Intro: Mardi
Gras, Mississippi Suite, Ferde Grofé
Hullo,
this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme has been researched and
written by Mike Burrows, and presents an anthology of American music. We have just heard Mardi Gras from Mississippi
Suite, by Ferde Grofé (1892-1972), a New Yorker, pianist in the Paul
Whiteman band, popular composer and master-arranger whose best-known work was
in the field of ‘tone-painting’ descriptive of America; he was not perhaps a
great composer, so much as one who had a gift for melody, effective harmony and
lively, frankly colouristic scoring. An
American Straussian, he was of German extraction and studied for a short time
in Leipzig. Given his orchestral
expertise, one should not be surprized that he accepted a friend’s challenge
and wrote two pieces descriptive of a bicycle-pump, one entitled, Theme and
Variations On Noises From A Garage.
Ned
Rorem has combined a free-wheeling, frankly diarized private life with a career
of composition, performance and teaching.
His short piece for strings, Pilgrims dates back to 1958 and
takes as its inspiration a French novel Le Voyageur sur la Terre, about
the suicide of an alienated teenager.
Its North-Western-trained composer wrote it in a day at the Macdowell
Colony. Its elegiac style is tonal,
lyrical, easy to follow, austerely-scored but expressive, and fits its purpose,
its scenario, perfectly - and poignantly.
Adolescent feelings run deep, and however naive, their sentiments
deserve to be taken seriously by those who can no longer think uncompromized, but
who respect their earnestness! There are
curious, fleeting after-echoes of the opening of Dvorak’s American Suite, and
also, one may be reminded of the music of Aaron Copland. Rorem was born in 1923 and has written many
fine, accessible pieces for orchestra and chamber ensemble, but is best-known
for his art-songs. Like many American musicians,
he spent time in Paris and something of Gallic expressiveness is found in his
music - lightness is in no way to be regarded as flippancy or glibness. Similar comes from the pen of a Dutilleux or
Francaix. We were all pilgrims. For some, Earth, is the shrine.
Track
One: Pilgrims, Ned Rorem
This
is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, I’m Rupert Kirkham and today’s programme
is of American music.
Now,
from New England, and from rural New England’s greatest composer, Charles Ives,
comes a short piece of musical mayhem, the Overture And March 1776. Originally written for theatre band, it is
here performed in an arrangement for military band. It is a devastating display of ‘taking off’
small town music - rhythmical disjunctness, mistaken notes and fragments of popular
tunes, some anachronistic to the War of Independence, but de rigeur at
celebrations of the epoch. It does as it should, ‘stretch the ears’. Ives’ own father was town bandmaster and
loved country music-making, wrong notes and all; in his experience, wrong
notes, collision in the parts and late or early entries must have been an
essential ingredient in performance!
Making music was the thing, and note-perfectness had nothing to do with
it. Fourth of July celebrations are not
that polite! Ives is not poking fun at bad
musicians; he is sharing his experience of community-music with us - the
absurdity is in our rigidly limited expectations of players and of music’s being,
its life in itself. We should
remember that stereotypical performance of stereotypical music can be deadening,
and that Washington’s was largely an army of amateurs but great fighters!
Track
Two: Overture and March, 1776, Charles
Ives
Samuel
Barber (1910-81) was the composer of Symphonic, concertante, orchestral,
chamber music and many songs. He was one
of the latest of late romantics and was not a follower of any school,
preferring to
permit the work of the moment to determine the style employed. He is remembered today for one piece, his Adagio,
originally a movement from a string quartet, but later arranged for string
orchestra and for unaccompanied choir.
He did not enjoy the popularity of the Adagio: typical of composers of one popular piece,
his attitude was that it was not characteristic of his best and most deeply-felt
work. In his defence, the Adagio
is a well-written, affecting piece and has come to represent America in
mourning or America feeling the Pity of War, but it can sound deeply
bogus. Whether or not it is more
characteristic of him than the Adagio, let’s hear the haunting
Canzone for flute and piano, his own arrangement for flute and piano of the
first section and coda of the slow movement of his Pulitzer-prize-winning Piano
concerto of 1962.
Track
Three: Canzone for flute and piano, Barber
The
Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a gifted amateur
musician. He played the violin, guitar
and harp and invented a variety of glass harmonica. Here is a short work attributed to him - a
String Quartet. In five movements,
Intrada Alla Breve, Menuetto, Capriccio, Menuetto, Siciliana, it is an
object example of Eighteeth Century American chamber-music; like all but the
most fashionable furniture of the time, this was characterful and rudimentary
to a degree and often echoed European models of a pre-Classical era. Throughout this brief suite of movements -
for it is nothing more - the rasp and tang of the instruments - played on open
strings - seem palpable, but the music is playful if unadventurous on the tonic
and must have been (simple) fun to play.
