RSO Opens with Gershwin
September 17, 2011
PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven
Ledbetter
JAMES BECKEL
Toccata for Orchestra
James Beckel was born in Marion, OH, in 1948, and lives in Indianapolis, IN. His Toccata for Orchestra was commissioned by a consort of five orchestras, among them the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, which gave the first performance under the direction of Mario Venzago on March 16 and 17, 2007. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (three players), piano, harp, and strings. Duration is about 9-10 minutes.
James Beckel graduated from the Indiana University School of Music and has been Principal Trombone of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra almost since his graduation. He also teaches at DePauw University and the University of Indianapolis. His music—designed to be accessible to American audiences as it reflects gestures, sounds, and ideas that seem notably American, often throws the brass instruments into relief (not surprising, perhaps, since he is a professional trombonist. One of his best-known pieces is the horn concerto titled The Glass Bead Game¸ which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The Toccata is meant, he writes, “to be a miniature concerto for orchestra,” which is to say that it shows off the caliber of the players in every section of a modern orchestra, both individually (such as the solos for flute and clarinet in the middle of the work) to the busy, energetic fugue section. Somewhere in the piece, virtually every instrument has a solo moment.
The term “toccata” was employed in 17th-century Italy to refer to a piece of purely instrumental music—the word literally means “touched”—in contrast to a “cantata” which is “sung.” These “touched” pieces generally involved a fair degree of virtuosity.
The composer learned from a colleague (who had discussed 17th-century music with an Italian organist), that at the time, organists would play improvisatory preludes, often running through a sequence of keys in fourths or fifths, to learn which notes might not be working on a given Sunday morning! For the rest of the service, the organist would remember which keys to avoid.
This remarkable practice interested James Beckel, and he decided to use the idea in his Toccata. He begins with a melodic pattern of fifths that runs through all the notes of the chromatic scale by the sixth measure, and this figure will be the basis for the B theme.
The Toccata is shaped in five major sections: the introduction and presentation of the two main themes, along with a brief development; then a total contrast, presenting a clarinet solo and a section for string quartet. The third section is a kind of fugue started by the bassoons and growing to a percussion section that is very loud and very active with simultaneous contrasting meters. A return to the quiet music brings in the flute playing against an ostinato figure derived from the fugue. The fifth section is a recapitulation and coda.
One of the elements generating excitement in the piece is a 7/8 rhythm first stated by piano, xylophone, flute, and piccolo. This nervous, irregular rhythm reappears in various guises, including the fundamental rhythm underlying the ostinato that accompanies the lyrical flute solo in the fourth section.
James Beckel’s Toccata is a work that demonstrates the technical and expressive prowess not simply of a single instrument but of the entire orchestra functioning as a single, but remarkably varied, organism.
GEORGE W. CHADWICK (1854-1931)
Jubilee, from Symphonic Sketches
George W. Chadwick was born in Lowell, MA, on November 13, 1854, and died in Boston on April 4, 1931. He composed three movements of his Symphonic Sketches, including Jubilee, in 1895, and adding a scherzo in 1904. The first performance took place under the composer’s direction, with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in an all-Chadwick concert celebrating his 50th birthday, on November 21, 1904, in Boston’s Jordan Hall, at the New England Conservatory. The score calls for two flutes (one doubling piccolo), oboe and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, harp, and strings. Duration is about 8 minutes.
Chadwick was for many years the dean of New England composers, a lasting influence on American musical life through his compositions, his teaching of an entire generation of younger composers, and the role he played over the thirty‑three years that he was director of the New England Conservatory, building that institution to a position of national eminence as a full‑fledged conservatory. Of all the New England composers from around the turn of the century, Chadwick was the least “academic” in his music, the heartiest, and often the most American sounding despite three years of academic study in Leipzig and Munich. His graduation piece was an overture called Rip Van Winkle that was played with great success in Europe; it then made its way to Boston and was promptly performed there three times, by three different ensembles, in the same season, surely a record for a new American composition. Four years later (1884) the Boston Symphony gave the first performance of the Scherzo from Chadwick’s then-unfinished Second Symphony. The audience in the hall demanded (and received) an encore, the first ever given by the BSO. A decade later Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony was credited with showing Americans how to use the folksongs and musical characteristics of their homeland in a symphony—but Chadwick, in the Second Symphony, had beat Dvorak to it!
