American Strings
Ronald Feldman, Music Director
BARBER Serenade, Op. 1
CARTER Elegy for string orchestra
FOOTE Suite in E major, Op. 63
HIGDON String from Concerto for Orchestra
GRANT STILL Danzas de Panama
TORKE December
ZAIMONT Elegy
Concerts will be presented without intermission.
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About the Program
Program Notes by Steven Ledbetter
+ BARBER Serenade
SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981)
Serenade, Opus 1
As a teenager, Samuel Barber demonstrated the range of his musical talents over nine years of study at the newly-founded Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He was an exceptional pianist, a fine singer, and, increasingly, a composer of significance in the development of a strain of American music that composers increasingly sought in the second quarter of the twentieth century. His composition teacher Rosario Scalero did not teach by offering “rules” of composition, but rather by urging his students to study works of the masters to deduce that effective approach to composition. With a student as gifted as the young Sam Barber, this proved an effective approach, reminding him always that the music should “breathe.” Even before he began studying with Scalero, in his middle teens, Barber composed actively, mostly for his own instrument, the piano, or for piano and voice. Songs came naturally to a singer, and his aunt was the great Louise Homer, who included some of his songs on her recitals.
With Scalero, Barber began to work on instrumental genres as well. Among his first such pieces were a violin sonata and the work that he chose to label Opus 1, the Serenade, intended for either string quartet or string orchestra. In 1928, Barber made his first trip to Europe with Scalero and a few other young musicians from Curtis. He spent a good part of the time in France, to improve his already excellent command of the language. He completed the score of Opus 1 that December, when he was eighteen years old. It is a compact work in three movements, in which his teacher recognized several elements of the string quartet of the great Austrian composer of songs, Hugo Wolf. Wolf transcribed his quartet into a work for string orchestra under the title Italian Serenade, which may have given Barber the impetus to suggest that his piece could be played either by solo or multiple strings. aerber’s uncle and frequent advisor, the composer Sidney Homer, wondered why he had chosen the title Serenade. “Are you really serenading and to whom?” He lamented the limitations of titles on pieces of music to something generic like “serenade.” This comment might have induced Barber to include less common titles for later works (such as “Essay for Orchestra” on three later occasions).
Still, the three movements of the Serenade are lyrically expressive, with songful moods. The slow opening of the first movement provides the musical germ to the work with a series of suspensions that suggest sighs. It turns into an allegro section that reworks this opening material compactly and then in a broader span. The slow middle movement includes more musical sighs in a broadly conceived descending scale. The finale is a lively dance that comes closest, in mood and spirit, to the Wolf serenade, though it is entirely original in its material. This score set the path for several of Barber’s future works for strings, eventually culminating in the Adagio for Strings, Opus 11, that became one of the lasting favorites of his output.
+ CARTER Elegy for string orchestra
ELLIOTT CARTER (1908-2012)
Elegy for string orchestra, Opus 3
Elliott Carter is one of the supreme contemporary masters of American music. Much of his work is daunting in its rhythmic complexity, requiring many hearings to clarify and appreciate. Much of his early work, though, is fresh and approachable in its lyrical diatonicism, while at the same time offering insights into the mature composer he became. Carter grew up hearing the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg and other modernists, but he also learned (partly through his Harvard roommate) much of the music of the Elizabethan era and became, at the same time, extraordinarily well-read in subjects ranging from literature to mathematics.
The poignant Elegy was composed for a private concert organized by the League of Composers. In its original form, for cello and piano, the work was performed only once. In 1946 Carter spent a summer at Camp Lanier in Maine, where he encountered a string quartet made up of players from the Boston Symphony. For this ensemble he rewrote the Elegy, preserving the cello line, but substantially rewriting the original piano part. This version seemed to him more successful, and in 1952 he acceded to a publisher's request to arrange it for string orchestra. A still later version, dating from 1961, returns to a solo stringed instrument (now viola) with piano accompaniment, but is otherwise substantially reworked to differentiate the two instruments polyphonically, in much the style Carter had created with his Cello Sonata.
The Elegy expresses a single melodic impulse that grows and builds slowly to a climax, then recedes into tranquility. The independent contrapuntal voices of the different instrumental parts, only rarely imitative, suggest the influence of Elizabethan fantasies for a consort of viols, with many of which the Elegy shares a sober, but delicate, lyricism.
