Program Notes
Portraits of America
April 26, 2025 @ 7:30PM
April 27, 2025 @ 3PM
Notes by Janet E. Bedell ©2025
“Simple Gifts”:
Shaker Tune from Appalachian Spring
Aaron Copland
(b. 1900, Brooklyn, New York, d. 1990, North Tarrytown, New York)
Thirty-five years after his death, Aaron Copland remains perhaps the most popular of American classical composers. Uncannily, he managed to create music that seems more quintessentially American than that of any of his peers. As he once said, he saw his mission as expressing “the deepest reactions of the American consciousness to the American scene.”
Though he studied music in France and initially followed the most challenging modern idioms, the Great Depression ignited Copland’s sense of musical mission. He became part of a group of New Deal artists clustered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (including Georgia O’Keefe, Ansel Adams, and Hart Crane) who, taking the motto “Affirm America” as their credo, sought to express the American democratic ideal in their art. Copland decided to address his music not to the elite few but to the general music-lover and “to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.”
Undoubtedly, the most enduringly popular work Copland wrote was the ballet score Appalachian Spring, created on commission for the American high priestess of modern dance, Martha Graham. Graham chose the title after a line in Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge,” from which she also drew the ballet’s scenario. Their joint creation was introduced to the world on October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress; the following year, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
In a time when American values were being challenged by totalitarian enemies, Graham fashioned an affirming scenario that extolled the pioneer spirit that built the country. As described in the score, the ballet concerns “a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the 19th century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. … At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.”
Spareness and simplicity are at the heart of this eloquent music and its ability to conjure both the wide-open spaces of the American frontier and the down-to-earth values of the first settlers. Plain harmonies and open intervals of the fourth, fifth, and octave dominate the musical fabric, with complexity saved for the country-fiddling rhythms that propel several dance episodes. The score’s focal point is the song “Simple Gifts,” which Copland found in an anthology of Shaker dance tunes, a utopian sect that flourished briefly in early 19th-century America. Introduced by the clarinet, it is treated to several variations, then sung very grandly by the full ensemble.
Mandolin Concerto
Jennifer Higdon
(b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York; now living in Philadelphia)
Many of today’s composers bring a sensibility to concert music that owes more to rock, jazz, and folk music than to Bach and Beethoven. The brilliantly gifted American composer Jennifer Higdon is one of them. Growing up in Tennessee and Georgia, she recalls that her favorite musicians were The Beatles. “Classical music was probably the least present music in our household … My dad worked at home — he was an artist, which meant there was a lot of music in the background all the time — but normally it was rock and roll or bluegrass or reggae.” However, Higdon’s attraction to playing the flute eventually drew her into the world of classical music.
Now a prolific composer in constant demand by major orchestras and ensembles all over America, Higdon has also managed to pursue additional careers as a virtuoso flute player, a conductor, and for more than 25 years a very popular teacher of composition at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music.
Her former teacher at Curtis, the esteemed composer George Crumb has identified several qualities that make her music special: “rhythmic vitality, interesting coloration, and sensitivity to nuance and timbre.” But beyond that, Higdon succeeds because she is a very original, personal, and emotionally communicative composer whose music, though modern in its techniques, is also immediately accessible and appealing. “My philosophy is simple and basic … the music has to sing — it has to speak — it has to communicate. If it doesn’t, there’s no point.” Therefore, it’s not surprising that her composition blue cathedral (2000) has been reported by the American Symphony Orchestra League to be the most performed contemporary orchestral work of the 21st century.
In recent years, Higdon has created a series of concertos for a wide variety of instruments, some of them rarely featured in this virtuoso genre, and has received a stream of major awards for them. Her Violin Concerto for Hillary Hahn received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music; her Percussion Concerto, Viola Concerto, and Harp Concerto won Grammy awards in 2010, 2018, and 2020 respectively.
However, when the star mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital approached her to write a concerto for his sparkling instrument, she at first hesitated. “Avi worked for years to talk me into doing the concerto. There was this one amazing incident that convinced me. He was coming through Philadelphia, and he called me and asked me to see him in the train station before he left for New York. In the middle of this huge, busy train station, he pulled out his mandolin and started playing Bach. I was so enraptured. After about ten minutes, I looked around and realized that everyone in the station had stopped to listen. That was the moment I knew I had to write the Mandolin Concerto.