The best‑known work today of Chadwick’s large output is the orchestral suite published in 1907 as Symphonic Sketches, premiered in 1904 and first played in a Boston Symphony subscription concert in February 1908. Most of the work had been composed a decade earlier. The first movement, Jubilee, written in 1895, is a festive evocation of a brilliant public celebration. The rich colors of the orchestra are appropriate enough, given the fragment of verse with which Chadwick prefaces the score:
No cool grey tones for me!
Give me the richest red and green,
a cornet and a tambourine,
to paint my jubilee!
Always something of a prankster, Chadwick concealed the fact that he had written this bit of verse himself by signing it with the purely fictitious initials “D.R.”
At the time of the first performance, H.T. Parker reviewed the Symphonic Sketches for the Boston Transcript, noting that Chadwick “is the most American of our composers, because oftener than with the rest his music and mood sounds distinctively American.” And Chadwick’s own brief comment on the score is interesting, especially since we tend to have a stereotype of the older Boston composers (if we are aware of them at all!) as stodgy, dry sticks‑in‑the‑mud, to whom simple display of humor would be anathema. When he offered to send the score of the Symphonic Sketches to Theodore Thomas for a possible performance, Chadwick remarked pithily, “They are not very serious, but they sound.” Indeed they do.
The Symphonic Sketches, when heard as a whole, make up a full four-movement symphony, though one of a particularly colorful and varied character, since the composer suggests a visual image to go with each movement. (It is worth noting that he was a close friend of many leading American artists of the time. He bought the first painting that Childe Hassam ever sold. As a student he had traveled with some of his artist friends in Europe, and even years later he would sometimes join one of them during the summer for a trip to a beautiful spot where the painter friend would work on a landscape canvas while Chadwick composed alongside him.) This alertness to visual values seems to fill his music as well.
Jubilee opens with a vivid burst of color and energy enlivened by rhythmic play between the written 6/4 pattern and accentuations that make the ear hear it as 3/2. A quieter syncopated accompaniment underlies a flowing theme in the strings, with a hint of a “Scotch snap” in it, providing a transition to a new key with the rich sound of four horns that just might be recalling a phrase from Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” (“G’wine to run all night”)—but it is gone as soon as it appears, to bring in a songful melody tinged with just a hint of nostalgia. Chadwick develops these various themes with a wonderful variety in orchestral color and mood. Just before the end, the theme that seemed to hint at nostalgia returns in a full-blown expression of poignancy before the “cornet and the tambourine” send it away with a burst of high spirits.
George Gershwin
Concerto in F
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, NY, on September 26, 1898 and died in Beverly Hills, CA, on July 11, 1937. He composed his concerto in the summer of 1925 on a commission from the New York Philharmonic and played the solo part himself at the premiere under the direction of Walter Damrosch on December 3. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani plus three percussionists, and strings. Duration is about 31 minutes.
Had Gershwin lived even a normal lifespan, rather than being cut off in his prime by a brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight, who knows what musical marvels would have been created from an extended life of brilliant musicianship and imagination? But that is the kind of second-guessing we offer for other musical geniuses whose lives were far too short—Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Bizet, none of whom reached the age of forty. And as with them, we also celebrate Gershwin’s far-too-brief life because, in spite of its brevity, his creativity left an astonishing wealth of riches. He remains unique among American composers.
After all, Gershwin did something that no other composer has managed to do so easily and so well: he spanned the two cultures of classical and popular music in America, crossing a chasm that had begun to open up in the middle of the 19th century, when composers had to choose whether they wanted to be popular (and, with luck, get rich) or to be taken seriously as artists (though that probably meant starving in self-respect). They might address an audience in the hundreds in the concert halls, or they might reach millions via the popular theater, sheet music, and later recordings, radio, and television.
