North Shore Symphony Orchestra

Program Notes For June 7th, 2008

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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM

 

Concert March: “The Thunderer”

by John Philip Sousa (born on November 6, 1864, in  Washington, D. C.; died on March 6, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania)

Sousa was born in Washington, D. C.; his grandparents were Portuguese immigrants, and his father played trombone in the U. S. Marine Band.  So wholeheartedly did Sousa père enjoy his job that when his son was thirteen he enlisted him in the Marine Band also, as an apprentice.  Young John had started out playing the violin, and playing it very well, but in the course of a few years he had learned how to play all the wind instruments as well.

A bit later, he left his apprenticeship to join a theater orchestra, where he learned the rudiments of conducting.  Thenceforth, he was never without some kind of ensemble to conduct, usually a concert band.  One of these, known simply as “The Sousa Band,” was selected to represent the United States at the Paris Exposition in 1900, when its members marched in parade up and down the Champs Elysées from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, winning the hearts of the thousands upon thousands of eager visitors to the French capital.  He became a connoisseur of cheese, and he always called attention to the fact that in those months he had learned to know and enjoy many of the 332 kinds of cheese manufactured in France (which reminds us of the late Charles de Gaulle, who wondered, “How can you possibly impose unity on a country that has 300 kinds of cheese?” (This was in 1962.)

All his life Sousa composed music; many marches, of course, but also operas, operettas, and school songs.  Several of the operas have been successfully revived, among them the 1909 Glass Blowers which was produced at Glimmerglass several seasons ago; Désirée, dating from 1883, and El Capitan, from 1896, were both recorded a few years ago and highly praised by reviewers who compared them favorably to Jacques Offenbach and Franz Lehar.

Bur of course it was his marches that achieved for him his most lasting fame.  Indeed, he is affectionately known as “the March King” just as Johann Strauss, Jr., is known as “the Waltz King..”  In all he wrote more than 140 of them (a few of which were never published, inexplicably), and The Thunderer, which we hear this evening, has always been among the most popular.  It seems to have been composed in 1889, right after The Washington Post but before The Liberty Bell in 1893 and The Stars and Stripes Forever in 1896.   

Starting with a dramatic opening in which the treble line goes upwards, mostly in half-steps, as the bass line goes downward similarly, the first of two main themes struts gaily, bright with trills and upward leaps, while the second is more martial, with the trumpets very much to the fore.  The Trio  is as sonorous as a chorale, and just as impressive, truly one of Sousa’s most inspired melodies.

Besides devoting himself to music, Sousa also wrote five novels and an immensely readable autobiography, Marching Along, as well as poetry and short stories.  He devoted much time to Freemasonry (like Mozart) and was an ardent trap-shooter, once saying, “The sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘Pull,” the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect tune and time announces the result: ‘Dead.’”

He was always deeply suspicious of the recording art.  Before a congressional committee, in 1906, he argued that “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country..” He called phonographs “infernal machines” and predicted that the human vocal cord would disappear as a matter of evolution because it was not being used enough and “young people don’t sing any more.”  For years he would not conduct on the radio, either, though when he finally did, in 1929, he had a huge success.  In 1952, Twentieth Century Fox made a film based on his life, Stars and Stripes Forever, with Clifton Webb playing Sousa and Alfred Newman arranging the music from Sousa scores.

 

Bugler’s Holiday

by Leroy Anderson (born on June 29, 1908, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; died on May 18, 1975, in Woodbury, Connecticut)

Anderson will always be associated with the Boston Pops Orchestra.  When he was a student at Harvard University, he was already achieving success with his arrangements for dance bands around Boston, and Arthur Fiedler asked the young man to show him what kind of work he did.  In 1938 he wrote Jazz Pizzicato especially for Fiedler and the Pops, and it was such a success that Fiedler asked him for an encore, Jazz Legato.

When World War II intervened, Anderson continued to compose, in addition to his army work as a translator and intelligence officer.  In 1945 he composed a couple of his most successful tunes in a youthful career full of successes, Syncopated Clock and Promenade.   Blue Tango, whose recording, by the Pops, sold more than a million copies, was a product of 1951, when he was  recalled to active duty in Korea.

Perhaps his single most successful work, Sleigh Ride, is today considered a Christmas tune, but in fact he began working on it during a heat wave in August.  His Syncopated Clock was picked up as the theme song for CBS’s The Late Show, and the great Mitchell Parish added words to it, as he had done for Hoagy Carmichael’s Star Dust and, later, Peter de Rose’s Deep Purple, as well as a number of other Anderson tunes, such as Blue Tango and Syncopated Clock.