“Writing for the mandolin, you first have to think about how to balance it with an orchestra. The orchestra is big, and the mandolin is very, very quiet. With the mandolin, there’s not a lot to sustain the tone.” The player has to strum continually to sustain the musical line. “Counterpoint and musical line had to be there to give us some sort of sense of the instrument. I thought that this was a piece that needed good tunes. And also, because it’s a concerto, you have to have some fast music in there. There are parts where I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s let it rip!’”
Composed in 2020 during the Pandemic, the Concerto had its premiere given in June 2021 by the Munich Philharmonic in Munich, Germany, where it enjoyed a huge success. It is in two substantial movements. Wrote veteran Chicago critic John von Rhein of its American premiere by the Chicago Philharmonic: “The bouncy energy of bluegrass in the second movement is married to the gently rippling lyricism of the first [movement], which is couched in modal-tonal harmonies that, in the first section, hark to the populist Americana of Aaron Copland, his Appalachian Spring in particular.” In the beginning of the intensely beautiful first movement, harp and briefly marimba enhance the mandolin with their complimentary bell-like sounds.
The faster and more virtuosic second movement opens with the mandolinist launching a whirling dance in which bluegrass meets the more exotic sounds of the Middle East. Eventually, this subsides into a slower, more lyrical middle section, which features a haunting trio between the mandolin, harp, and marimba. The tempo increases again, and amid a shifting kaleidoscope of marvelous orchestral and mandolin colors, the music spins to a fast, dazzling finish.
“The Promise of Living” from The Tender Land
Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland’s only full-length opera, The Tender Land was premiered at the New York City Opera in April 1954. With a libretto by Copland’s friend Erik Johns, it is set on a Midwestern farm in the mid-1930s at the height of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the emphasis here is less on the drama of those events and more on the coming of age of the Moss family’s 18-year-old daughter Laurie, as she graduates from high school. Needing help for the spring harvest, Laurie’s mother and grandfather hire two drifters who come looking for work. Laurie falls in love with one of them, Martin. Falsely suspecting that Martin and his sidekick are the men who have been molesting girls in the area, Grandpa Moss orders them off the farm on the night of Laurie’s graduation party. Martin and Laurie decide to elope, but Martin has second thoughts. When Laurie finds the next morning that she has been jilted, she decides to follow her dream and leave home anyway.
In 1956, Copland created a three-movement orchestral suite from the opera’s music, which beautifully expresses the feeling of rural America in an earlier, more innocent time. It’s third movement is the opera’s finale: an orchestral expansion of the vocal quintet “The Promise of Living” that concludes Act I, as the main characters admire the sunset before the party and express their different emotions. It makes striking use of a traditional American revivalist hymn, “Zion’s Walls,” first heard in trombones and low strings midway through.
“Giggling Rapids” from The River
Edward Kennedy “Duke Ellington”
(b. 1899, Washington, D.C.; d. 1974, New York City)
In 1969 Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington returned to Washington D.C. to receive the rarely conferred Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Nixon. The occasion was a triumphant return for a native son, for in 1899 Ellington was born in that city and his father had been a butler at the White House. He began piano lessons at age seven and made his professional debut at 17. At the urging of Fats Waller, he moved to Harlem in 1923 with his band, The Washingtonians. By 1927 he and his ensemble — now called the Duke Ellington Band — had reached Harlem’s famed Cotton Club where they reigned as Harlem’s leading jazz band until 1932. Ellington’s first concert tour of Europe in 1933 spread his fame internationally, as did his hundreds of recordings and radio, film, and television appearances.
Today, 126 years after his birth, Duke Ellington is widely acclaimed as the greatest jazz master America ever produced. He was certainly among the most prolific — creating so many three-minute instrumental pieces (timed to fit on the old 78 records), popular songs, film scores, large-scale concert suites, musical comedies, and even an opera that they numbered some 2,000 works.
