Category: On Music

One of Leonard Bernstein’s main self-appointed missions in life was the advancement of new American music. As comfortable as he was in the orchestral repertoire all the way back to Mozart, Bernstein saw it as his duty to stand up for modern music as well, and particularly modern American music at that. He felt strongly that it was essential for American concert music to move beyond the rigidity of the forms already over a century old that sprang largely from the Germanic symphonic approach, and that American music was, in terms of a nationalistic school, actually in its infancy, roughly on par with where that old Germanic tradition had been not at the end of the 19th century, but at the end of the 18th.

One composer Bernstein championed was William Schuman, an academic and arts administrator who was overwhelmed as a young man by a Toscanini-led concert of the New York Philharmonic; at that concert he decided to be a composer. Over his long life (1910-1992), Schuman generated a large body of work, much of which is highly-regarded.

This piece, the American Festival Overture, was written for a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of American music led in 1939 by Serge Koussevitzky. Bernstein would later lead this work frequently, and include it in recordings, such as this by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (The performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring from this same album is simply the best recording of that wonderful piece I’ve ever heard.)

Of this piece, Schuman himself wrote:

“The first three notes of this piece will be recognized some listeners as the “call to play” of boyhood days. In New York City it is yelled on the syllables “Wee-Awk-Eee” to get the gang together for a game or festive occasion of some sort. This call very naturally suggested itself for a piece of music being composed for a very festive occasion. From this it should not be inferred that the Overture is program music. In fact, the idea for the music came to mind before the origin of the theme was recalled. The development of this bit of “folk material” then, is along purely musical lines.

“The first section of the work is concerned with the material discussed above and the ideas growing out of it. This music leads to a transition section and the subsequent announcement by the violas of a Fugue subject. The entire middle section is given over to this Fugue. The orchestration is at first for strings alone, later for woodwinds alone and finally, as the Fugue is brought to fruition, by the strings and woodwinds in combination. This climax leads to the final section of the work, which consists of opening materials paraphrased and the introduction of new subsidiary ideas. The tempo of the work, save the last measure, is fast.”

(from WiseMusicClassical)

Here is the American Festival Overture by William Schuman, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Reinhold Gliere was a Russian composer who lived long enough to stop being a Russian composer and become a Soviet one. He was born in 1875 and lived to 1956, almost exactly contemporary with Joseph Stalin. As the last living exemplar of nationalist Russian classical music, Gliere was able to avoid the various artistic purges and seemingly random shifts in taste handed down by Stalin.

Gliere is, admittedly, not always my cup of tea. Some years ago the Buffalo Philharmonic performed his Third Symphony, a gigantic work purporting to tell the life of a particular Russian hero (“Ilya Muromets”), a work that apparently has its devotees. I couldn’t get through the whole thing. Gliere and I are not on the same page, apparently…but I do like this particular orchestral poem quite a bit. Called The Sirens, it seems to me to have very little Russian character at all; to me this is much more the sound world of French impressionism. I hear, in this piece, not the echoes of the Tchaikovsky’s and the Balakirevs and the Borodins of the world, but rather the Debussys and the Ravels. The work shimmers and seems at times to be approaching a melody without quite getting there, in what must be a simulation of what the sailors heard in those voices luring them off their ships.

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Sometimes it’s interesting to compare performances by the same conductor, but separated by decades. Here we have Leonard Bernstein conducting his own Overture to Candide, which is likely the most enduring of his own works. The first performance is from one of the Young People’s Concerts he did in 1960 with the New York Philharmonic, while the second performance is with the London Symphony Orchestra in late 1989, less than a year before Bernstein died. These kinds of comparisons allow a peek into the development of an artist’s mind from different vantage points of their careers. Which do you prefer?

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Ugh! I don’t know why this didn’t publish. I could swear I clicked the right thing on here. Anyway, this should have run the day before yesterday. Admittedly, this is one of my “Fallbacks because I’ve been having a busy week” kind of Tone Poem Tuesdays, but the thing should have at least gone live on the site! Here’s the post, as originally written:

Busy! So, here’s Rossini.

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