Anderson became a frequent guest conductor of the Boston Pops, and very often Fiedler would show up, too, and sit on the sidelines.  When Anderson was conducting The Typewriter, which the orchestra could play in its sleep, he liked to put on a green eyeshade, reporter style, and roll up his sleeves as he mimed pounding away on an old-fashioned typewriter, always ostentatiously returning the carriage as was so unmistakably mirrored in the music itself. 

Bugler’s Holiday, composed in 1954, is designed to give show-off parts for three solo trumpets, though the piece’s energy and zippiness give the effect of a dozen instrumentalists playing away for dear life, the individual parts are not nearly as difficult at difficult as they sound.  If this is a “holiday,” it is certainly a peppy one.

Anderson’s spécialité has always been and probably always will be the light classics that dot his output and have become standards of the pop orchestra repertoire, but he has also spread his musical wings on occasion and produced two somewhat more “classical” suites, one a collection of Irish tunes and the other a set  of Christmas carols, as well as a much-recorded Piano Concerto in C major and a musical for Broadway, Goldilocks, nominated for several Tony’s in 1958.

 

 

from Rodeo: A Ballet for Agnes

      Buckaroo Holiday

      Hoe-Down

by Aaron Copland (born in Brooklyn, New York,  on November 14, 1900; died in Peekskill, New York, on December 2, 1990)

             The famous American choreographer Agnes DeMille, born in 1908 and dying in 1993 (daughter of one Hollywood film director, William C. DeMille, and niece of another, Cecil B. DeMille) describes, in her memoir, Dance of the Piper, the circumstances of her first meeting with Copland.  He was brought to her sparsely furnished apartment in Greenwich Village by a mutual friend, conductor Franz Allers.  There was one chair, which Allers immediately occupied.  Ms. DeMille sat on the piano stool, and Copland draped himself across her bed, propping his head up with chintz pillows and looking vastly amused. 

Ms. DeMille had already told Allers that she wanted to commission a ballet “in the Russian style,” for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, not exactly Copland’s dish of tea, and she had suggested her own plot for the story, a somewhat tedious one.  She admitted coyly that it wasn’t exactly Hamlet but hoped that it would give off “an aura of ethnic memory.”  Copland’s response was to laugh, long and loudly, both at her idea and her phrasing.  The offended Ms. DeMille sat like a stone until Copland suggested as an alternative a ballet about Ellis Island, possibly, whereupon Ms. DeMille politely told him he could go to hell.

(Ellis Island happens to figure significantly in Copland’s own life.  His grandfather entered the United States from Poland through the Island in the 1870s, having very little command of English, his nervousness dampening into obscurity the few words he did recognize.  An official demanded to know his name, and the old man, already in his late 60s, stuttered “K-K-K-Kaplan.”  The official brusquely pretended not to understand him, and made him repeat it several times.  Each time it came out more garbled.  Finally the uncomprehending officer wrote down what he thought he heard, which turned out to be “Copland.”  And thus it officially came down to the composer, only to be misspoken by musicians the world over for the next century and more.)

Back to Agnes and Aaron: somehow these two bright, gifted antagonists, despite that awkward first meeting, were drawn to each other, perhaps because each basically prized forthrightness and honesty.  The next day Copland telephoned DeMille and told her to “put the kettle on;” he was coming for tea. 

What their dance turned out to be was neither the least bit Russian nor Ellis Island, but a ballet about American cowboys and cowgirls: Rodeo (which Copland specified was to be pronounced in Western fashion, as “ROH-dee-oh,” not in the more authentic Spanish way,  “Roh-DAY-oh).

Ms. DeMille and Mr. Copland soon became thick as thieves, both chortling over little details as the composition progressed.  The first performance, on October 16, 1942, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, was gala in every sense of the word.  The sold-out hall was aflutter with excitement, the dancing was superb, the audience devoured the performance and adored the music.  Immediately Rodeo was established as a dance classic.  Of course, Copland arranged the music as a four-movement symphonic suite, of which we hear the first and final segments this evening.  (The others, being omitted this evening, are “Corral Nocturne” and “Saturday Night Waltz.”  The complete concert version contains almost all the ballet and makes very few major changes.

“Buckaroo Holiday” incorporates music from the first scene, where the cowboys are congregating for the weekly Rodeo. There is a grand fanfare, following which the woodwinds introduce the theme of the cowgirl, awkward and tomboyish, as she makes a bid to dance with the Head Wrangler.  But he has eyes only for one of the glamorous city girls.  The cowboys come flailing back, to the old railroad “holler,” “Sis Joe,” a section envisioned by Ms. DeMille as a sensation “like thunder,” which Copland orchestrates with big drums and brass; there is also much use of  the Western tune, “If He’d Be a Buckaroo.”  All in all, plenty of cheerful music and western prairie rhythms for the Cowgirl to take pleasure in and for the rest of us to wish we could dance to.

