THE NEW WORLD, TO AND FROM

Program Notes

Wood Notes
William Grant Still (1895 - 1978)

William Grant Still, the Dean of African American composers, was born during the shameful Jim Crow era of US history. It was also, however, a golden era for music, where jazz, pop, classical and even film music overlapped. He began violin lessons at age 15, then taught himself to play clarinet, saxophone, oboe, bass, cello and viola. His mother wanted him to be a doctor, so he enrolled in pre-med studies at Wilberforce University. But most of his time was spent conducting the band, composing and arranging. He left his medical studies without a degree and enrolled at Oberlin Conservatory. He then became connected with the Harlem Renaissance, 1918 to 1937, where the music of African-American culture was blossoming. He moved to Los Angeles, where he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, becoming the first African American to conduct his own music with a major American orchestra. He continued his highly successful career, which included nine operas and five symphonies, by arranging for the movies, working for the major film studios. He ultimately severed ties with those studios because of their treatment of people of color. He wrote a song for the 1939 World's Fair in New York but was not allowed to attend the fair unless he came on "Negro Day."

The pastoral orchestra suite, Wood Notes, was inspired by the poetry of Joseph Mitchell Pilcher, a social worker living in Alabama, and by his love of the natural beauty of the American South. Composed in 1947, it had real social significance as a collaboration between a Southern white man and a Southern-born Negro composer.

The first movement of the suite, called "Singing River," was inspired by one of Pilcher's poems about the Coosa River in Wetumpka, Alabama. It has layers of traditional spirituals over impressionistic features, reminiscent of Smetana's The Moldau and Thompson's The River. The music ebbs and flows between dramatic waves and calmer water. The second movement, titled "Autumn Nights," is lighter, opening with solo flute and pizzicato strings. The feeling of lightness continues, achieving periods of jollity and of mystery with the use of muted brass.The third movement, "Moon Dusk," is the slowest of the set, with an elongated opening from the woodwinds. The theme is carried by the woodwinds while swirling strings accompany. Soloists appear: first the oboe, then a soft violin. Still's love of impressionism shows throughout and is used to create the feeling of a whirlpool of sound, then a soft, quiet ending.

The suite premiered in 1948 with the Chicago Symphony and was received by reviewers as having "classical American style woven into the fabric of the piece, with warm melodies and rich texture".

Beryl McHenry

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Cello Concerto in E Minor
Edward Elgar (1857 - 1934)

By the time his Cello Concerto was composed, Elgar had already gained considerable reputation and popularity in the musical community. His Enigma Variations, 20 years earlier had finally gained him the recognition he sought, although he had been composing for many years before that. He had composed a violin concerto 10 years earlier which was well received, but he feared that by 1918 his late romantic style was beginning to bore his listeners. He decided to try something very different.

During the years of World War I, Elgar's health had deteriorated. He was profoundly depressed by the war and had written only a few minor pieces since then. His wife, Alice, suggested a move to the country, where he continued to write some of his most beautiful compositions. The story goes that Elgar underwent surgery for a throat ailment, and while coming out of the anesthesia, he requested pencil and paper and sketched the opening theme of his cello concerto. He completed the work in 1919 and premiered it in London with the London Symphony Orchestra. The premiere did not go well (Elgar felt it had been under-rehearsed), but Elgar made several recordings after that with other cellists. In 1965, Jacqueline Du Pré recorded it and since then the piece has been a staple for solo cellists.

Elgar used an unusual movement plan, one that he had never used before. The first two movements and the last two movements are connected, The work begins slowly with a cello solo, continues at a moderate pace, then moves into the graceful main theme in the orchestra. The cello returns briefly, introduces the second, faster movement. The next set, also slow, uses a cello recitative to ease into the fast and very spirited finale. Earlier themes reappear and the work ends with a last reminder of the main theme.

Critic Donald Tovey writes that the work is "…a fairy tale, full, like all Elgar's larger works, of meditative and intimate passages; full also of humor, which, in the second movement and finale, rises nearer to the surface than Elgar usually permits."

