MTT makes his triumphant return to the New World Center podium to join Fellows in celebrating the composers who established the American sound. Charles Ives conjures musical vignettes of American life, like sweetheart strolls, Fourth of July picnics and war. NWS alumnus and Principal Trumpet of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Billy Hunter returns to perform Aaron Copland’s introspective Quiet City.

 

NWS thanks its 2020-21 donors.

 

Program

William Grant Still

Patterns for Orchestra (1960)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

After studying at a historical Black college in Ohio, William Grant Still got his professional start arranging songs for the bandleader W. C. Handy, i.e. “The Father of the Blues.” Still went back to school at Oberlin College to refine his skills in theory and counterpoint, and he kept seeking out mentors for private composition lessons even as his career in music theater progressed admirably. Having earned a spot as the oboe player for the show Shuffle Along—the first Black musical to play in white theaters—Still used the production’s long run in Boston to study with George Chadwick, an esteemed composer and the director of the New England Conservatory. (Still, incidentally, taught himself oboe in addition to piano, violin and cello.)

In the early 1920s, while scraping by from gig to gig arranging scores for short-lived Broadway shows, Still found his most important teacher in Edgard Varèse, an avant-garde French composer based in New York who “taught me to be independent,” as Still recounted in a biographical note. Varèse also used his platform as the founder of the International Composers’ Guild to promote Still’s early experiments with concert music.

In 1931 Still became the first Black composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, and he went on to write five major symphonies in addition to a number of suites and smaller orchestral works.

Patterns, a suite of five short orchestral movements composed in 1960, points to Still’s continual evolution as a composer. Traces of jazz harmonies remain, but the lyrical folk melodies and quasi-spirituals of earlier scores are broken down into essential gestures and insistent repetitions. Still was picking up on the same trends that fueled experimental music from the likes of John Cage and Morton Feldman in New York (inspired by their abstract expressionist painter friends), and his use of cyclical patterns foreshadowed the minimalism movement that soon emerged among a group of San Francisco renegade composers. One trait that distinguished Still, even at his most unconventional, was that after a lifetime of composing and arranging music meant to make large ensembles sound their best, his use of orchestral instruments was impeccable, transmitting each subtle detail with clarity and beauty.

Conlon Nancarrow

Prelude and Blues for Solo Piano (1935)
Approximate duration: 4 minutes

The American composer Conlon Nancarrow spent the most significant years of his career in Mexico, living in obscurity and working with single-minded focus on a series of contrapuntal studies that could only be executed by mechanical player pianos. First, though, he tried his hand at writing for conventional instruments; his taste for rhythmic layering and counterpoint was already evident in his very early works, including the Prelude and Blues for solo piano written while he was living in Boston studying with some of America’s most respected composers. Nancarrow had played jazz trumpet in high school, and his compositional voice owed much to jazz piano titans including Art Tatum and Earl Hines. Echoes of their “stride piano” techniques can be heard most clearly in the lumbering bass line and clustered chords of the Blues movement.

Aaron Copland

Quiet City (1939-40)
Approximate duration: 10 minutes

Aaron Copland, born in Brooklyn into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants, received his most significant training in Paris, where he studied with famed pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. After a decade spent mining the European styles of Stravinsky and his younger French colleagues, Copland finally found his mature compositional voice in the late 1930s, and he initiated a vital new chapter of American music in the process. In the orchestral essays El Salón México and An Outdoor Overture, and especially in a string of ballet scores—Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring—Copland used the expansive American landscape as fodder for a bright and spacious approach to orchestral music.

In that same transformative stage, Copland accepted a commission in 1939 to write incidental music for Irwin Shaw’s Quiet City, which centers on a disturbed man and his memories of a trumpet-playing brother. The experimental play closed after only two preview performances, despite the effective music by Copland for a jazzy ensemble of clarinet, saxophone, trumpet and piano. Copland revisited the music the next year, reshaping it into a short suite for English horn, trumpet and strings. He described in his autobiography that the initial impetus for the trumpet part “was simply an attempt to mirror the troubled main character.” Quiet City dwells in a languid, nocturnal and urban sound world, colored by the dark hues of the English horn and smooth string accompaniments. The trumpet makes one heroic rise toward an affirming climax, but it recedes at the end, when the use of a mute evokes a sense of further distance.

Conlon Nancarrow

Sonatina for Solo Piano (1941)
Approximate duration: 5 minutes

Nancarrow’s support of the Communist Party led him to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War to fight against the fascist regime, and his strong political views were part of what prompted his move to Mexico in 1940. He found it near impossible to express his musical point of view through scores written for performances on conventional instruments, as he discovered with his Sonatina from 1941, which no pianist of his day could perform in the form it was written. (Nancarrow eventually authorized an arrangement that the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff made for four hands.) Like the player piano experiments that followed soon after, each movement of the Sonatina is a short and dense exploration of a particular sonority or combination of notes. Demonstrating his penchant for strict counterpoint, Nancarrow constructed the finale as an exacting fugue, but with hyperactive musical material that gives the impression of a boogie-woogie improvisation.

