Music of the New World
April 16, 2011, 7:30 p.m.
Coronado Theatre
PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV
Triumphal March
Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov was born in St. Petersburg on August 10, 1865, and died in Paris on March 21, 1936. He composed the Triumphal March for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The score calls for three flutes plus alto flute, two oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, strings, and optional wordless mixed chorus. Duration is about 9 minutes.
There are not many works by Russian composers of the Tsarist period with an Illinois connection. Glazunov’s Triumphal March is one of the very few—indeed, possibly the only one. This is all the more surprising because it was written when the young composer was still a few years shy of thirty and not likely to have a worldwide reputation.
Alexander Glazunov is one of those artists who achieved high fame early in life and then never really surpassed that youthful brilliance, with the result that his career seems in retrospect to have almost stagnated. It certainly did not start that way: when he began harmony lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov at the beginning of 1880, the astonished teacher remarked, “His musical development progressed not by days but by hours.” Two years later, when young Glazunov was just seventeen, he appeared as the composer of a symphony, described by his teacher as “young in inspiration but already mature in technique and structure.” He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to write out the overture to Borodin’s unfinished opera Prince Igor, which Borodin had played for his friends on the piano, but never written down. After the Borodin’s early death, we have the overture only from Glazunov’s memory of those drawing-room performances.
Glazunov became a busy conductor, which he enjoyed enormously, though he was never a real master of the podium. He spent decades in service to the St. Petersburg Conservatory and worked tirelessly in his twenty years as the Conservatory’s director to improve the school at all levels. When he took on the position, he was at the height of his compositional skill, but gradually over the years his music showed something of a decline. The great nationalist school of the preceding generation had done its work, and Glazunov was part of the generation that produced a rapprochement with the art of western Europe. He composed eight symphonies (he left a ninth unfinished). His talent for elegant, attractive melodies led to lasting success in ballet, particularly Raymond and The Seasons.
I have been unable to ascertain what connection won for the young composer an invitation to compose a festive march to be performed at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893—popularly called the “Chicago World’s Fair”—that was created to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. The extraordinary event has been the subject of more books and articles than any other world’s fair in history—for the remarkable architecture constructed as a “white city;” for the creation of “villages” from every continent around the world, populated by their inhabitants in traditional dress; for the busy schedule of musical performances; for the fountains and the electric lights; for the wonderful great wheel developed by George W. Ferris that carried spectators up to an amazing height from which they could get a thrilling view of the whole area. As if all that excitement wasn’t enough, there was a dark side, too, a vicious serial killer preying on single young women who came to the big city from small towns all over America (the story of both the architectural glories of the White City and the string of murders that took place just outside the grounds is recounted in Erik Larsen’s best-selling book The Devil in the White City).
Writing his work in 1892, Glazunov evidently took the pains to find an American tune to work into the music. Throughout a large part of the score he develops an old camp-meeting song about gathering “on Canaan’s happy shore.” This tune had become connected with John Brown’s abortive attempt to instigate a slave rebellion; after his execution, the song was changed to refer to the rebellious abolitionist’s body “mold’ring in the grave.” Finally, at the suggestion of Abraham Lincoln himself, the tune took its definitive form as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The opening fanfare of Glazunov’s score is a skeleton version of the refrain “Glory, glory, hallelujah!”
Following a vigorous and heroic build-up based largely on that melody, Glazunov introduces a surprisingly pastoral section featuring the woodwinds, briefly interrupted by flowing strings. Roughly halfway through the piece, the opening fanfare material returns and becomes explicitly an extended and varied treatment of the old song now unforgettably evoking the ordeal through which the Union had passed triumphantly only three decades earlier.