Track
Four-to-Nine: String Quartet, Benjamin
Franklin
A
song commemorating an unknown soldier of the American Civil War, now. From 1911, The Old Sword On the
Wall, by HW Fairbank,
was dedicated to the Union General, George H Thomas.
Track
Ten: The Old Sword On The Wall
The
opera, Porgy and Bess, was the largest-scale work of the great
George Gershwin, whose talents enabled him to accomplish art-music admired by
Schoenberg, Ravel and others, his career having begun as a plugger or
song-demonstrator in tin--pan alley. A
fine pianist as a boy, he enjoyed a career as a Broadway-composer,
collaborating most successfully with his versifier-brother Ira, and did more
than anyone to create non--improvized, orchestral jazz. Porgy and Bess was his
masterpiece, and grew out of musical theatre.
It burns with the same inspired, seemingly instinctive flame as his
concert-music. Cat-fish Row, where lame
Porgy falls in love with Bess, kills a murderer for love of her; finds on being
released from jail that she has left for New York, and sets out for the city,
is no place for blacked up faces: its
mixture of numbers and recitative holds together elements of negro-music, work-songs,
gospel, rag, lushly chromatic late-Romantic harmony and harsh dissonance. Its first performance was given on Broadway,
but its ambitions were very different.
For example, Summertime is
sung by a mother as the men play crap.
The character Sportin’ Life - one of his songs is It Aint Necessarily
so - is a drug--dealer. Sportin’
Life entices Bess to a life of drugs as well as the boat for New York. Let’s hear Porgy’s Lament, Oh, Where’s My Bess, and the
Finale of the opera - Oh, Lord, I’m On My Way.
Track
Eleven: Porgy’s Lament and Finale,
Gershwin
God
and Melville created whales. Hollywood created
the Western. Jerome Moross created the
Big Country. There are many good
film-scores for the films in which the United States took on outlaws, indians,
Civil War renegades, Mexican bandidos, and won, latterly While being drenched
in tomato ketchup, but, earlier, wearing corporate-style hairdos and
streamlined Nineteen Fifties cowboy-garb, when a .45 slug hit home like
heart-burn. The Big Country, from
1958, boasted a big theme. There is
nothing to beat its impetus, its agog excitement and exhilarating orchestral
sweep, with slowly swinging, striding bass and sectional, violin-unison-led
melody developing by statement and reply.
The scoring is Russian and bold, the melody and harmonies could be those
of a revivalist hymn.
Track
Twelve: The Big Country, Moross
Only
one composer wrote a Mount Saint Helens Symphony when the volcano
exploded on the 19th May, 1980. Alan Hovhaness (1911--2000) was an
American of Scottish and Armenian extraction.
Immensely prolific, he wrote well over sixty symphonies, numerous
concertante and large choral pieces. His work is characterized by strong, often
chant-like melody, rich, modal or chromatic harmony and counterpoint, often on
a massive scale. His writing for
hieratic brass and sonorous strings is matched by enchanting use of woodwind
and pitched percussion. One wonders where
but in America his perspective, sense of space and large spirit might have
grown. Music flowed from him, occasioned
by historical and even geophysical events, topography and the environment, the songs
of the whale, the folk--musics, poetries and religions of East Asia, and
polyphony of medieval and Reformation Europe. Its flavour is of ancientness,
mystery, and worship of the sublime. He
was not universally admired by critics, and must have learned some synonyms for
the words naive, fool and misguided, but his work seems to
be gaining ground on the listening public’s regard.
We
hope to play the Mount St Helens Symphony some other time soon. Today’s music by Hovhaness consists of the
slow movement and scherzo of his Symphony Number 22, Opus 236, City of Light. He said of this work, “I was thinking of a
million lights, an imaginary city...”
The Largo is subtitled Angel of Light, a reference to a
Christmas childhood experience of the composer’s. The Allegretto Grazioso is based on
themes from an opera that he had written while in high school, ‘Lotus--blossom’. The work was commissioned for the centenary
of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra of Alabama in 1971.
Tracks Thirteen and Fourteen:
Largo and Allegretto Grazioso, Symphony No 22, City of Light,
Hovhaness
We can
journey inside a whale thanks to Thomas Newman, a scion of the Newman dynasty
of Hollywood film-composers.
This
is his piece Haiku, drawn from his music for the Disney film, Finding
Nemo, of 2003. It exemplifies the
minimalist style much used in Hollywood these days, but is beautiful in its
trance-like lyricism. Its roots are
recognizably like those of Copland and Hovhaness.
The
strings chant in flattened common chords and accompanied by more complex drum
off-beats.
