Stockport Symphony Orchestra September 2021
Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990): A Lincoln Portrait (1942)
More than any other composer, Aaron Copland’s music is inextricably associated with his native America. His most popular works readily conjure imagery of expansive prairies, and so it is easy to forget that his formative years were spent studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After finding that his modernist style was not overly successful at paying the bills, he pragmatically adopted a more accessible style, making the 1940s a period of relative security as his populist works filled concert halls. After the war, his attentions would return to Europe and the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg, though he also found success in conducting.
In 1942, half a century after Dvořák set out to write an American symphony, and amid the tumult of war, Copland received a commission from the Russian-American conductor André Kostelanetz to write a work capturing the ‘magnificent spirit of our country’. Copland’s piece was one of three commissioned for the same purpose, along with Virgil Thomson’s The Mayor La Guardia Waltzes and Jerome Kern’s Mark Twain - Portrait for Orchestra. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kostelanetz rejected Copland’s initial suggestion of using Walt Whitman as the subject in favour of a more political figure.
The music is divided into three parts: an expansive slow passage (Lento), a lively Allegro, and a third in which the orchestra accompanies Lincoln’s words. Of the first, Copland wrote that ‘I hoped to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln's personality… [and] something of his greatness and simplicity of spirit’. In alluding to sudden death, the folktune On Springfield Mountain is quoted near the end of the section, recounting the abrupt death of a boy following a rattlesnake (‘Pesky sarpent’) bite. The Allegro uses another contemporary tune, Camptown Races (already used in 1909 for the finale of Charles Ives’ second symphony), to ‘Sketch in the background of the times he lived’. This leads directly into the work’s final passage, in which more sober music accompanies narration of Lincoln’s words. Here, wrote Copland, ‘My sole purpose was to draw a simple but impressive frame about the words of Lincoln himself’. The texts are taken from speeches including State of the Union addresses, debates and the Gettysburg Address. Prominent narrators since the first performance have included Neil Armstrong, Bill Clinton, James Earl Jones, Tom Hanks, Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher.
Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990): Billy the Kid Suite (1939)
Although Copland’s output includes symphonies, concertos, quartets, film scores and ballets, it is the latter which have been most enduringly popular, including Rodeo, Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid. Copland wrote Billy the Kid following a commission from the impresario Lincoln Kirstein. It is one of the first works in his new populist neoclassical style, which he had begrudgingly adopted in the 1930s following ardent opposition to his original modernist voice, above all in the jazzy Piano Concerto. The suggestion of using cowboy songs rankled Copland, though Billy’s origins in New York City persuaded him to spend summer 1938 in Paris with a bundle of cowboy tunes. The ballet was immediately popular; Copland later remarked drily that ‘It was after Billy, when I was almost forty years old, that my mother finally said the money spent on piano lessons for me was not wasted.’
Shortly after the ballet’s premiere in Chicago, Copland created the orchestral suite which we hear tonight. The suite retains a significant majority of the music from the ballet (as well as its storyline), condensed into seven sections. The Open Prairie readily conjures images of the vast expanses beyond the frontier of westward migration. An abundance of cowboy tunes appear in the bustling Street in a Frontier Town, including ‘Great Grandad’, ‘Come Wrangle Yer Bronco’ and ‘Git along Little Dogies’. A drunken brawl breaks out, and after Billy’s mother is shot in the crossfire, he immediately stabs her killer. The music immediately becomes more sparse and lonely for Card Game at Night (featuring ‘Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie), before violence again erupts in the Gun Battle as the Sheriff tracks Billy down with a barrage of timpani and trombone explosives. The Celebration depicts a rowdy thigh-slapping dance in the local saloon after the outlaw is captured, before a sentimental portrait of Billy’s Death. Finally, The Open Prairie returns to bookend the work in spacious grandeur.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Symphony No. 9 in E minor Op. 95, From the New World (1893)
At the height of his powers in 1893, Dvořák attracted a salary equivalent to around £250,000 as director of the US National Conservatory of Music. There was a simmering awareness of a lack of musical heritage in the ‘new world’, and so Dvořák’s principal task was to lay the foundations for such a tradition by writing an expressly American symphony. He was perfect for the job: bucolic in his Bohemian roots, egalitarian in outlook, and a cultural nationalist above all. When the New York Philharmonic commissioned the symphony, Dvořák wrote that ’The Americans expect great things of me…to show them to the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music.’ On creating a national voice, he later wrote that ‘The future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.’
During his travels in the early 1890s, Dvořák familiarised himself with a smattering of American-Indian and African-American folk music. He was already familiar with Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, and the adventures of the eponymous Native American hero provide the inspiration for the symphony’s inner movements. Although much of the symphony readily conjures images of the Mid-West, the only identifiable folk tune quoted is a strain of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Elsewhere there is widespread use of the pentatonic scale (that which omits the fourth and seventh notes of the scale), which the composer noted to be common to African-American, Native-American, Czech, and, interestingly, Scottish music.
In hindsight, it was remarkably enlightened of both Dvořák and his New York commissioners to choose and endorse such music as the foundation of American classical music. As late as 1890, the massacre of some 300 Lakota Native-Americans, mostly women and children, took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for which US forces were rewarded with Medals of Honour. Three years later, Dvořák’s ground-breaking symphony was derided as ‘barbaric’ and ‘negrophile’ in the altogether more Anglo-Saxon Boston. Fortunately, it was rapturously received in New York, already an ethnically diverse city.
The first movement (Adagio – Allegro molto) opens with a slow introductory theme, given by the cellos and then flute, before some violent timpani outbursts precede a dramatic pause. The principal theme is then given, initially by the horns and then by the full orchestra. A dancing woodwind motif acts as bridge into the distinctly Slavonic second theme, which is subtly passed around the orchestra. Dvořák’s melodic generosity then gives us the only apparently unoriginal theme in the symphony, a soft and atmospheric variation on Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. After the repeat, the early themes are developed in an unsettled, skittish passage. It takes a decisive reassertion of the Swing Low theme by the horns to find a solution, before the movement closes in a blaze of brass and timpani.
The famous cor anglais melody of the Largo has variously been misappropriated for ersatz spirituals and bread adverts. Dvořák attached this theme to chapter ten of Longfellow’s poem, depicting Hiawatha’s journey home with his new wife, Minnehaha. The subsequent processional passage evokes her death and funeral. The movement’s climax provides a momentary bright climax, in which hints of the first movement are heard again, before the cor anglais melody reappears. Finally, the music is passed between progressively small numbers of string players, eventually leaving just a solo violin and cello. The melody chokes on itself, much like the funeral march in Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, before a reappearance of the soft brass chords which bookend the movement.
The Scherzo, Dvořák wrote, ‘Was suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance’. It is an energetic flurry, demonic in places, interrupted only by an attractive trio. The coda gives an ominous warning in the form of distant horn calls recollecting the first movement. In the Allegro con fuoco finale, Dvořák shows his masterly abilities in uniting several motifs from each movement of the symphony, alongside a striking motif first heard in the horns and trumpets, and a more lyrical and free-flowing second theme given to clarinet and low strings. The quick tempo continues unabated, the music becoming progressively more skittish and unsettled as the cellos and violas search for resolution. The music is tossed between lyricism and storms; though the latter appears to find the upper hand in the music’s last pages, the bright sounds of E major are suddenly won via a monumental effort for the whole orchestra. After a discordant cacophony as the principal themes from the two outer movements struggle against each other, the final word in Dvořák’s symphonic career is a quiet one.