MICHAEL HORWOOD
National Park Suite
Michael Horwood was born in Buffalo, New York, on May 24, 1947; he has spent most of his adult life in Canada and currently lives in Cowley, Alberta. His National Parks Suite was composed in 1991 for a consortium of six orchestras and was designed to contain movements devoted to three Canadian and two American national parks. The first performance was given by the Peterborough (Ontario) Symphony under the direction of Stan Kopac on October 25, 1991. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two percussionists (playing bass drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, sizzle cymbal, swish cymbal, snare drum, triangle, tambourine, headless tambourine, tamtam, glockenspiel, xylophone, wood block, maracas, vibraslap, chains or beads, box of marbles, cardboard scraper, cedar shim), harp, and strings.
Born practically on the Canadian border, Michael Horwood studied music composition and theory at the State University of New York in his home town, Buffalo. After receiving his master’s degree in 1971, he moved to Canada, where he spent the next thirty years, from 1972 to 2003, as a professor of music and humanities at Toronto’s Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology. During much of that time, he was active as pianist and percussionist in the improvisation ensemble Convergence, which he founded in the late 1970s.
He has composed more than seventy works in a wide range of modern musical styles, but from the late 1980s his music has focused largely on neo-romantic trends. These have been especially prominent in programmatic works such as his frequently performed suites with musical depictions of amusement parks and national parks.
Of course, the best-known work depicting a national park is Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite. Horwood notes a closer inspiration from Ottorino Respighi’s Roman trilogy, The Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals. The principal characteristic of all of these suites is the choice of colorful images connected to the subject, projected in brilliant orchestral scores featuring lively rhythm and memorable melody. After the success of his 1986 Amusement Park Suite, Horwood decided to choose varied images from national parks of North America for a five-movement suite, alternating parks in Canada and the United States. He chose strikingly diverse images (including one scene from a park that is almost entirely underwater!) to exercise his musical and orchestral imagination.
The following descriptions come directly from the composer:
Forillon National Park [Québec] (Lento pericoloso)
On the northeastern tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, rugged terrain abruptly meets the coastline and ocean waves. Roadway, mountain, cliff and ocean seem to merge into one entity. The presence of the lighthouse beacon and the recurring blast of the foghorn serve as a warning to ships of potential danger. Wave-like ostinato figures of varying lengths propel the music toward a central climax of noble, yet forbidding grandeur.
Click here to visit the website of Forillon National Park.
Bryce Canyon National Park [Utah] (Vivo e fragile)
A fast, delicate scherzo depicts this relatively small, but endlessly fascinating place. Towers and spires of rock formations rising from the canyon floor are multi-colored—strong to the eye, but weak to the touch. The orchestra is reduced to smaller proportions suggesting the thin, frail rock textures. Nature's beauty humbles the lowly spectator.
Click here to visit the website of Bryce Canyon National Park.
Fathom Five Marine Park [Ontario] (Andante tranquillo)
At the confluence of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay is the only national park in North America that is primarily under water. Consequently much of the park is best viewed by skin diving or through glass-bottom boats. Daylight here is often stubborn, but crucial. Calm, still harmonies evolve ever-so-slowly under melodic wisps of different contours. Clacking wooden sounds recall the moorings of ships and boats long since vanished. The passage of time is almost frozen.
Click here to visit the website of Fathom Five Marine Park.
Yellowstone National Park [Wyoming] (Allegretto con fuoco e caldo)
A sulphurous, primeval mystery looms within Yellowstone, one of Nature's rare places where the senses of sound and smell are as important as sight. Here one feels that the earth is timeless, yet still forming - unsafe, yet frail with its geysers, steam pools and fumaroles. All manner of hissing, bubbling and gurgling sounds emerge from the brass and percussion interrupting a march of thunderous proportions. Old Faithful, eternal showman and time-marker of this wondrous place, makes itself heard and felt.
Click here to visit the website of Yellowstone National Park.
Jasper National Park [Alberta] (Largo e maestoso)
Confronting this stark, compelling stretch of the Rocky Mountains in Western Alberta may well be one of the most scenic views along the entire 3,000-mile range. These jagged sentinels, paralleling the famous Icefield Parkway, are broken only by the cold, wind-swept glacial remnants. A chorale gradually arises from the lower instruments and becomes progressively cumulative and grandiose. There is an aura of intense, yet contained power; beauty, yet reverence.