However, sheer productivity was not what made Ellington great; far more important were his originality and his superb taste. Though he’d detested his childhood piano lessons, he became a master pianist. Even more important was his ability to motivate and blend the talents of all the musicians in his band, fusing them into the most sophisticated and adventurous sound in big band jazz. As a composer, he was largely self-taught — relying on his remarkable gift as a melodist and his refined ear for instrumental color and harmony.
By the 1940s, Ellington had no more worlds to conquer in the world of big band jazz. From then until the end of his life, he devoted his most intense creative energies to composing many extended or multi-movement concert suites, which married jazz with symphonic techniques and ambitious extra-musical programs
Combining influences from both jazz and classical music, The River is one of Ellington’s most ambitious and beautiful scores. It was commissioned by the American Ballet Theater as a ballet score for the great African American choreographer Alvin Ailey and was premiered at Lincoln Center in June 1970; today it remains an active repertoire piece for ballet companies around the world. Described by Ellington as a work “celebrating birth, life and rebirth,” it traces the flow of a river from its source to the sea and uses that transit as a metaphor for how human beings change over the course of their lifetimes. It was also edited down to a seven-movement concert suite, whose third movement, “Giggling Rapids,” appears on tonight’s program.
Symphony No. 2 “Romantic”
Howard Hanson
(b. 1896, Wazoo, Nebraska; d. 1981, Rochester, New York)
Though he never achieved his universal fame, Howard Hanson had much in common with Leonard Bernstein. Both were the sons of immigrants: Bernstein’s parents from Russia and Hanson’s from Sweden. Both were esteemed conductor-composers, and both were educators, although in that field Hanson definitely took the lead since he devoted the greatest part of his career to guiding the next musical generation. For forty years (1924–1964), he was director of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, building it into the leading American music school of that era.
Hanson also developed the Eastman-Rochester Symphony (now the Rochester Philharmonic) into an important orchestra and was often invited to the podiums of America’s premier orchestras. Though he was a musical conservative, he became a tireless champion of American composers, regardless of which end of the creative spectrum they came from. With his orchestra, he produced many recordings of American repertoire.
Somehow Hanson managed to squeeze in his own creative work as well, including an opera and six symphonies. His Fourth Symphony won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Music, but his Second, which he subtitled “Romantic,” is his most popular work. Commissioned by conductor Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony, it was premiered in Boston in November 1930.
The subtitle “Romantic” was more than a name — for Hanson, it was a statement of faith. In 1930, “Romantic” music was out of favor, and the neo-Classicism of Stravinsky and the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg were in. At the time of the symphony’s premiere, Hanson wrote: “The symphony represents … my escape from the rather bitter type of modern musical realism which occupies so large a place in contemporary musical thought. … I do not believe that music is primarily a matter of the intellect, but rather a manifestation of the emotions. I have, therefore, aimed … to create a work that was young in spirit, lyrical and Romantic in temperament, and simple and direct in expression.”
The warm, noble sound of horns — both solo and in quartet — provides the signature color of this symphony, just as these instruments epitomized the Romantic sound throughout the 19th century from Mendelssohn to Tchaikovsky. But as the first movement begins, we hear the woodwinds in a dark three-note ascending motive that forms the slow introduction to this traditional sonata-form movement. When the tempo accelerates, the horn quartet introduces a heroic descending theme. Hanson will use this melody as a motto idea appearing in all three movements. A little later, mellow strings introduce a second theme: a true romantic melody in the style of the 1930s and as warm and relaxing as a favorite easy chair. Keep this tune in mind, too, for it will reappear much later in the symphony.
The tender second movement is yet more melodious and exudes a sumptuously orchestrated atmosphere. The woodwinds create a new theme out of the horns’ motto melody; the relationship becomes more obvious when the horns take over. A middle section re-introduces the ascending three-note motive from the opening, and the horns seize on it as an engine to power a slow, steady crescendo.
Horns launch the finale with a vivacious whoop of fanfares derived from the motto theme, which will be expanded into a an exciting horn-led brass passage at the movement’s midpoint. In its original form, the motto keeps making reappearances, at first discreetly, then more boldly. The music builds to a grand close over pounding timpani; dominating the action is the motto theme in the brass. But just before the end, Hanson can’t resist a last reminiscence of the strings’ mellow “easy-chair” theme from movement one.