Mysterious,
comforting, it is like music of the womb.
This
is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.
Today’s script was written and researched by Mike Burrows. We hope that you enjoyed our time in the Big
Country and will join us again soon.
Goodbye!
Track Fifteen: Haiku from Finding Nemo, Thomas Newman
Postscript On HW Fairbank
Henry
Waterman Fairbank was born on the 18/04/52 at Linden, Michigan, given his
father’s names and mother, Harriet Waterman’s, maiden name. He took a degree in music at Michigan State
University and married in 1874. He and
his wife lived in Detroit throughout the 1880s and he was listed in census as a
seller of instruments. By the turn of
the century, he had moved to the Chicago area and was a composer of Baptist hymns,
patriotic pieces, songs, character-pieces for piano (such as a Mazourka Elegante dedicated ‘In Remembrance’
to Miss Mollie Bush of Newtown Pennsylvania), a highly respected choirmaster
with the Chicago South Side Sunday Schools, and head of music at Chicago’s
Normal College (a Ladies Teacher-training College). As a choirmaster, he was capable of
conducting choirs of 2-3000 girls and boys, his concerts attracting anything up
to 4,000 listeners. There is that about
the informal journalistic descriptions of such concerts that one wishes one
might have ‘been there’. Hymns,
patriotic songs, displays of virtuosity on the cornet or organ (on the organ, a
Suppe overture, perhaps), and even a song-performance by a 4 yr old boy .
As a teacher, Fairbank became a much-loved figure, as one can tell from
his obituary in the Normal College’s annual Year-book, the Emblem, 1925 Issue, given with portrait below. He published his work, such as The Old Sword on The Wall, through his own publishing company. He died on 11/01/25, aged almost 73. As noticed in the Chicago Tribune, his wife
took his body back to Linden for burial.
My
view of Fairbank has changed considerably through this information, got chiefly
from kind friends of a friend on Facebook.
At first, I visualized a grizzled man in shirt-sleeves, trilby on back
of head, cigar butt causing a more-than ordinary twist to sardonic lips and the near-permanent
closure of one eye as he pounded out songs for Vaudeville – once in a while,
this hard case had a rush of blood to the head and hopeful feeling in the
wallet while perpetrating a commemorative song dedicated to Victims of The Late
Disaster (whatever it was). Somehow,
this man had achieved The Old Sword on
The Wall, certainly the best self-published song I have ever heard. Maybe, he had stolen it from a brilliant young
plugger who had come to less than nothing as a result.
After
seeing utterly anomalous cuttings from a friend of a friend, I found The Emblem,
1919, on the Net. This began with pages
of portraits of some 70 teachers, which gives an idea of the scale of the very
Gothic and sylvan-seeming Normal College
(quite a lovely Teutonic-Attican academy).
The first sight of HW Fairbank was dispiriting. Could this phlegmatic, chubby-faced man be
the composer? I didn’t find it easy to
believe, though I thought that he might have been confident, intelligent and
energetic enough to conduct 1000s of youngsters in a concert – he looked so
truly unSchumannian in physiognomy that I thought he would be a muscular enough
Christian, too.
Then
I noticed that the top corner of Fairbank’s page was missing, some of the
Science-tutor’s title showing. I flipped
back the page. Yes. Head of Science.
A
fearsome face glared out from further down the Fairbank page next to a female
tutor’s name and title. Could Fairbank’s
portrait have been displaced to rest there?
What a cruel joke for an unmissish teacher to endure down decades. This bespectacled
baleful scholar of lean jaw, thin, pursed lips and frown-marks might be intense
enough to be a creative artist. He was
clean-shaven, his longer-on-top, slightly wavy hair well-brushed but mildly
electric-looking. This man could be a
crusty don-like teacher, born in the same year of Professor Charles Villiers
Stanford of Cambridge and the Royal College of Music and outliving the Irish academic
basilisk by a short time.
No.
The fearsome face glared out through a hole. Flipping back one or two pages, I found that the
intense pedant was, in fact, Head of Geography.
I tried the Emblem of 1925 and found this:
I
have to say that I like this portrait and the affectionate tribute more than
any of my imaginative leaps that fell
flat. I’d add that this looks like a
composer and man who devoted his life not only to music but to people; for
forty years fostering through integrity and humour not only learning and proficiency
in his art, but also the happiness of his fellow man. As such, he deserves respect over and above regard
for a song, the only song of his that I have heard. It is an inspired song, a real song for
humanity however, and I so wish that someone out there would enable the public
to hear many more of the works of this peculiarly modest artist, HW Fairbank: I suspect that it would be worth their while
to record, and worth ours, at last, to listen.
Thanks,
once again, to my informants!
Mike
Burrows