Click here to visit the website of Jasper National Park.
SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR
Overture to Hiawatha, Op. 30
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London on August 15, 1875, and died in Croyden, England, on September 1, 1912. He composed his Overture to Hiawatha in 1899. It was first performed the Norwich Festival on October 6, 1899. The score calls for two flutes, piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 11 minutes.
The son of an African doctor from Sierra Leone and an English woman, Samuel Taylor-Coleridge remained in England with his mother after his father returned to Africa. He showed great musical talent in early violin studies and singing in a church choir, an experience that led to his first published compositions, starting with a Te Deum published by Novello, starting when he was only sixteen. By that time, he had been a violin student at the Royal College of Music for a year. He began studying composition with Charles Villiers Stanford, and his music began to find performances among fellow students who included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, and Frank Bridge.
His most lasting success came when he was merely twenty-three with the colorful setting of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, drawn from the long narrative poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was at the height of his fame at that period. Although he wrote many other kinds of music that were performed by leading artists, it was the Hiawatha subject matter that continued to intrigue him. After the success of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (first performed at the Royal College of Music on November 11, 1898), he added The Death of Minnehaha (1899) and Hiawatha’s Departure (1900). Shortly before the premiere of the second cantata he introduced the Overture to Hiawatha as a separate work, but one suitable to precede a performance of the entire trilogy. He returned to the subject of Hiawatha for a ballet, his last completed score before his tragically early death at thirty-seven from pneumonia, apparently brought on by overwork, which had weakened his system.
Though it remains his best-known music, Coleridge-Taylor wrote much else as well. Determined to bring his African heritage to concert audiences, he wrote other music inspired by African culture, whether on its home continent or in the New World, including Symphonic Variations on an African Air, the “rhapsodic dance” Bamboula for orchestra, as well as chamber works like the African Suite for piano and string quartet, Three African Dances for violin and piano, and Twenty-Four Negro Melodies—transcriptions for solo piano of various melodies including the familiar spirituals “Deep River,” “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?”, and “Steal Away.” He was equally active in creating “mainstream” compositions as well, including a clarinet quintet that his teacher Stanford thought worthy of showing to Brahms and his Violin Concerto, commissioned by the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut in 1912, premiered very shortly before his death. Probably the best-remembered of his non-Hiawatha choral works was A Tale of Old Japan, Op. 76, from 1911.
In addition to his large and varied list of compositions, Coleridge-Taylor established himself as a highly gifted conductor. Carl Stoeckel, the founder of the Connecticut Norfolk Festival, who hosted Coleridge-Taylor several times, reported that the New York-based professional instrumentalists who performed in the festival orchestra spoke of him as a “black Mahler,” a term of high praise for a conductor.
The Overture to Hiawatha was composed, it seems, as an afterthought once Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast became a sensational hit, and probably because Coleridge-Taylor extended his compositional plan to the two further Longfellow cantatas. If performed together, as a kind of three-act choral drama, an overture might well seem to be called for. Many famous overtures attain their popularity in part by quoting highlights from the opera to follow. Coleridge-Taylor chose not to quote the most famous aria of the first cantata, “Onaway! Awake, beloved!”, and since he had not yet composed the remainder of the work, the overture consists entirely of original music not otherwise part of the three cantatas. He also avoids any stereotypical “Indian” sonorities, such as booming tom-toms. If anything, the pentatonic tunes seem to have an Irish lilt as often as not, though the more vigorous rhythmic passages may be the composer’s way of projecting the basic feeling of the dances of Sioux tribesmen.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Opus 95, From the New World
Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He began sketching themes for the Symphony No. 9 during the last two weeks of 1892; the finished score is dated May 24, 1893. The symphony was first performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl on December 15, 1893. The score calls for two flutes (one doubling piccolo) two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes.
