerational effect that shows these themes aren’t limited to World War I.”

The multigenerational effect will be in evidence more literally when the duo performs Leonardo Dugan’s (Peter’s brother) setting of the well-known WWI poem “I Have a Rendezvous With Death.” It was written by a New Yorker named Alan Seeger, who died in the battle of the Somme in 1916. Alan’s brother, musicologist Charles Seeger, was on the faculty of the Institute for Musical Art, Juilliard’s predecessor institution, from 1921 to 1933. Charles and his first wife, Constance (faculty 1921-24) had several children; the youngest was Pete Seeger, who would become one of the world’s foremost folk singers. The duo will perform his iconic antiwar song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” as the concert poses the question, Dugan said, “Will we ever be able to get to a point where war doesn’t keep happening?”

The tour will include stops at various colleges and other venues around the country and wind up at the Kennedy Center on November 12, the day after the 100th anniversary of the armistice.