+ FOOTE Suite in E major for string orchestra
ARTHUR FOOTE (1853-1937)
Suite in E major for string orchestra, Opus 63
There was no history of musical talent in Arthur Foote's family, but like so many children of his day, he and his sister were subjected to the usual "civilizing" influence of piano lessons at an early age. Young Arthur took to the instrument with sufficient enthusiasm for his parents to consult the Boston musician B. J. Lang(+) when Arthur was fourteen. This led to his beginning studies in harmony with Stephen Emery at the New England Conservatory. He entered Harvard at the age of seventeen. There he was able to study in the only academic program in composition in the entire country under John Knowles Paine, the dean of Boston composers, the first professor of music in an American university, who quickly became the father figure for all serious composers in this country. Years later, in his autobiography, Foote recalled that experience:
He was not one of the born teachers, but certainly he could give generously. Looking back at some of the fugues, etc., of which I have preserved the manuscripts, I am surprised to find how good the result of our work was. His influence was always for what was strong and good in music.
Despite this study, however, Foote had at first no intention of becoming a professional musician; he was aiming at a career in law. But during the summer after his graduation from Harvard, as a pastime before beginning his legal studies, he went back to B. J. Lang, who had heard him play seven years earlier, for piano and organ lessons. Lang was so encouraging that Foote returned to Harvard for a postgraduate year of study with Paine; in 1875 he was awarded the first master's degree in music ever granted in the United States. He thus became the first important, professionally trained composer to receive his entire training in this country, without the then requisite period of study in Germany. Of course, his musical education was still completely Germanic in its orientation, but that merely means that he learned as composers have always learned by studying the music that spoke most meaningfully to them, and for Paine as well as Foote that meant Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.
Foote spent the rest of his long life (when he died at 84, he was described as "the Nestor of Boston composers") serving Boston's musical life in various capacities: as pianist and organist, chamber music organizer and performer, composer, and teacher. Like most of his contemporaries, he found that the organ loft offered a measure of financial security, since all of the largest churches had elaborate musical programs that revolved around the organist. Foote served as a church organist for some three decades, finally retiring in 1910. Unlike most of his colleagues, he spent very little time in any academic position. For many years he had a private studio for instruction in piano and organ, and he spent a summer as acting chairman and guest lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, but he turned down the offer of a permanent position there. It wasn't until 1921 when he was 68 years old that he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he remained until his death. A bust of Foote by sculptress Bashka Paeff may still be seen at the entrance of Jordan Hall at the Conservatory.
During Foote's earlier years he played in many concerts, usually as the pianist in chamber music performances. He organized a regular series of concerts presenting the repertory for piano trio in the 1880s and also played frequently with Franz Kneisel (for twenty years concertmaster of the Boston Symphony) and the Kneisel Quartet. Through Kneisel "I became aware of a different and higher standard of performance through my work with him in rehearsal. All this has been a matter for deep gratitude." But playing concerts was not his real, compelling interest, and he never felt himself fitted, either by temperament or technique, to devote himself fully to it, though at one period he was playing seventy five concerts a year.
During all these years of varied activities, Foote composed for most of the musical ensembles active in Boston during his day. He wrote pieces for the choral societies that were (and are) active in this city, among them settings of Longfellow's The Farewell of Hiawatha (for men's voices and orchestra) and The Wreck of the Hesperus (for mixed voices and orchestra) which were very popular at the time and would repay revival today. The bulk of Foote's output consists of chamber music, including three string quartets, two piano trios, a violin sonata, a cello sonata (also arranged in an alternative version for viola), a piano quintet, and many smaller pieces.
As an orchestral composer, Foote was somewhat atypical of the Boston group, who generally aimed at full scale symphonies while also writing overtures, suites, and other "lighter" works (among Foote's contemporaries, Paine and Chadwick were especially successful in the genre of the symphony). Foote's lyric style, somewhat less assertive than Paine's and less exuberant than Chadwick's, lent itself rather well to the chamber music repertory. He never attempted a symphony, though he did write a still unpublished cello concerto and a number of smaller works, including an impressive "symphonic prologue" Francesca da Rimini, an overture In the Mountains, the well known Night Piece for flute and strings, the colorful Four Character Pieces after the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and several works for string orchestra. All of these (except the cello concerto) have been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and all enjoyed some popularity in Foote's day (and do not deserve the oblivion into which most of them have fallen). But the Opus 63 Suite for strings, at least, retained a firm foothold in the repertory during Serge Koussevitzky's tenure as music director. It was one of his favorite American pieces; he programmed it in no fewer than eight of his twenty five seasons in Boston and recorded it in the early forties.
