PROGRAM NOTES
AARON COPLAND
(1900-1990)
Quiet City
Born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five children, composer, composition teacher, writer, and, later in his career, conductor of his own and other American music, Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition incorporating elements of jazz and folk music. He was, and still is, often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers." Copland's musical journey began with piano lessons from his sister and later, formal instruction with Rubin Goldmark. He traveled to Paris where he studied at first with Isidor Philipp and Paul Vidal, then with noted pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He studied with Boulanger for three years, from 1921-1924, and her eclectic approach to music inspired his own broad taste in that area. Upon his return to the U.S., he was determined to make his way as a full-time composer.
His First Symphony was premiered in 1925 by the New York Symphony Orchestra under conductor Walter Damrosch, who expressed his feelings about Copland's work by saying, "If a young man (age 25) can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder." A few months later, in Boston, Serge Koussevitsky conducted the premiere of Copland's jazzy Music for the Theater … and his career was solidly under way. In the mid-1930s, Copland adopted a more accessible, utilitarian musical style that still fulfilled artistic needs and expression.
During the late 1940s, Copland felt a need to compose works of greater emotional substance than his utilitarian scores. Though not enamored with the prospect, his activities turned from composition to conducting in the 1960s, when he found himself without new ideas for composition. "It was exactly as if someone had simply turned off a faucet." He became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U.S. and U.K. as well as making a series of recordings of his music. Copland's career also included teaching at the The Juilliard School and Harvard University, and writing on music which helped shape the understanding of American music.
In 1936, Copland began to change his style, concentrating on folk themes. He wrote music for high school musicians, An Outdoor Overture being a prime example, before moving on to ballets on American themes, such as Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944). Among the many awards Copland received included an Oscar for Best Dramatic Film Score for The Heiress (1949), the Pulitzer Prize for Appalachian Spring (1944), the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Johnson, and the National Medal of Arts (1986).
Copland's last public appearance was at an Aaron Copland Day celebration at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts on July 24, 1985. Leonard Bernstein conducted the center's student orchestra in the Third Symphony. Copland died after a lengthy illness, in North Tarrytown, New York, on December 2, 1990, at the age of 90.
For a 1941 Boston Symphony performance, Copland wrote: “In the Spring of 1939 I was asked by my friend, Harold Clurman, director of the Group Theatre, to supply the incidental musical score for a new play by Irwin Shaw, author of Bury the Dead, Gentle People, and other dramas his new opus was entitled Quiet City, and was a realistic fantasy concerning the night-thoughts of many different kinds of people in a great city. It called for music evocative of the nostalgia and inner distress of a society profoundly aware of its own insecurity. The author's mouthpiece was a young trumpet player called David Mellnikoff, whose trumpet playing helped to arouse the conscience of his fellow-players and of the audience. The play was given two 'try-out' performances in New York on successive Sunday evenings in April of 1939, and then withdrawn for revisions. Several friends urged me to make use of some of the thematic material used in my [stage] score as the basis for an orchestral piece. This is what I did in the summer of 1940, as soon as my duties at the Berkshire Music Center were finished. I borrowed the name, the trumpet, and some of the themes from the original play. The addition of English horn and string orchestra (I was limited to clarinet, saxophone, piano, plus the trumpet of course, in the stage version), and the form of the piece as a whole, was the result of work in a barn-studio two miles down the road from Tanglewood. The orchestration was completed in late September, and the score dedicated to Ralph Hawkes, junior member of the London firm of Boosey and Hawkes, who published the composition recently.”
According to Copland, the piece was "an attempt to mirror the troubled main character of Irwin Shaw's play", who had abandoned his Jewishness and his poetic aspirations in order to pursue material success by anglicizing his name, marrying a rich socialite, and becoming the president of a department store. The man, however, was continually recalled to his conscience by the haunting sound of his brother's trumpet playing. Continuing the assessment in his own autobiography, Copland observed that "Quiet City seems to have become a musical entity, superseding the original reasons for its composition."
Quiet City was premiered on January 28, 1941 by conductor Daniel Saidenberg and the Saidenberg Little Symphony in New York City.
SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR
(1875-1912)
Ballade in a minor, opus 33
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s musical talent was recognized early and supported by a series of patrons who assisted him in completing his composition studies at London’s Royal College of Music. While still a student, his Clarinet Quintet (1895) achieved critical praise and a performance in Berlin by the famous Joseph Joachim Quartet. After graduation, Coleridge-Taylor was appointed a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and conducted the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire. In 1899 Taylor married a fellow student at the RCM, Jessie Walmisley, despite her parents' objection to his mixed-race parentage (his mother was English and his father a “Sierra Leonean Creole”). They had a son Hiawatha (1900–1980) and a daughter Avril (1903–1998), who became a conductor-composer in her own right.
His first break came when Edward Elgar suggested Coleridge-Taylor for a commission from the prestigious Three Choirs Festival to be held at Gloucester in 1898. The performance there of his attractive orchestral Ballade in a minor proved a decisive hit while demonstrating a ready assimilation of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and, above all, Dvořák. The premiere of his Hiawatha's Wedding Feast for chorus and orchestra in a concert at the Royal College of Music on November 11, 1898, launched what may be said to have been a cataclysmic success, with performances following rapidly in England, the United States, Canada, and in venues as unlikely as New Zealand and South Africa. Commissions and invitations to conduct poured in. 1905 saw the publication of Twenty-four Negro Melodies for piano that featured a long, glowing preface by Booker T. Washington. The final years of Coleridge-Taylor's brief life saw continued spontaneity in his compositions but with a new deftness. Significant late works include the cantata Bon-bon Suite (1909), the Petite Suite de concert (1910), and the Violin Concerto. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was 37 when he died of pneumonia a few days after collapsing at West Croydon railway station. He was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington, Surrey.
Ultimately, Coleridge-Taylor made three tours of the United States, each of which increased his interest in his racial heritage. In 1904, he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a very unusual honor in those days for a man of African descent and appearance. Coleridge-Taylor was greatly admired by African Americans, even earing the title "the African Mahler" from the white orchestral musicians in New York in 1910.
A year after graduating from the Royal College of Music, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor received a commission from the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester in 1896 with the premiere taking place two years later. Initially offered to Sir Edward Elgar, the senior composer suggested his protégé, writing: "I have received a request from the secretary to write a short orchestra thing for the evening concert. I am sorry, I am too busy to do so (he was about to compose the Enigma Variations). I wish, wish, wish you would ask Coleridge-Taylor to do it. He is far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men.” The resulting Ballade in a minor is a work that is full of youthful vigor (the composer was 23) − compact, urgent, confident, and dramatic. The composer Sir Arthur Sullivan happened to be the in the audience at the premiere and noted that he was “much impressed by the lad’s genius. He is a composer, not a music-maker. The music is fresh and original; he has melody and harmony in abundance and his scoring is brilliant and full of color, luscious, rich and sensual.’’
AARON COPLAND
(1900-1990)
Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson
The poems of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) have been described as passionate, astute, and concentrated, among many other descriptors. Consequently, many consider her as important a figure in Western literature as William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen. In total, she wrote around 1,800 poems (though only 10 were published during her lifetime), and these works abound with lyricism, rhythmic vigor, and rich imagery and often refer to music and to the sounds around her – so it is not surprising that her poems have frequently been set to music. She remained shrouded by obscurity for most of her lifetime with Nature and the sciences firing her imagination as a student at Amherst College. Returning home after completing her education, Emily resented the social visits she was expected to make as a member of a prominent family and became increasingly withdrawn. Most of her friendships were conducted by letter and she would often speak to visitors through a closed door. Essentially a recluse, she left Amherst on only three occasions during her life.
It was only after her death at the age of 55, from what her physician diagnosed as Bright’s Disease, that her sister, Lavinia, found 40 hand-sewn manuscript books crammed with Emily’s writings. Her first volume of poems was published in 1890, four years after her death. The literary critic Helen Vendler summarized Dickinson’s endless variety and invention saying, “She is epigrammatic, terse, abrupt, surprising, unsettling, flirtatious, savage, winsome, metaphysical, provocative, blasphemous, tragic, funny – and the list of adjectives could be extended since we have almost 1,800 poems to draw on.”
