An American Sampler
The Sixth Annual Benefit for The Hospice of Cambridge
Saturday, March 27, 1999 at 8:00 pm.
Charles Fussell
Mists (1997)
Kurt Weill
Kiddush
Charles Ives
Down East, Sixty-seventh Psalm, Circus Band
Samuel Barber
To be Sung on the Water, Reincarnations
Irving Fine
The Choral New Yorker
Norman Delo Joio
A Jubilant Song
Cole Porter
In the Still of the Night, arranged by R. Hunter
Ernst Bacon
Last Train, from A Tree on the Plains
Stevedore's Work Song
Ragged Leevy, arranged by D. Morrow
African-American "Spirituals"
Deep River, arranged by Alice Parker/Robert Shaw
Ride the Chariot,arranged by William Henry Smith
Texts and translations
Program Notes
Cultural diversity has been a hallmark of the United States since its beginnings. And the broad range of the music our country has produced from its earliest days reflects this rich palette of ethnic and cultural influences. The program we offer tonight merely skims the surface of this "melting pot," yet it affords a glimpse of a number of stylistic divergences and resonances.
Irving Fine's small but precious legacy of compositions is one of the real treasures of American music. Its shameful neglect for many years now seems to be abating. Few other American composers so felicitously combine an almost Ravel-like delicacy and love of detail and craft with a real "American-sounding" harmonic syntax and gift for melody. A revered teacher at Harvard and later at Brandeis, Fine's life was tragically brief. He died unexpectedly in his 48th year, on the brink of an important breakthrough to the world's symphonic stage with his masterful Symphony 1962 just premiered by the Boston Symphony.
For his 4-movement suite The Choral New Yorker, Fine selected poems of varying levels of seriousness from early issues of The New Yorker magazine to set to his unique and meticulously crafted music. First is "Hen Party," by Peggy Bacon,* a sly and somewhat bitchy description of a gathering of females "of a certain age" portrayed as a coven of witches. Fine's music is both affectionate and downright dissonant. Following immediately is "Caroline Million," by Isabel MacMeekin.* The quirky music is almost as demented in its maniacal changes of mood and single-minded obsessiveness as the namesake of the verse. What better portrait of a slightly deranged centenarian than this? With "Pianola d'Amore," by Bostonian David McCord,* we enter the world of highly amusing word-play – nonsense verse on the exalted level found in Lewis Carroll. For this, Fine composed a fiendishly difficult piano accompaniment for the light-hearted men's chorus it enriches – reminiscent possibly of the music performed by the Harvard Glee Club, of which he was accompanist for a time. Fine was an accomplished pianist, and his compositions for this instrument are uniformly demanding.
The suite concludes with "Design for October," by Jake Falstaff.* More than merely a farewell to summer, Fine's music reaches a searing climax near the end, the weight of which underscores that this "Epilogue" is perhaps an epitaph as well.
Charles Fussell – composer, performer, teacher – divides his busy schedule between professorships in composition at Boston and Rutgers Universities, advising and occasionally conducting Collage New Music. His works include six symphonies: Julian (after Flaubert)for chorus, soloists, and orchestra; Cymbeline, a chamber drama after Shakespeare; and Specimen Days for baritone solo, chorus, and orchestra. His chamber opera, The Astronaut's Tale, was premiered in 1997. Mr. Fussell has received Fulbright, Ford, Copland Foundation, and Massachusetts Cultural Foundation grants, and numerous commissions. Mists, for a cappella mixed chorus with soprano solo and set to the poetry of Hart Crane†, was premiered by The New Amsterdam Singers in 1997. This performance by The Spectrum Singers is the first since then. Each of Mists' three brief movements is an elegant miniature, reflecting the color, sound, and meaning of the verse it illuminates. Fussell's care in crafting these superb vignettes is evident in his canny use of rhythm as an expressive device and his gift for rich, tonal portraiture, evident, for example, in his setting of Crane's lines in "October-November," when the moon's "… mad orange flare/Floods the grape-hung night."
Charles Ives is among the most remarkable of American composers. After having been a moderately successful composer in his early days, he abruptly gave up music later in life, and spent his remaining years as an insurance salesman. Due much to the efforts of Aaron Copland, and later, Leonard Bernstein, Ives's music has enjoyed a much-deserved renaissance in the last three decades. The son of a band-master, Ives often imbued his music with snippets of all that he had come to know in his early years. In his Sixty-Seventh Psalm, Ives makes use of what may seem incongruous to the listener – two different keys! Indeed, the tenors and basses begin and end the work in g-minor, while the altos and sopranos sing in c-major. Ives may well have written this work having been influenced by the Danbury, Connecticut choir, about which he had joked as always sounding as if they were singing in two different keys.
Down East, a remarkable work from Ives's self-published book of Collected Songs, is offered tonight in what he described as "unison chant." An uncannily evocative recollection of a long-ago Sunday at the seacoast, Down East offers distant echoes of hymns sung with parlor organ accompaniment surrounded by the shimmering haze of a day dimly remembered. The wide‐ranging piano accompaniment helps create the dream-like mood of this short but poignant evocation of calm and repose – almost as if time had stopped and a window into the past had silently opened.
Circus Band, here offered in a challenging version for piano four-hands and chorus, recalls the composer's youth and the sights and sounds of marching bands and parades. The raucous ending camouflages a tongue-in-cheek exclamation which has become a oft-used mono-syllabic term of denial.