Carl Ruggles

Angels for Muted Brass (1921; 1938 revision)
Approximate duration: 3 minutes

Carl Ruggles was born into a family that had been prominent in Massachusetts since Colonial times, and his childhood in a fishing village imbued him with those traits of individualism and self-reliance so closely associated with New England and its Transcendentalist philosophers. He became a good enough violinist as a teenager that he could gig in theater orchestras in Boston and play chamber music with symphony members, and in his 20s he published his first songs while also working at a publishing house and freelancing as a music critic and lecturer. He married and spent an unremarkable decade in Minnesota, until he finally moved to New York in 1917.

Angels, originally composed for six muted trumpets in 1920-21, was one of the first works that crystallized Ruggles’ mature viewpoint as a composer, and it came at the time when he was finally, in his mid-40s, finding his place among America’s musical mavericks. He earned the support of Edgard Varèse (whose International Composers’ Guild gave the premiere of Angels in 1922), began publishing works through a journal printed by Henry Cowell, and struck up a long friendship with Charles Ives. Even surrounded by so many thought leaders, Ruggles stayed true to a unique musical vision rooted in pure polyphony, allowing the sanctity of each horizontal line contribute to harmonies that defy any existing logic.

The music of Ruggles has endured through the efforts of a small but devoted cadre of champions. When Ingolf Dahl conducted a rare performance of a Ruggles work at the University of Southern California, among the audience was the 13-year-old Michael Tilson Thomas, who recalled how the music “seemed to unfold arching and aching lines evoking ineffable shadings that caught longings and sorrows in my throat. I was fascinated.” MTT later sought out Ruggles, then in his 90s and living in a rest home in Vermont, and the up-and-coming conductor went on to make a landmark recording, The Complete Music of Carl Ruggles, released on two LPs (because it is truly that small of a body of work) by CBS Masterworks in 1980. This comprehensive set, now reissued by Other Minds, includes not just the original Angels but also Ruggles’ 1938 revision heard here, with the key transposed and the instrumentation reshaped to use four trumpets and three trombones.  

Charles Ives

Three Places in New England (1911-14; 1929 orchestration)
Approximate duration: 19 minutes

Charles Ives received his earliest musical training from his father, who had served in the Civil War as the Union’s youngest bandmaster before returning to Danbury, Connecticut. The sounds of parade bands and church hymns conducted by his father seeped into young Ives’ musical consciousness, as did their shared experiments with bitonality and other ear-stretching games. He became Connecticut’s youngest salaried church organist at 14, and he went on to enroll at Yale, where his studies with Horatio Parker added a formal, European grounding to his craft and where he branched out beyond church music and popular songs to focus on composing serious art music.

Upon graduating in 1898, Ives moved to New York, worked various insurance jobs and played in churches on the weekends. His unorthodox career began in earnest in 1902, when he withdrew from church work and any other public life in music. Externally, he worked to become one of the most successful dealers of life insurance in the industry. Privately, he composed the first truly American body of serious concert music, applying pioneering techniques often years or decades ahead of the musical establishment and drawing on the songs and hymns he loved. When he wrote his last new piece in 1926, hardly anyone knew his music even existed. Beginning in the 1930s, champions including Cowell, Copland and Bernstein rallied behind Ives, and his music finally reached the public after decades of obscurity. He earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his Symphony No. 3, composed 40 years earlier, and heard finally many of his works performed before he died in 1954.

Some of the material that become part of Three Places in New England may have originated as early as 1903. Ives developed the work as a set of three movements, each based on a particular location, and he completed a version for full orchestra in 1914. The score languished for 15 years, by which point Ives had come to the attention of Henry Cowell, a younger American composer sympathetic to Ives’ maverick tendencies. Cowell persuaded the conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, head of the Boston Chamber Orchestra, to program something by this unknown “amateur” composer from Connecticut. Upon Slonimsky’s invitation, Ives undertook a revision of Three Places in New England in 1929, reducing the instrumentation to a chamber orchestra and condensing some of his musical ideas. Slonimsky conducted the first public performance in 1931, at a concert in New York’s Town Hall financed by Ives himself.

Ives titled the reverent first movement The Saint-Gaudens in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment), referring to the monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Boston’s oldest park. The bronze relief sculpture depicts Colonel Robert Gould Shaw on horseback, leading the Massachusetts 54th Regiment—the first African American regiment in the Union army, which suffered heavy losses (including the death of Shaw) while fighting near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1863.

The second movement, titled Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut, pays tribute to the site of a Revolutionary War encampment set up by General Israel Putnam, and it showcases Ives’ penchant for collage-like quotations from well-known tunes, including “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ives recycled much of this music from an earlier composition titled Country Band March, an image that recalls those bands his father used to parade around the town.

The third movement, From the Housatonic at Stockbridge, was inspired by a walk Ives took with his wife, Harmony, on their honeymoon in the Berkshires in 1908. One musical ingredient he borrowed was a 19th-century American hymn tune—“Dorrnance” by Isaac Woodbury—but perhaps the deeper influence over this meditative movement was the philosophy of the Transcendentalists whom Ives so admired, those American trailblazers who taught how self-reliance and communing with nature could be a spiritual practice.

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.