Antonín Dvořák’s arrival in America on September 26, 1892, was a triumph of persistence for Jeannette Thurber, founder of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. She hoped that the appointment of this colorful nationalist with a wide reputation both as composer and teacher would put her institution on a firm footing and eventually produce American composers who could vie with any in the world. Dvořák had at first been unwilling to leave his beloved Prague and undertake the rigors of a sea voyage to the New World for so uncertain a venture, but Mrs. Thurber’s repeated offers eventually wore down his resistance. She also hoped that, in addition to teaching young American musicians, he would compose new works especially for American consumption. One potential project was an opera based on Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, which Dvořák had enjoyed in a Czech translation years before. The opera never materialized, but the subject did have an influence on his most famous symphony, the Ninth.
It was only too clear to Dvořák that he was more than a celebrity and great things were expected of him. He wrote to a Moravian friend in mock terror what the American papers were writing was “simply terrible—they see in me, they say, the savior of music and I don’t know what else besides.” But after a few months he wrote to friends in Prague more equably: “The Americans expect me...to show them the Promised Land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short to create a national music. If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense.”
For the first few months he had no time to compose, but by the end of autumn he began a sketchbook of musical ideas. On December 19 he made his first original sketches in America. The next day he noted on the second page one of his best known melodic inventions: the melody assigned to the English horn at the beginning of the slow movement in the New World Symphony. In the days that followed, he sketched other ideas on some dozen pages of the book, many of them used in the symphony, some reserved for later works, and some ultimately discarded.
Finally, on January 10, 1893, Dvořák started sketching the continuous thread of the melodic discourse (with only the barest indications of essential accompaniments) for the entire first movement. From that time until completion of the symphony on May 24, he fitted composition into his teaching as best he could.
No piece of Dvořák’s has been subjected to so much debate as the Symphony From the New World. The composer himself started it all with an interview published in the New York Herald on May 21, just as he was finishing the last movement. He was quoted as having said:
I am now satisfied that the future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. When I came here last year I was impressed with this idea and it has developed into a settled conviction. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil...There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.
At another time Dvořák complicated the issue by claiming to have studied the music of the American Indians and even to have found it strikingly similar to that of the Negroes. This view was surely mistaken, or at least greatly oversimplified—and it probably has more to do with the composer’s own mental link between this symphony and his unfinished Hiawatha opera than it does with actual musical quotation.
In any case, Dvořák’s comments attracted much attention. Diligent American reporters buttonholed European composers and asked them for their views, then wrote that most composers felt Dvořák’s recommendations to be impractical if not impossible. Thus, when the new symphony appeared six months later, everyone wanted to know if he had followed his own advice. Claims appeared on all sides that the melodic material of the symphony was borrowed from black music, or from Indian music, or perhaps both. In another interview just before the first performance, Dvořák emphasized that he sought the spirit, not the letter of traditional melodies, incorporating their qualities, but developing them “with the aid of all the achievements of modern rhythm, counterpoint, and orchestral coloring.”
Despite the composer’s disclaimer, accounts of his tracking down sources for the music became progressively embellished, and by the end of the century one could read, even in the program notes of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for example, that the symphony’s “thematic material is made up largely of Negro melodies from the Southern plantations.”
Yet there are witnesses who merit credence for some claims of ethnic influence. One of these is Victor Herbert, then known as a conductor and as the leading cellist of his generation (he had not yet started composing the operettas that were to make him famous). Herbert was head of the cello faculty at the National Conservatory and worked in close proximity to Dvořák during his first year at the institution. Herbert recalled later that the young black composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh, then a student at the Conservatory, had given Dvořák some of the tunes for the symphony. He added, “I have seen this denied—but it is true.” Certainly on a number of occasions Burleigh sang spirituals for Dvořák, who took a great interest in him as one of the most talented students at the school. Whether or not he gave Dvořák any actual melodies, Burleigh certainly familiarized him with the characteristic melodic types of the spiritual, including the frequent appearance of the pentatonic scale.