Beryl McHenry

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Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra
Erich Korngold (1897 - 1957)

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a musical child prodigy. He was compared to Mozart early on but was later recognized as one of the most gifted young composers in his own right. His first original works were produced at age eight. His father quickly recognized Erich's phenomenal music abilities and took him, at age nine to meet, and play for, Gustav Mahler. Mahler proclaimed the child a musical genius and directed his further studies. His father privately published three of his son's compositions in 1909 - a ballet, a piano sonata and a character study, and sent them to all the most famous musical authorities of the day. All were reportedly amazed at their originality. Erich began a period of prolific composing and sensational notoriety. Musical authorities at the time called him a "miracle child" and were quick to promote his creations.

By age nineteen, Korngold had become a respected opera and symphony composer, and he began to branch out into other musical genres. He composed incidental music for Shakespeare's plays, worked as director/conductor at the Stadttheater in Hamburg, and added arranging to his resume. When he moved to America to escape Hitler he began to write for the movies, adding a number of classic movie scores to his portfolio. When he died in 1957 at age 60 he left a massive body of works, with more in the planning stages, but felt he had been largely forgotten. As the years passed he has become more and more appreciated. Today his Violin Concerto is part of the repertoire of leading violinists.

The Violin Concerto was composed in 1937, at the same time as he was beginning his film music career. He hoped to return to Vienna and the concert stage there but found during the war years that he could make a better living writing for the movies. The work was enthusiastically received when it premiered in St Louis but was less popular in New York, where critics deemed it "Hollywood" music, ordinary and sentimental. Beginning in the 1960s, when collections of film scores became popular, he was recognized once again for the beauty and opulence of his music.

Korngold's Violin Concerto was a work of love for the composer. In the first movement he uses melodies from his scores for Another Dawn and Juarez. Themes from Anthony Adverse make the second movement more melancholy, and the third movement is based on jaunty music he composed for The Prince and the Pauper. It is the most performed work in his catalogue, prized for its beauty and originality.

Beryl McHenry

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Symphony No. 9 From the New World
Antonin Dvorak (1841 - 1904)

Following a varied and successful career in his native Bavaria, Antonin Dvorak took his wife, his fourteen-year-old daughter, nine-year-old son and a personal secretary on a great adventure. Thy sailed for America in 1892, arriving in September. After twenty-four hours of quarantine at Staten Island they docked in Hoboken, were met by a cheering entourage of dignitaries and Czech immigrants, and spent their first night in "the new world" at a hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan. He spent the next few months teaching and composing, and familiarizing himself with his new surroundings. The Dvoraks enjoyed New York, living simply and quietly, and getting along well with their new neighbors. Antonin particularly loved the Central Park aviary and took the El train to visit once a week. At the end of a year he had fulfilled his obligations to his sponsors and was free to embark upon a labor of love - his ninth symphony.

Its New York premiere in December of 1893 was wildly successful, There was some discussion in musical circles about the authenticity of its "American credentials." After all, Dvorak had been in the US less than a year when the work was competed. He nevertheless declared that he had a thorough understanding of American musical language. The keys to the future of American music were what he described as: "the negro melodies" and "the local color of Indian character."

As with his native Czech music, his American writing consists of original themes, incorporating all the distinctive elements that give a set of tunes their family resemblance. He uses the altered scale characteristic of black songs, the drive toward resolution typical of Western melodies, the emphatic rhythms used by Stephen Foster, and the lilt of the black spiritual. The tunes themselves, however, are wholly Dvorak's. Dvorak wrote to a critic, "But leave out that nonsense about my having made use of original American melodies. I have only composed in the spirit of such American national melodies."

This statement notwithstanding, many listeners have claimed to hear fragments of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in the first movement, and a bit of "Yankee Doodle" in the finale. Many critics do not consider the ninth symphony Dvorak's strongest. It is, however, the most played and most enjoyed by American orchestras and audiences.

Beryl McHenry