Before Gershwin only two composers—John Philip Sousa and Victor Herbert—had a considerable degree of success in more than one musical arena, but the world has persisted in linking them especially to the march and the operetta. And since Gershwin showed the way, other composers, like Morton Gould, Leonard Bernstein, and André Previn sought success in different areas. They were talented creators who have left much wonderful music. But none of them, before or since, created a full body of music that is so consistently welcomed from Broadway to the Met, from “Your Hit Parade” to Carnegie Hall.
Gershwin’s talent was recognized early. By the time he was twenty-one he had written his first full Broadway score (for La, La, Lucille, 1919) and the following year his song Swanee became a sensational hit for Al Jolson and remained his number-one money-maker for the rest of his life. Clearly he was destined to become a “popular” composer. But even then he composed a a short opera called Blue Monday, sung by African-American performers to the cheerful, empty-headed Scandals of 1921, a revue produced by George White. The audience was not prepared for a serious musical-dramatic number ending in murder as part of their light entertainment, and Blue Monday was dropped after a single performance. But it showed that Gershwin was interested in more than the thirty-two bar song form and led Paul Whiteman to commission a work for his “Experiment in Modern Music.” The result was Rhapsody in Blue, and it made history. Suddenly, out of the world of American popular music, there was a piano concerto that could swing and snap its fingers.
The Concerto in F would never have been written but for the success of Rhapsody in Blue. Even though that work was loose-limbed in its architecture (as befits a rhapsody), it demonstrated Gershwin’s ability to write a piece much larger than a popular song, so when the New York Philharmonic offered a commission for a genuine full‑scale piano concerto, he accepted. Now he had to demonstrate his mastery of a traditional classical form. With the apparently brash confidence that was characteristic of him, Gershwin signed the contract for the concerto on April 17, 1925; it stipulated that the piece had to be presented in time for a performance the following December 3, a deadline that might have daunted many a more experienced composer.
Right after that he left for London to supervise a performance of the show Tip-Toes. He later commented that he had picked up a few books in London to learn “what a concerto was,” but this was surely only an expression of nervousness before the premiere. He had taken with him Cecil Forsythe’s Orchestration, which he studied diligently, determined to understand fully the process of orchestration for a full orchestra—and to complete it himself. While in England he sketched a few themes, but only on his return to New York did he start to work on it consistently, completing the first movement on August 27 and the draft of the full work in early October. Work on the orchestration took him until November 10, only three weeks before the premiere.
The premiere attracted mixed reviews, as was often the case with Gershwin’s concert music. From the beginning there were those who called it a “jazz concerto—and those who used the term probably intended to malign the piece with that label. But Gershwin insisted that to label the entire work as jazz was not correct: “I have attempted to utilize certain jazz rhythms worked out along more or less symphonic lines.” Some critics insisted that writing music of this type did not come naturally to Gershwin, and that the strain showed. One of the most negative comments came from Prokofiev, who—possibly in jealousy—complained that the concerto was only “32-bar choruses ineptly bridged together.”
Possibly Prokofiev was referring to the development of the first movement, which is the simplest part of the piece in traditional classical terms. But even there, Gershwin’s key choices are effective and unhackneyed. And there is much else going on; Gershwin creates a series of diverse themes (an opening wind and percussion fanfare, a Charleston motif cited by almost everyone, and a dotted-rhythm arpeggiated figure). In Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin showed his mastery of melodic development. Here he shows his ability to work with two and more melodies simultaneously in a more elaborate and interactive development—precisely the kind of technique that marks a “real” composer.
The slow movement recalls in its long opening melody the sheer melodic grace of Rhapsody in Blue. The movement is in a simple rondo form ABACA, but throughout Gershwin unfolds melodies of warm humanity and anticipates elements to come. This is the movement that took him the longest time to complete and the one that even the most dubious critics at the premier managed to praise.
The finale breaks forth with the lively spirit of a rondo, though it is one with a rather complex layout. Many of the themes are derived and further developed from the earlier movement, simultaneously unifying the overall work and bringing on a virtuosic close.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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