The title that Dvořák appended to the symphony—almost at the last minute—has also been heavily interpreted, probably over‑interpreted, in discussions of the work’s national character. The composer’s assistant, a young Czech musician named Kovařik, wrote, “There were and are many people who thought and think that the title is to be understood as meaning ‘American’ symphony, i.e., a symphony with American music. Quite a wrong idea! This title means nothing more than ‘Impressions and Greetings from the New World’—as the master himself more than once explained.”
All in all, then, the American influence seems to be, for the most part, exotic trimming on a framework basically characteristic of the Czech composer. Today, nearly a century after the first performance of the piece, we don’t get so exercised over the question of whether or not the symphony is really American music; the point is moot now that American composers have long since ceased functioning as imitators of European art. Still, there is little reason to doubt Dvořák’s evident sincerity when he wrote to a Czech friend during the time he was composing it, “I should never have written the symphony ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”
One of the most lovable characteristics of Dvořák’s best works is his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh melodic invention. The apparent ease with which he creates naively folk-like tunes conceals the labor that goes into the sketches: refining, sorting and choosing which ones will actually be used, often recasting them in quite substantial ways from first idea to end result. Still, Dvořák does not agonize over the invention of thematic ideas so much as he worries about how to link them together. (His occasional uncertainty at this stage of building his movements shows up sometimes in the sketch‑drafts, where he may break off precisely at the linking of themes for further preliminary sketching.)
After a slow introduction that hints at the main theme, the horns play a soft, syncopated fanfare over a string tremolo. This theme is one of several that will recur throughout the symphony as one of its main unifying elements. The dotted rhythmic pendant to the horn figure leads the harmony to G minor for a theme of narrow compass (introduced in flute and clarinet) over a drone. This in turn brightens to G major and the most memorable moment in the Allegro: a new theme (perhaps an unconscious reminiscence of Swing low, sweet chariot) presented by the solo flute in its lowest register; the first four notes of this tune, too, will recur many times later on.
The two middle movements, according to Dvořák, were inspired in part by passages in The Song of Hiawatha. The slow movement was suggested by the funeral of Minnehaha in the forest, but at the same time Dvořák instilled a deep strain of his own homesickness for Bohemia (perhaps it is no accident that the text that afterward came to be attached to this melody was “Goin’ home”). The introduction to the slow movement is one of Dvořák’s most striking ideas: in seven chords he moves from E minor, the key of the first movement, by way of a surprising modulation to D‑flat, the key of the second movement. A similar chord progression, though not modulating, reappears at the close to frame the movement.
Dvořák’s image for the third movement was the Indian dance in the scene of Hiawatha’s wedding feast. This must refer to the dance of Pau‑Puk‑Keewis, who, after dancing “a solemn measure,” began a much livelier step:
Whirling, spinning round in circles,
Leaping o’er the guests assembled,
Eddying round and round the wigwam,
Till the leaves went whirling with him...
but it is nearly impossible to find anything that could be considered “Indian” music in this very Czech dance. The whirling opening section has the same rhythmic shifts and ambiguities as the Czech furiant, and the remaining melodic ideas are waltzes, graceful and energetic by turns.
The last movement is basically in sonata form, but Dvořák stays close to home base, harmonically speaking, and uses surprisingly square thematic ideas. Recently, scholar Michael Beckerman has shown that it is possible read Longfellow’s poetic account of the climactic battle between Hiawatha and his arch-foe Pau-Puk-Keewis rhythmically in time to the music of this opening section, and he suggests that this poetry was clearly in the composer’s mind as he wrote. Toward the very end, elements of the three earlier movements return in contrapuntal combinations (most stunning of these is the rich chord progression from the opening of the second movement, played fortissimo in the brass and woodwinds over stormy strings). Somehow in these closing pages, we get the Czech Dvořák, the Americanized Dvořák, and even a strong whiff of Wagner (for a moment it sounds as if the Tannhäuser Venus is about to rise from the Venusberg), all stirred into a heady concoction to bring the symphony to its stirring close.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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