July 3, 2009
One of my favorite blogging things to do for the Fourth is create an all-American playlist that I try to adhere to during the day. While one of our country’s most important exports is our popular music, the United States has a tremendous and marvelous corpus of classical music that rarely gets the attention it deserves.
There are historical reasons for that, such as the rise of a music-loving public with leisure in the years when German musical culture was at its most influential, and the heritage of the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven tradition remains a major part of our classical music. But American composers made something new out of those models, and it’s my hope that one day most of our concert halls will feature American music as a matter of course rather than making us all wait for major holidays.
Until then, I’ll offer up a few pieces that I’ll have on my various players tomorrow. These pieces are quite Romantic for the most part; that’s the mood that appeals to me this year:
1. William Grant Still, Symphony No. 2 (Song of a New Race). (Neeme Jarvi/Detroit SO; Chandos 9226; 1993) This piece has become a staple of my Independence Day soundtrack, and every time I hear it, I can’t for the life of me understand why Still isn’t recognized as the major American composer he was. Doubtless infrequent performances have the most to do with that, but give this symphony a listen and then start badgering your local conductor.
It reminds me of Dvorak and Schubert in its liveliness, color and ease of expression, and Still strikes me as the only other American art-music composer besides George Gershwin to have so successfully melded the worlds of pop and classical. It’s a lovely piece, full of good tunes in fine orchestral dress, and completely accessible to every audience. Unlike many other leading American composers whose work requires hundreds of pages of program notes to explicate, Still speaks with no less skill and sophistication, but much more directly. The neglect of this well-wrought, attractive work, as well as Still’s music in general, is a scandal.
2. Samuel Barber, Violin Concerto, Op. 14 (Hilary Hahn/St. Paul Chamber Orch, dir. Wolff; Sony SK 89029; 2000). When it comes to concerti, Americans write lots of them, but there are only a handful that have entered the repertory with any frequency: Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Gershwin’s Concerto in F for piano, and the Bernstein Serenade, which is a violin concerto in everything but name. But it is the Barber Violin Concerto that is perhaps the finest of all of them, and it makes an eloquent case for Barber’s very conservative but lovely aesthetic.
From the opening bars to the moto perpetuo finish, this piece never fails to win over an audience, and I’ve seen it played less than spectacularly on a couple occasions. Barber’s melodies here are some of his finest, beginning with an unforgettable inspiration in the opening bars that is immediately appealing and gets topped only by the ravishing slow movement. It’s now a classic of the literature, but it still needs to be heard more often in regular concerts; perhaps next year’s Barber centenary will provide the impetus.
3. Howard Hanson: Laude and other pieces. (John Boyd/Philharmonia a Vent; Klavier 11158; 2006). The wind band is the original American concert ensemble, the performing group at whose hands most Americans of earlier generations heard great European orchestral music as well as their own native pieces. Who knows how many Americans only ever heard something like the ballet music from Gounod’s Faust in wind-band guise?
Plenty, is the answer, and this year I’m including one all-wind disc for the Fourth, because here, too, is a woefully underappreciated musical category at which Americans have excelled for more than a century. Howard Hanson, whose Second Symphony is hanging on for dear life at the far fringes of the repertory, represents not just a late-Romantic tradition but also the church tradition of the Midwest.
The states of the upper Midwest in particular have deep ties to the Lutheran Church and Scandinavia, and Hanson, the son of Swedish immigrants to Nebraska, was deeply attached to the religious music of his youth. This fine all-Hanson disc on Boca Raton’s Klavier label, featuring the Indiana State University Philharmonia a Vent, contains the title work, Laude, along with director John Boyd’s transcription of the suite from Hanson’s lone opera, Merry Mount.
4. William Schuman, New England Triptych (Jose Serebrier/Bournemouth SO; Naxos 8.559083; 2000) Not a surprising choice, perhaps: This is the one piece by which this estimable composer and educator is remembered today. But it remains an exciting listen for the way Schuman infuses the music of the early Boston choirmaster William Billings with something astringently 20th-century that nevertheless respects its archaic character.
The second movement, the poignant When Jesus Wept, has an intimate beauty that’s easy to associate with a dark, frosty day in New England, where I lived for a couple years as a music student in Boston, and this movement always takes me back there. The closing movement, Chester, the best-known of the three, also makes its point with relative restraint, even though the composer brings plenty of brass and drums to bear on his argument. In its clarity, precision and harmonic profile it reminds me of Hindemith, but without losing its distinctive American flavor.
5. Shenandoah, arr. Marshall Bartholomew and James Erb (Chanticleer/A Portrait; Teldec 0927 49702-2; 2003). This most achingly gorgeous of all American folksongs gets a slightly fussy arrangement at the hands of Bartholomew and Erb in this performance by the San Francisco-based male choir Chanticleer, but that’s a quibbling.
There’s nothing that will shut up a crowd and bring it to attention more reliably than a beautiful tune like this, with its sad, desolate lyrics and plush harmonic setting perfectly performed, as it is here. There’s a lot of debate over what the song actually is about, but I go along with the school of thought that maintains it’s originally a sea chantey of the early 19th century sung by men working the rivers of the west and dreaming of home in Virginia.
It also works for me as a Civil War song, sort of, but ultimately for me it’s about the love of a place where you no longer are, but a place you had to leave to make your way in the world. That, it seems to me, is much of what the American story is, and perhaps that’s why it usually reduces me to a shuddering, sobbing wreck.
Best wishes for a wonderful Fourth of July to one and all.