“Hoe-Down” draws on music from the last scene of the ballet, opening with a vamp on the stately Irish folk march/reel, “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” There are several other cheerful tunes, among them “McLeod’s Reel,” which shows off various solo instruments, and the especially jaunty Irish “Guilderoy,” for clarinet and oboe.  The piece ends with a grand fanfare based once again on “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” whose tune and text are related not only to the famous French leader defeated at Waterloo but to the autumn flight of wild geese.

 

 

Grand Canyon Suite

by Ferde Grofé (born Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofé on March 27, 1892, in New York City; died on April 3, 1972, in Santa Monica, California)

      Sunrise

      On the  Trail

Grofé’s family roots are four generations of classical musicians; his father was an operatic baritone, his mother a professional cellist who taught her young son the violin and the piano.  One grandfather played cello in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra in New York, and an uncle was concertmaster of the Los Angeles Symphony.  No wonder Ferde had the potential of becoming a first-rate classical polymath, especially since his father died when his son was only seven, and his mother took him off to Leipzig to study piano, viola and composition, and eventually a remarkable range of other instruments, including horn, cornet and flute, with special  attention to the piano.

His whole life turned into a bizarre flowering of careers when he left home at age 14 and took jobs as milkman, truck driver, theater usher, newsboy, elevator operator, book binder, iron foundryman, and pianist in a local bar for a dollar a night.  Variety was normal for him.  At 15 he wound up playing for dance bands in New York.

Eventually he won a place with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, possibly the most prestigious of all such ensembles.  He played jazz piano and made arrangements for the orchestra, eventually completing hundreds of songs.  “If you could sing it or play it, I could arrange it,” he later said.

In 1924 he was asked to orchestrate some music by a young, unknown composer named George Gershwin.  Gershwin had composed a little rhapsody for Whiteman which he called Rhapsody in Blue, a combination of classical techniques and jazz rhythms.  Whiteman’s concert in Æolian Hall in New York on February 12, under the umbrella title of “An Experiment in Modern Music,” combined a number of diverse compositions by such composers as Sir Edward Elgar (one of his Pomp and Circumstance marches) and a suite by Victor Herbert, but the chief interest was in the penultimate work, Gershwin’s Rhapsody as orchestrated by Ferde Grofé.  It made all three musicians, Gershwin, Whiteman and Grofé, famous.  (Æolian hall became a cigar manufactury that same summer, and today it is an optometric college.)

Grofé himself became a recognized classical composer, completing several orchestral suites, including Mississippi, as well as another celebrating Niagara Falls and  yet another in praise of the Hudson River, as well as a symphonic theme for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, a Piano Concerto, a Symphony in Steel, several symphonic poems.  Of them all, a five-movement suite for orchestra, Grand Canyon, is by far the best known.  The third movement, indeed, is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in the world, “On the Trail.”

In 1916, Grofé had driven across the Arizona desert with some friends, chiefly to watch the sun rise over Grand Canyon.  So moved was he by the magnificence of the experience that it was still imperishably vivid thirteen years later when his schedule finally allowed him to compose, and he worked in a white heat to finish the “Sunrise” movement in the summer of 1929.  The following year he finished the “Sunset” and “Cloudburst” sections, though he could not find enough time to orchestrate them.  The entire suite was not completed until the summer of 1931.

It was given its first performance in Chicago at the Studebaker Theater on November 16, 1931, played by Paul Whiteman’s band.  Subsequently Grofé scored the suite for symphony orchestra (as well as for piano solo) and published in both versions. 

“Sunrise” begins mysteriously in the moment of dawn, with a feeling of peace and the sense of the air’s stillness, in a place where Nature holds sway.  Gradually the sun mounts in the sky, and the orchestra becomes more and more joyous as the full splendor and radiance of the day arrives.  Late in the movement, after a piccolo trill, we hear the descending notes of the canyon wren, a rarely seen songbird found only in the Canyon.

The third movement, “On the Trail,” begins and concludes with a great “hee-haw” from the pack donkey that is everywhere found as the burro-like animal that provides transport for the daily thousands of visitors.  The clip-clop of its tiny hooves furnishes the accompaniment for an unmistakable theme, presented by horn and trombone, as the suite’s central motif.  A decorative  violin cadenza is heard to magical effect.

 

 

Rhapsody in Blue

by George Gershwin (born in Brooklyn on September 26, 1898; died in Hollywood on July 11, 1937)

             The American band-leader Paul Whiteman commissioned Gershwin to compose a sizeable work for a concert of popular music he planned to play at Æolian Hall in New York City on February 12, 1924.