The Suite originally consisted of four movements. Foote himself decided to remove a theme and variations movement from the work before publication (though it still exists in manuscript at the Library of Congress).
The three movements that remain are wonderfully varied in mood and gesture and in the treatment of string sonority. The title Suite suggests a Baroque pastiche, an impression reinforced by the fact that the work begins with a Praeludium and ends with a Fugue. But there is nothing drily academic about this songful score. The "Praeludium" takes flight from a descending fifth, B E, in the first violins, a graceful melodic gesture initiating a gradual and beautifully planned rising line. A more vigorous middle section modulates rapidly and leads to the climactic return of the opening theme an octave higher (and doubled in octaves in the first violins). The movement dies away with reminiscences of the opening B E, the last breathed out as a pensive farewell by the cellos at the very close.
The middle movement combines the lightness of a traditional scherzo (here made lighter still by being played pizzicato throughout) with the expressive intensity of a lyric slow movement (which functions here as the contrasting middle section). The closing fugue is anything but academic. The only full fugal exposition occurs at the outset. Thereafter we are treated to a series of varying episodes featuring the interplay of tiny rhythmic motives excerpted from the fugue subject, each time culminating in a single statement of the subject proper. (One of these episodes, for just an instant, plays with the characteristic rhythmic figure that was all the rage in 1907 in the new music known as ragtime that last thing one would expect to hear in a sturdy, Germanic fugue by a cultivated Boston composer!) The final statement, a climactic return to E minor, is fully harmonized in a densely rich scoring ending in a strongly asserted plagal cadence.
(+)These days B. J. Lang is so obscure to most Bostonians as to be hardly even a name, but a century ago he was central to this city's musical life. As Foote summarized it in his autobiography:
Lang was a musician of great gifts and very versatile; a composer of originality, who would have been one of our leading men had he published, and a teacher of incredible activity (when I knew him he was regularly giving lessons from 8.30 to 6). As conductor of the Apollo Club and the Cecilia Society, he brought out an extraordinary number of important works, while as pianist he performed for the first time most of the novelties that came along from 1870 to 1900; for he was eager to know and to show others new and significant developments in music. The most striking individual undertakings were his concert performances of Berlioz' "Damnation de Faust" and of "Parsifal."
Moreover, Lang's daughter, Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867 1972), was also a composer. Her Dramatic Overture was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Arthur Nikisch in 1893, making her the first woman composer to be represented in the orchestra's repertory; a lifelong subscriber to the BSO, she was present in Symphony Hall three days before her one hundredth birthday when Erich Leinsdorf led the orchestra in a performance of her arrangement of the psalm tune Old Hundredth.
+ HIGDON String
JENNIFER HIGDON (1962-)
String from Concerto for Orchestra
Jennifer Higdon is one of America’s most acclaimed figures in contemporary classical music, receiving the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto, a 2010 Grammy for her Percussion Concerto, a 2018 Grammy for her Viola Concerto and, most recently, a 2020 Grammy for her Harp Concerto. Higdon’s first opera, Cold Mountain, won the International Opera Award for Best World Premiere and the opera recording was nominated for 2 Grammy awards. In 2018, Higdon received the prestigious Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University which is awarded to contemporary classical composers of exceptional achievement who have significantly influenced the field of composition. Higdon enjoys several hundred performances a year of her works and her works have been recorded on more than seventy CD’s.
“String” is a sonic celebration of the wonderful sound of the string instruments of the orchestra. From solos to massed playing, and from plucking to bowing, this work romps from beginning to end, rushing headlong into what amounts to a rolling fanfare for the instrument. This work is part of my “Concerto for Orchestra”.
(Program note provided by composer.)
