Intro:
Fanfare For The Common Man: Copland
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 Giant
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 triangle or 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.
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
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, hymns or popular tunes such as Hail Columbia, Dixie
and Turkey In The Straw – or, indeed, ragtime - provided this
intensely patriotic liberal Democrat with raw material, sentimental value, for
reworking in context. Here is one of his
eerier works, Hanover 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
– hymns were another of Ives’ New England inheritance - 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: Hanover St North, Ives
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 he fifty States. With
the growth of the railways from Atlantic to Pacific and North to South, mass-ducation
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.
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
Next,
let’s hear a piece by another maverick, Henry Cowell (1897-1965). 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
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
Another
black musician: the violinist, composer and
arranger of Negro music, HT 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
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!
(Ed:
actually, the pen ran away with me,
here; these are the end-credits!)
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!
Track
12: Swing Your Partners, The Devil and
Daniel Webster, Herrmann