In 1949–1950, Copland composed 12 songs for voice & piano to poems by Dickinson. The composer recalled, “The first lines absolutely threw me: ‘Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me – / The carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.’” He went on to write that "Her poetry, written in isolation, was folklike, with irregular meters and stanzas and many unconventional devices." While working on the songs, Copland visited Dickinson’s home in Amherst and stood by the small writing table in her bedroom, “to see what she saw out of that window.” He assigned the first line of each poem as the song title, since Dickinson had not written a title for any of the pieces with the sole exception being "The Chariot” (one of the few works that Dickinson saw published during her lifetime).
In 1958, Copland began to arrange the 12 songs for voice and orchestra, but didn’t finish until 1970, and even then, had only completed eight of the original twelve. He did complete them in time for the premiere performance, which coincided with his 70th birthday, on November 14, 1970 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with soloist Gwendolyn Killebrew and the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.
Howard HANSON
(1896-1981)
Symphony No. 2, Op. 30 ("Romantic")
Howard Hanson was among the first twentieth century American composers to achieve widespread prominence. Unlike most of his colleagues, Hanson wrote in an unabashedly Romantic idiom influenced by his Nordic roots, particularly noting the importance of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957).
Born in Wahoo, Nebraska, Hanson studied the piano before attending the School of Music at Luther College (Decorah, Iowa), the Institute of Musical Art in New York City, and Northwestern University. In 1921, he became the first American to win the Prix de Rome, for his tone poem Before the Dawn. This provided him with the opportunity to study with Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), whose colorful orchestral language was clearly an influence on Hanson's own. During his two-year stay in the Italian capital, he completed his Symphony No. 1, “Nordic,” which premiered in Rochester, N.Y., in 1923 and brought him to the attention of George Eastman, founder of the famous school of music there. Eastman invited Hanson to become the school’s director, a post he served for four decades with seemingly limitless energy and commitment. While there, Hanson continued to compose prolifically while also embarking on a career as a conductor. His most characteristic works are undoubtedly his seven symphonies but he also composed The Lament for Beowulf for chorus and orchestra, the opera Merry Mount, and a variety of other chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Hanson died at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York at the age of 84.
Hanson was a major force in American music. Although he was very conservative in his own work, he promoted the work of young composers whose styles varied widely. As artistic director of a music festival in Rochester, he was responsible for the performance of over one thousand works by six hundred composers whose music might never have been heard without his support.
Perhaps Hanson described his music best when he portrayed it as metaphorically "springing from the soil of the American Midwest. It is music of the plains rather than of the city and reflects, I believe, something of the broad prairies of my native Nebraska."
The Symphony No.2 “Romantic” was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and was first performed in 1930. The symphony abounds with an ebb and flow alternation between contrasts: tension and release, familiarity and surprise, heroism and lyricism, melancholy and joy. Even the overall structure reflects this alternation: the first and third movements are powerful and dramatic while the middle andante movement is a lyrical repose. The three movements are tied together by the recurrence of themes, and each movement alternates between the dramatic and the lyric presentations of those themes. The evocation of moods and feelings are at the heart of this symphony in particular and Hanson’s music in general.
Hanson did not approve of the Neo-Classical tendencies of his contemporaries and, as if the title "Romantic" for his second symphony were not sufficiently direct, he made the following statement at its premiere:
“The symphony represents for me my escape from the rather bitter type of modern musical realism which occupies so large a place in contemporary thought. Much contemporary music seems to me to be showing a tendency to become entirely too cerebral. I do not believe that music is primarily a matter of intellect, but rather a manifestation of the emotions. I have, therefore, aimed in this symphony to create a work that was young in spirit, lyrical and romantic in temperament, and simply and direct in expression.”
OF NOTE:
The "lyrical, haunting second theme" of the first movement has become known as the "Interlochen Theme” as it is performed at the conclusion of most public performances at the Interlochen Arts Camp.
Hanson was displeased that a theme from the Second Symphony was used for the closing credits of Ridley Scott’s Alien without his permission, but decided not to fight it in court