+ STILL Danzas de Panama
WILLIAM GRANT STILL (1895-1978)
Danzas de Panama
The prolific composer William Grant Still was experienced in just about every aspect of music in American life, and his talents were such that he became a pathbreaker in all of them. He was the first Black composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, the first to conduct a major symphony orchestra, the first to have an opera produced by a major opera company, and the first to conduct a white radio studio orchestra. He worked in both "popular" and "classical" styles. After studies at Wilberforce College (which he left without a degree) he worked for W. C. Handy. Later he enrolled at Oberlin Conservatory, where he was encouraged to compose. He played the oboe in theater orchestras (including that for Sissle and Blake's landmark show Shuffle Along) and studied in New York with Varèse. George Chadwick offered him a scholarship at the New England Conservatory and encouraged him to compose specifically American music. He was an arranger for Handy, Paul Whiteman, and Artie Shaw. He conducted the CBS studio orchestra for the radio show "Deep River Hour" in New York, and he worked in Hollywood for films and television (including "Gunsmoke" and "Perry Mason"). Still was a prolific composer in all musical forms, creating a total of five symphonies, nine operas, four ballets, and many other works. His Afro American Symphony was performed by the Rochester Philharmonic in 1931; it marked a breakthrough for serious concert music by black composers.
In a career so long and so marked by prolific creation in every possible medium, it has been difficult to get a firm handle on Still’s full achievement. But with the substantial number of revivals of his work in the year of his centennial, 1995, and a large number of new recordings and reissues of older recordings, it has become clear that he was a composer of extraordinary range, warmth, and color. Whether writing music in a consciously “ethnic” style (Latin American rhythms, African-American spirituals, or even Jewish melodies) or in jazzy arrangements or serious concert works, Still was a master of all he undertook.
Danzas de Panama is a suite of four dance melodies that had been collected by Elizabeth Waldo. Still arranged them first for string quintet, then again for string orchestra. In both versions he was concerned to capture the spirit of the original dances and their Panamanian character, and he did this by calling for special effects from the instruments. The Tamborito is, as its name (“little drum”) suggests, basically a percussive dance, and Still calls for the players to rap with their knuckles on the backs of their instruments. The Mejorana is a dance in improvisatory style usually played by several guitars (in counterpoint) and a three-stringed native instrument similar to a violin; such a combination is easily adapted to the instruments of a string orchestra. The Punto is a graceful dance in 6/8 time with two sections whose names suggest foot movement: Zapateo (“shoe tapping”) and Paseo (“promenade”). The final dance, Cumbia, is the most sensuous of them all and the one least linked in any way to European dance elements. When danced in Panama, the women move through the streets holding lighted candles above their heads, while the men dance around them in an abandoned manner.
+ TORKE December
MICHAEL TORKE (1961-)
December
I remember experiencing a kind of cozy cheer in the early days of winter back in suburban Milwaukee, when, on the rounds of my afternoon paper route, I would anticipate with pleasure the forecast of the season's first snow. The cold and the precipitation never bothered me; I loved the season: young girls wrapped up in parkas with only their bright faces showing, outdoor Christmas lights being strung out on the front lawns, warm meals waiting when I got back home.
Music never literally represents things, but it does evoke feelings, impressions, and sometimes memories. In writing this piece, I noticed that the music that came out didn't just refer to itself—it is my habit to set up certain compositional operations to give each piece its own profile—but that the music seemed to refer to things outside of itself. This is something I discover as I'm writing; it is not that I set out intending to describe the last month of the year through music; rather, the associations creep up on me, as I'm composing.
I had originally called this piece Rain Changing to Snow because at first the listener might hear a kind of musical 'precipitation', a resultant wetness that comes from some of the strings sustaining notes that are moving in the other instruments. And as this develops, the music moves to a more tranquil key, where it sounds as though the rain has turned to snow and there is a strange stillness everywhere.
But to me the music is about more than meteorological patterns. In my goal to write more thematic music which is less process oriented, I believe this music can afford a wide range of responses in the listener. I am against music that is merely cerebral, and I welcome the simple, physical experience of listening, and responding directly, without undue brain circuitry.
(Program note provided by composer.)
+ ZAIMONT Elegy
JUDITH LANG ZAIMONT (1945-)
Elegy for Strings from Symphony No. 2: Remember Me
"In (Symphony No. 2), I've tried to mask nothing, and speak purely in every moment." - Judith Lang Zaimont
In the close-knit yet harmonically luxuriant Elegy, a single long melody begins in measure one and is spun out through the movement in one continuous song. Tonally pristine, the movement has an intentional British cast. Phrases proceed in long arches, and the sense of semi-cadence (‘half-close’) is purposeful, to honor the memory of my aunt, Mildred Barret-Leonard Friedman, who died at too early an age in autumn 1997.
(Program note provided by composer.)
© Steven Ledbetter (Barber, Carter, Foote, and Still notes)
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