             Gershwin’s name was already so popular on Broadway that American playwright George S. Kaufman once wrote: “George’s music gets around so much before an opening that the first-night audience thinks it’s at a revival.”

But he had not yet tried his hand at the classical idiom, though what he finally gave Whiteman—Rhapsody in Blue, orchestrated by another popular name in light music, Ferde Grofé for want of time—was partially classical, partially jazz, giving rise to symphonic conductor Walter Damrosch’s remark, “Gershwin has made a lady out of jazz, taken Cinderella by the hand and proclaimed her a genuine princess.”

Beginning with the instantly recognizable upward squeal of a clarinet, the Rhapsody overflows with melody and intense rhythms.   “It’s not a composition at all,” said admirer Leonard Bernstein; “it’s a marvelous string of separate paragraphs stuck together with a little glue.  I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist since Tchaikovsky.”  Hundreds of editions began to leap from all sorts of music presses, for every instrument or instrumental arrangement under the sun.  Rhapsody in Blue not only made Gershwin famous but it made him rich.  Royalties poured in from sheet music, recordings, rentals, even an arrangement for ballet.

Throughout his short life, Gershwin remained unhappy about his lack of formal musical education.  He went to French composer Maurice Ravel, but Ravel refused to take him as a student.  In fact, in their friendly but brief interview, Ravel asked Gershwin a trenchant question: “How much do you make a year?”  Gershwin mentioned some astronomical figure, whereupon the older, less naïf musician said, “Why not let me study with you?” 

In Hollywood, later, Gershwin approached the highly atonal Viennese academic Arnold Schoenberg, who also refused.  “You write such fine Gershwin, already; if you worked with me you’d just write bad Schoenberg.”

 

          

Variations on a Shaker Melody

by Aaron Copland

 

“Simple Gifts” is the Shaker melody that dates from the period in American history between 1837 and 1847.  Copland used it as the basis for variations in the ballet Appalachian Spring which was first played by the New York Philharmonic on October 4, 1945, conducted by Artur Rodzinski.  Copland supplied the following notes at that time, the music of the ballet taking as its point of departure the personality of choreographer Martha Graham. 

“I have long been an admirer of Miss Graham’s work.  She, in turn, must have felt a certain affinity for my music because in 1931 she chose my Piano Variations as background for a dance composition entitled Dithyramb.  I remember my astonishment, after playing the Variations for the first time at a concert of the League of Composers, when Miss Graham told me she intended to use the composition for dance treatment.  Surely only an artist with a close affinity for my work could have visualized dance material in so rhythmically complex and æsthetically abstruse a composition.  I might add, as further testimony, that Miss Graham’s Dithyramb was considered by public and critics to be just as complex and abstruse as my music.

“Ever since then, at long intervals, Miss Graham and I planned to collaborate on a stage work.  Nothing might have come of our intentions if it were not for the lucky chance that brought Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge to a Graham performance for the first time early in 1942.  With typical energy, Mrs. Coolidge translated her enthusiasm into action.  She invited Martha Graham to create three new ballets for the 1943 annual fall Festival of the Coolidge Foundation in Washington, and commissioned three composers—Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and myself—to compose scores especially for the occasion.

“After considerable delay, Miss Graham sent me an untitled script.  I suggested certain changes to which she made no serious objections.  I began work on the music of the ballet in Hollywood in June of 1943, but didn’t complete it until a year later in June of 1944 at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The première took place in Washington a year later than originally planned, in October of 1944.

“The title Appalachian Spring was chosen by Miss Graham.  She borrowed it from the heading of one of Hart Crane’s poems, though the ballet seems to bear no relation to the text of the poem itself.”

 

Apparently the tune was composed by Joseph Brackett, born in Cumberland, Maine, on May 6, 1797.  He first joined the Shakers at Gorham, Maine, when his father’s farm helped to form the nucleus of a new Shaker settlement.  In 1819, Joseph moved with the other Shakers to Poland Hill, Maine.  He later served as first minister of Maine Shaker societies, as well as church elder at New Gloucester, Maine, now known as Sabbathday Lake, the last remaining Shaker community.  He died on July 4, 1882.

“Simple Gifts” was written while Brackett was at the Shaker community in Alfred, Maine, in 1848.  These are its lyrics:

 

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free,

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning turning, we come round right.

 

Several Shaker manuscripts indicate that this is a “Dancing Song” or a “Quick Dance.”  That is apparent with such lines of the song as “turn, turn will be our delight” and “turning, turning we come round right.”  These are dance instructions.  (It should also be noted that the tune traditionally paired with these lyrics is frequently used in many hymnals for the song, “Lord of the Dance.”)         

—Musical annotations by Clair W. Van Ausdall

especially for Maestra Susan Deaver and the North Shore Symphony Orchestra