Intro:
Fanfare For The Common Man: Copland (3.15 min)
Hullo. This is Classical
Break, and
I’m Rupert Kirkham.
Today’s programme,
researched and written by Mike Burrows,
is a tribute to the music
that established the United States as
a pioneer-nation in the mainstream
of cosmopolitan art-music.
We have just heard the Fanfare
For The Common Man
by Aaron
Copland. Written after
the United States
had entered the Second World War,
to a commission awarded by the
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, this is a
crucial work in the history of
North American music, and must have
seemed so from its first play-
through. At a time when
the
world seemed nightmarishly split along racial
lines, a New York Jew had
written music for a great nation
of races, seeming to express the
idealism and determination of this nation’s
response to Pearl Harbour.
In gong-
and timpani-strokes, massed trumpets, more
throaty horns and trombones, fourths, fifths
and triads of purity and brazen
clashes, the stride and power of
the titan is evoked with permutations
of a phrase and answer:
but
in deliberate white-note music, this
is American humanity on the march.
Copland said that he had written
as he imagined others were feeling.
The Sleeping Dragon has been awoken.
The brash circus-world of Sousa
marches or music-theatre jazz is
a world away.
We think of this music as
‘American’. Actually, its
jagged aesthetic owes
greatly to Stravinsky, Janacek and Les
Six as well as to
what
might be characterized as a settler-
rhetoric. Copland, like
most of his
American contemporaries, studied in Paris.
Our next piece was written in
a similar style: some fifty years
on. Saving Private
Ryan, a Spielberg
portrayal of the Omaha landing on
D-Day and a small force’s
attempt to return a Mother’s last
surviving son home, suffers from histrionics
and cynically manipulative scenes of mayhem,
but no such faults mar John
Williams’ music, the piece Hymn For
The Fallen,
in particular. True, Bach’s
Air On A G-string turns
up, along with a less noticeable
echo of Delius’ Song Of Summer,
but for the rest, the side-
drum, stoical, close-harmony theme, Coplandesque
brass, not to mention the glockenspiel
and busy string-figuration at the
climax, are both emotionally true-sounding
and affecting. There is a
power
in the deliberately limited melody grouped
about a modal clash between major
and minor, between home-spun harmonies
and the tritone. This is
like
a marching song for ghosts or
for those who knew them.
It
is a fine piece and may
cause one to forget how the
Copland ‘Common Man’ style has been
hijacked for just about any feature-
film that aimed for pathos, patriotic
or spiritual uplift, in the past
thirty years.
Track 2:
Saving Private Ryan, Hymn To The Fallen, John Williams.
(6.07 min)
This is Classical Break on Somer
Valley FM, and I’m Rupert
Kirkham. Today’s
programme looks at American
music.
A Hymn To The Fallen from
the 1990s reminds us that America
has always had a strong tradition
of non-conformist psalm-singing, from
the early years of European settlement
until the period of 19th Century
religious revivals, the days of the
‘camp-meetings’. Our
concept of hymn-
singing dates back to the days
of Methodism and the Wesley brothers -
and the Church of England had
no official hymnal until the 1860s
or so.
In the main, at first the
music was rudimentary and in unison,
and trained singers led a congregation
with greater or lesser accuracy.
By the 18th Century, Tune-books
were in use. Here is a
hymn by John Antes, a Pennsylvanian
of this period, How Beautiful Upon
The Mountains,
in a comparatively ‘classical’
contemporary arrangement for singers, chorus and
orchestra.
Track 3:
How Beautiful Upon The Mountains, John Antes (3.24
min)
A hymn like Simple Gifts, we
owe to the American Shaker sect,
of course. The much later
Episcopalian
setting of Nearer My God to
Thee by Lowell Mason
resounds from
its use in films on the
Titanic disaster. From
numerous westerns and
small-town films, besides the dances
at hoe-downs or balls, hymns
such as The Shining River have
been a valuable scene-setter.
One of the stranger and stronger
figures in United States music was
the recluse Charles Ives, born in
Danbury, Connecticut in 1874.
The
son of a Civil War bandsman,
town bandsman and banker, he was
taught music by his father, who,
fascinated by resonance, free tonality and
chance musical happenings, encouraged his children
to sing in one key whilst
accompanying themselves on the piano in
another. Ives grew up to
be
a fine organist and pianist, playing
in his local church, encountered academic
music at Yale and, after a
spell as organist and choirmaster at
a New York church, went into
insurance and continued to compose in
his own manner. A fervent
transcendentalist
to whom everything sang, between boyhood
and his late thirties, he created
a huge quantity of music that
anticipated every development in modernism by
twenty years. At the same
time,
tunes such as Hail Columbia, Dixie
and Turkey In The Straw - or
ragtime - provided this intensely patriotic liberal
Democrat with raw material, sentimental value,
for reworking in context.