One of my favorite blogging things to do for the Fourth is create an all-American playlist that I try to adhere to during the day. While one of our country’s most important exports is our popular music, the United States has a tremendous and marvelous corpus of classical music that rarely gets the attention it deserves.
There are historical reasons for that, such as the rise of a music-loving public with leisure in the years when German musical culture was at its most influential, and the heritage of the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven tradition remains a major part of our classical music. But American composers made something new out of those models, and it’s my hope that one day most of our concert halls will feature American music as a matter of course rather than making us all wait for major holidays.
Until then, I’ll offer up a few pieces that I’ll have on my various players tomorrow. These pieces are quite Romantic for the most part; that’s the mood that appeals to me this year:
1. William Grant Still, Symphony No. 2 (Song of a New Race). (Neeme Jarvi/Detroit SO; Chandos 9226; 1993) This piece has become a staple of my Independence Day soundtrack, and every time I hear it, I can’t for the life of me understand why Still isn’t recognized as the major American composer he was. Doubtless infrequent performances have the most to do with that, but give this symphony a listen and then start badgering your local conductor.
It reminds me of Dvorak and Schubert in its liveliness, color and ease of expression, and Still strikes me as the only other American art-music composer besides George Gershwin to have so successfully melded the worlds of pop and classical. It’s a lovely piece, full of good tunes in fine orchestral dress, and completely accessible to every audience. Unlike many other leading American composers whose work requires hundreds of pages of program notes to explicate, Still speaks with no less skill and sophistication, but much more directly. The neglect of this well-wrought, attractive work, as well as Still’s music in general, is a scandal.
2. Samuel Barber, Violin Concerto, Op. 14 (Hilary Hahn/St. Paul Chamber Orch, dir. Wolff; Sony SK 89029; 2000). When it comes to concerti, Americans write lots of them, but there are only a handful that have entered the repertory with any frequency: Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Gershwin’s Concerto in F for piano, and the Bernstein Serenade, which is a violin concerto in everything but name. But it is the Barber Violin Concerto that is perhaps the finest of all of them, and it makes an eloquent case for Barber’s very conservative but lovely aesthetic.
From the opening bars to the moto perpetuo finish, this piece never fails to win over an audience, and I’ve seen it played less than spectacularly on a couple occasions. Barber’s melodies here are some of his finest, beginning with an unforgettable inspiration in the opening bars that is immediately appealing and gets topped only by the ravishing slow movement. It’s now a classic of the literature, but it still needs to be heard more often in regular concerts; perhaps next year’s Barber centenary will provide the impetus.
3. Howard Hanson: Laude and other pieces. (John Boyd/Philharmonia a Vent; Klavier 11158; 2006). The wind band is the original American concert ensemble, the performing group at whose hands most Americans of earlier generations heard great European orchestral music as well as their own native pieces. Who knows how many Americans only ever heard something like the ballet music from Gounod’s Faust in wind-band guise?
Plenty, is the answer, and this year I’m including one all-wind disc for the Fourth, because here, too, is a woefully underappreciated musical category at which Americans have excelled for more than a century. Howard Hanson, whose Second Symphony is hanging on for dear life at the far fringes of the repertory, represents not just a late-Romantic tradition but also the church tradition of the Midwest.
The states of the upper Midwest in particular have deep ties to the Lutheran Church and Scandinavia, and Hanson, the son of Swedish immigrants to Nebraska, was deeply attached to the religious music of his youth. This fine all-Hanson disc on Boca Raton’s Klavier label, featuring the Indiana State University Philharmonia a Vent, contains the title work, Laude, along with director John Boyd’s transcription of the suite from Hanson’s lone opera, Merry Mount.
4. William Schuman, New England Triptych (Jose Serebrier/Bournemouth SO; Naxos 8.559083; 2000) Not a surprising choice, perhaps: This is the one piece by which this estimable composer and educator is remembered today. But it remains an exciting listen for the way Schuman infuses the music of the early Boston choirmaster William Billings with something astringently 20th-century that nevertheless respects its archaic character.
The second movement, the poignant When Jesus Wept, has an intimate beauty that’s easy to associate with a dark, frosty day in New England, where I lived for a couple years as a music student in Boston, and this movement always takes me back there. The closing movement, Chester, the best-known of the three, also makes its point with relative restraint, even though the composer brings plenty of brass and drums to bear on his argument. In its clarity, precision and harmonic profile it reminds me of Hindemith, but without losing its distinctive American flavor.
5. Shenandoah, arr. Marshall Bartholomew and James Erb (Chanticleer/A Portrait; Teldec 0927 49702-2; 2003). This most achingly gorgeous of all American folksongs gets a slightly fussy arrangement at the hands of Bartholomew and Erb in this performance by the San Francisco-based male choir Chanticleer, but that’s a quibbling.
There’s nothing that will shut up a crowd and bring it to attention more reliably than a beautiful tune like this, with its sad, desolate lyrics and plush harmonic setting perfectly performed, as it is here. There’s a lot of debate over what the song actually is about, but I go along with the school of thought that maintains it’s originally a sea chantey of the early 19th century sung by men working the rivers of the west and dreaming of home in Virginia.
It also works for me as a Civil War song, sort of, but ultimately for me it’s about the love of a place where you no longer are, but a place you had to leave to make your way in the world. That, it seems to me, is much of what the American story is, and perhaps that’s why it usually reduces me to a shuddering, sobbing wreck.
Best wishes for a wonderful Fourth of July to one and all.
