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19 July 2019. The day this piece of music is first heard by an audience!

Our Classical Century ends at the beginning: sounds that are so young, so fresh, so completely new that they have yet to fully enter the world. The world premiere of this work was at the First Night of the Proms 2019.

This piece is called Long Is the Journey, Short Is the Memory, and it’s by Zosha Di Castri, a composer from Alberta who studied in Montreal and New York and now teaches at Columbia University. Di Castri draws from electronics, sound art, video and dance. Her new piece commemorates one of the most important moments of the past 100 years: the Moon Landings.

Di Castri's piece brings Our Classical Century full circle. We began in 1918 with The Planets – Gustav Holst’s epic and mysterious orchestral summation of the thrill and terror of interplanetary exploration. Over the past year, we’ve charted brave new worlds of sound: the screeching sirens of Varèse's Amériques and the swaggering street life of Duke Ellington’s Harlem. We’ve heard how music made sense of war, or at least provided solace, with musicians from Leningrad to London performing despite the air raids, despite the blitz, because they couldn’t stop.

We’ve seen the founding of proud opera companies, the opening of grand new halls, the reach of cmusic to audiences of many millions, thanks to advances in radio, television, recording and device technologies. We’ve seen genre boundaries blur, shift and sidestep. We’ve seen music forge ahead against backdrops of social and political upheaval, and we've seen how audiences along the way have rioted and roared with outrage and acclaim. Most of all, we’ve seen how much new music has mattered over our past classical century. So here’s to the next.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by Â鶹Éç Radio 3’s Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a Â鶹Éç season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an archive recording of the world premiere of of Zosha di Castri's Long Is the Journey, Short Is the Memory, performed by the Â鶹Éç Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with conductor Karina Canellakis on 19 July 2019 at the First Night of the Proms.

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