Here is
one of his eerier works, Hannover
Street North, the
third and final
piece from his Orchestral Set No
2. It
is a description of
coming into New York as a
commuter the morning the news broke
of the sinking of the Lusitania:
he remembered that an organ-grinder
began to play the gospel hymn
In The Sweet Bye and Bye
-
and one by one, the passengers
joined in - their efforts uninterrupted even
though a train came into the
station. By its dying
fall, this
work has liberated the ear from
fixed notions of rhythm or harmony
in a piano-concertante texture (Ives
was a formidable pianist) that shows
all things in an almost filmic
equality of significance, with broken and
ultimately baleful brass - listen for the
crowd’s voice raised full-throatedly in
its hymn - and treble register ‘atmosphere’.
The close is as quiet as
the opening, but one has experienced
an event in human experience, an
epiphany of New York America.
Track 4:
Hannover St North, Ives (7.15 min)
Before pioneers such as Ives, popular
music, with its intermixed roots in
the world of slave-trade, settlers,
labourers, the Civil War, Indian Wars
and industrialization might have seemed to
be staring the hi-falutin in
the face as a potential source
of inspiration in the 19th Century.
The folksongs of many European nations,
negro spirituals and work-songs, revivalist
and episcopal hymns, Indian chants, military
marches, parlour- and theatre-songs and
dance-sets, South American ‘latino’ rhythms
and jazz were not only mixed
from the roots but cross-fertilizing
apace in the incredibly varied climate,
topography and demography of the fifty
States. With the growth
of the
railways from Atlantic to Pacific and
North to South, mass-education and mass
publication-methods, the musical establishment remained
an establishment by the skin of
its teeth.
The open fourths-fifths and pentatonic
style that most think of as
American is present in most countries’
folk-music, owing to systems of
tuning: the chromatic
accompaniment of such
music is artistic licence or literally
accidental. Like rubato,
it permits variety
of emotional nuance, usually on a
descending scale - a flatward tendency in
harmony. Certainly, it is
a demonstration
of skill to find the unovbvious
right wrong note. Jazz -
the word
originally denoted sexual excitement - is founded
on such tricks; spontaneous improvization was
the origin of all folk-music.
The Land of The Free was
built on conquest and oppression: folk-
music, to an extent - was
a reaction to rural and urban
oppression of ‘labor’ and crash social
and economic change.
Let’s hear the famous folk-tune,
Ashoken Farewell. Justly famous, easily as
fine a tune as Shenandoah, it
has come down to us in
many variations and arrangements. This one
is played on instruments that would
have been available to country people
and ordinary urban folk alike.
It
leaves the darkie-songs and parlour
muse of composers of the Mid-
19th Century, such as Stephen Foster,
for dead.
Track 5:
Ashoken Farewell, Trad. (4.36 min)
The transformation from a land whose
academies had grown modern by recognizing
the genius of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and
Dvorak rather than Liszt and Wagner,
took the better part of a
quarter of a century everywhere but
in the minds of Charles Ives and
Charles T Griffes, a man whose
world was of dreams and such
visions as Xanadu, and whose music
was influenced by the whole-tone
experiments of Debussy and Scriabin. He
did not represent a nationalist’s dream
of American music, but his success
was possibly to build on the
aesthetic change discernible in the Grieg-
-influenced music of another, earlier ‘modernist’,
Edward Macdowell, and cause comparisons between
the music of an American and
that of the impressionist musicians of
France and Spain, and the mystical
tendency, such as it was, in
Russia. Here is the
second of
his Two Sketches Based on Indian
Themes for String
Quartet, Allegro Giocoso.
Track 6:
No 2 of Two Sketches Based on Indian Themes, Charles T Griffes (3.54
min)
Next, let’s hear a piece by
another maverick, Henry Cowell (18-
97-1965). This was
a man who wrote several symphonies
and other large-scale works in
an idiom not far removed from
that of Ives. He could be
inspired by a good old Fuguing
Tune, but in many of his
pieces, instruments were played in novel
ways; he specialized in tone-clusters,
microtones and many other innovations, directing
a pianist, for example, to play
with his fist, or pluck and
play glissandi on the strings as
if on a zither. Here is
his magical miniature, the third piece
of his three movement Irish Suite for
String Piano and Small Orchestra: Fairy
Bells.