Samuel Barber's short choral song To Be Sung on the Water, dedicated to Florence Kimball, is based on a quiet, off-beat ostinato pattern in the male voices that calls to mind the gentle rocking of boats on a moonlit sea, which, together with strict modal harmonies and paired semichoruses in parallel sixths and thirds, weave a tender web of memorable romantic pathos.
The text of Reincarnations has a double history. James Stephens (1882-1950) was an Irish author writing in English whose output was dominated by nostalgia and melancholy over lost traditional Ireland. Two of these texts are "after the Irish of Raftery," i.e., they are translated and reworked from songs in the Irish language – what we call Gaelic – by the musician/poet Antoine O Reachtabhra, transliterated as Anthony Raftery. Raftery (1784-1835) was among the last of the great blind Irish harpists. Irish culture had a great bardic tradition with no meaningful distinction between song and poetry, and many of the greatest bards were blind. (The traditional self-accompaniment for the bard was the harp.) Harpists wandered from court to court, performing and improvising songs, taking maximum advantage of the elaborate code of aristocratic hospitality. Among the most common genres were songs of praise, the lament, the extended poetic insult, and the vision song. In setting these words to music, Barber restores them to their original purpose, not as poems to be read but as lyrics for song.
Two of the songs in the Reincarnations cycle – "Mary Hynes" and "The Coolin" – fall into the traditional category of love song or praise for a beautiful woman. Note in "Mary Hynes" the repeated use of visual imagery by the blind artist singing of the woman's beauty, and the concluding line "no good sight is good until by great good luck you see the blossom of branches walking towards you, airily, airily." The irony of this line would not have been lost on Raftery's original audience. The second piece is a tribute to Anthony Daly, a martyr hanged in 1820 for leading an agrarian terrorist organization. He was also accused of shooting at another man, a charge he vehemently denied: "If I did, though I have but one eye, I would have hit him." Nonetheless, he was convicted and sent to the gallows. Raftery, who witnessed the hanging, composed a bard's curse on those responsible for the death. Thus the mood is more of retaliation than of mourning, and legend has it that calamity did befall those whom he cursed! Barber makes expressive use of the ancient device of pedal point, with the note E sounded below or above the melody for all but four measures of the piece. The insistence of that pitch and repetition of Anthony's name heightens the impact.
The word coolin, used as the title of the third piece, refers to a lock of hair or "curleen" that grew on a young girl's neck and came to be used as a term for one's sweetheart. Stephens wrote: "I sought to represent that state which is almost entirely a condition of dream wherein the passion of love has almost overreached itself and is sinking into a motionless languor." Barber uses a gentle siciliano rhythm for this old Irish love song, filtered through Stephens's romantic poetry.‡
Ernst Bacon is best known today for his some 250 solo songs, most of which are set to texts by American poets, Whitman and Dickinson in particular. But his several works for chorus are equally well-crafted. Last Train artfully and musically depicts the whistled departure and disappearance in the distance of an old steam locomotive-powered train.
Kurt Weill's brief, rhapsodic Kiddush was written for the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York in 1946. Scored for mixed chorus, cantor, and organ, tonight we offer it in a form we believe the composer might well have approved – chorus, mezzo-soprano, and piano. Piano accompaniment provides a bit more of an incisive propulsion to this occasionally languid composition than organ, and the timbre of the mezzo-soprano voice rather than the traditional male tenor makes for a very rich broth, already seasoned with Gershwin-like lashings of blues-tinged harmonies.
Cole Porter – American playboy, son of a rich industrialist, icon of his time – wrote music – mostly very good music – for the fun of it. A continent-hopping, carefree gadabout, Porter's life and music are symbolized by one of his Broadway show's titles: Anything Goes. Whatever struck Porter's fancy, he could compose a work which would richly embody his subject. In the Still of the Night is a striking example of this – a poignant, pleading song, richly arranged for chorus by Ralph Hunter in 1939. Porter's gifts of complex chromatic melody and his extraordinary skill with writing and setting the English language are very evident here in what is truly one of the great love songs of all time.
Ragged Leevy is a contemporary arrangement of an African-American work song, in this case a stevedores' song from the Georgia Sea Islands. Work songs are highly rhythmic, and traditionally punctuated with a percussive vocal accent meant to be coincident with an expense of energy. A grunted "Huh!" is the sound called for in this example, perhaps uttered as the men passed heavy loads of freight from steamship deck to dock.
Traditional African-American "spirituals" embody some of the most controversial music in American musical history. Despite widely differing perspectives and interpretations, particularly with respect to origins and influences, the spiritual enjoys a deep and lasting impact, covering a spectrum of values and traditions. Many spirituals express the struggle between good and evil forces that blacks have endured throughout American history, both during the time of slavery and in the aftermath of a limited freedom. Many of these songs use Satan to symbolize oppression, and references to Jesus and the Promised Land serve as avenues of freedom from that oppression.
Deep River is thoughtful and reflective – a longing for the days when oppression ceases and relief is at hand. Ride the Chariot is a rollicking work, full of excitement about the coming of judgment day, when God would release his people from the bonds of slavery.
Post-World War II relief and hope for a bright new day are reflected in Norman Dello Joio's ebullient A Jubilant Song. Saucily peppered with high spirits, jazzy syncopations and a virtuoso piano accompaniment, it's very much a child of its time.
– John W. Ehrlich
* Copyright by the F-R Publishing Corp., 1927, 1928 and 1930.
Copyright by Charles Scribner's Sons. All used with permission.
† © 1986 Marc Simon. Used with permission of Liveright Publishing Co.
‡ Program notes for Barber Reincarnations by Clara Longstreth, Music Director, New Amsterdam Singers.
Notes Copyright (c) 1999 by John W. Ehrlich
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