Track 7:
Fairy Bells Henry Cowell (5.54 min)
The works of the urban negro
composer, Scott Joplin, born three years
after the end of the Civil
War and famous for his rag-
time, less so for an opera
about plantation-life, Tremonisha, took
up an uneasy position between Art-
music and popular songs and dances
and the world of the bar-
room, bordello and musical theatre. He
made a name for himself in
spite of his colour, his uncertain
education and poor health, working himself
hard as a performer and arranger
as well as composer, but died
before he could realize his ambitions
as a serious artist - Tremonisha’s trials
proved fatal to him.
George Gershwin
and others were to fare better
in this direction later on, with
hits like Porgy and Bess and
Show-boat. Of course, working within
the idiom of cakewalks and other
such black institutions, an idiom whose
holiday strut or weary worksong bluesiness
captivated whites, he was a useful
composer, a money-spinner for others.
The pathos and efficient melodic and
rhythmical resource of his rags have
conquered the world since his death,
the film Sting - which plugged The
Entertainer
- provoking a new wave of
sympathetic attentions from musicians,
musicologists and
Civil Rights supporters.
As a kid,
I recall, there were two pieces
the unmusical pianist was certain to
know how to murder, The Moonlight
Sonata - the opening
few bars, that
is - and The Entertainer.
Let’s hear
the Maple Leaf Rag.
Track 8:
Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin (3m15s)
Another black musician:
the violinist, composer
and arranger of Negro music, H
T Burleigh, was taught composition by
Dvorak at the New York Conservatory,
during the great composer’s brief reign
of terror as a professor.
Much-
respected - and liked - by his students,
Dvorak was known behind his back
as Borax, owing to his blunt
but abrasive reactions to their exercises.
Dvorak’s views on black music were
remarked on; he believed that an
American music of the future might
well be built on the traits
of negro themes and harmonies.
In
his American music - the
Cello Concerto,
the Nigger Quartet - as it was
once known - an American Suite, The
American Flag and
the New World
Symphony, he does seem
to have
taken his own advice!
Harry Burleigh
admired the dour Czech greatly; and
Dvorak’s respect for folk-song certainly
left its mark on his pupils.
Of peasant-stock himself, Dvorak had
not impressed the great musical and
other thinkers at Cambridge when there
to receive an honorary doctorate: “Did
you try him on pigs?” one
of these characters had asked a
colleague who had tried to get
a word out of the man.
But Dvorak was an inspired composer,
if not the world’s greatest theoretician,
and his good-hearted belief in
and practising of true art electrified
his students. It may not
be
too much to say that Dvorak
was a founding father of the
new American music - Nadia Boulanger of
1920s Paris later to become
a founding mother. Let’s
hear a
spiritual arranged by Burleigh, who himself
became an academic, My
Lord, What
A Morning.
Track 9: My
Lord, what a Morning, Arranged HT Burleigh (3m01s)
Pace Ives, there was a lot
of fine music written between the
1890s and the First World
War by conservatives such as George
W Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Henry Hadley
and Daniel G Mason, some of
which has an undoubted American accent.
Foote’s String Quartet in D-major,
of 1911, is a work
as inspiring as anything in an
American idiom by Borax - or, indeed,
anything written since.
Unlike most Americans
of the late 19th Century up
until the modernist period, Foote, a
good teacher of music, never studied
abroad. Born in 1853, he
died in 1937.
This is the song-like, sustainedly
varied slow movement, Andante Espressivo. It
shares its inheritance with Brahms and
Borodin, but something of its accent,
its melodic turns remains American.
Track 10:
String Quartet in D Major, 3rd Movt, Andante Espressivo, A Foote (7.02
min)
And that’s it for our programme
of American music - except...
Bernard Herrmann
(1911-75) wrote music for
a film, The Devil And Daniel
Webster, a fable set in
New
England, in which a farmer is
led to a hoard of War
of Independence gold by Scratch, the
devil, and proceeds to sell his
soul for wealth and an easy
life as the rest of the
local tenant farmers live and suffer
hard times, and he grows rich
at their expense.
Here is an evocative cue from
the film: Swing Your
Partners. In
this barn-dance sequence, Scratch strikes
up with a fiddle in Mephisto-
New England-style!
This is Classical Break, and I’m
Rupert Kirkham. Today’s
script was written
and researched by Mike Burrows.
We
hope you have enjoyed our survey
of American music and will join
us again, soon. Swing
Your Partners!
Tracks 12:
Swing Your Partners, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Herrmann (2.34
min)
