legoru
04-03-2014, 11:20 AM
Rare American classical music with black folk materials (by Henry F. Gilbert and John Powell) or purported jazz—usually ragtime and Jazz Age—materials (by John Alden Carpenter and Adolph Weiss)
John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951)
01. Krazy Kat, ballet for Orchestra (1921) 13:00
Henry F. Gilbert (1868-1928)
02. The Dance in Place Congo, symphonic poem (1906-08) 11:29
Adolph Weiss (1891-1971)
03. American Life, Scherzo-Jazzoso for Orchestra (1929) 5:16
John Powell (1882-1963)
04. Rhapsodie Negre for Piano and Orchestra (1917) 16:18
Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra
Calvin Simmons, conductor (1-2,4)/Lawrence Foster, conductor (3)
Zita Carno, piano (4)
1977, Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc.
https://mega.co.nz/#!oAMQUCIa!lKgZgaie_CNCJh_yEMET8LuZreId9GL8oUEckzg 08Rk
FLAC + COVERS + BOOKLET, 225mb
Henry F. Gilbert (1868-1928) - The Dance in Place Congo
The oldest of our four composers was in many respects the most quintessentially American—an ur-Amerikaner, indeed, as one German critic called him. Certainly he was our music's archetypal plain, rock-salty, crabbed, dryly ribald Yankee maverick—the poor-relation, bad-boy truant from the New England School, thumbing his nose at the establishment. Yet he was properly born in it as a descendant of Bay State colonists of 1631 (maternal side) and 1640 (paternal side).
Although Gilbert may have been as close as we've ever come to a musical Mark Twain, he never succeeded in winning even a remotely comparable status. Nor has his pioneering work yet earned even a belated acceptance remotely comparable to that of his more revolutionary, slightly younger contemporary Charles Ives. For that there were and still are two strong reasons: the lack of empathy with so rowdy a character on the part of the more gentlemanly, pre-dominantly European-oriented musicians and proper Bostonian audiences of Gilbert's time; and, more decisive, the lack of either daring innovation or beguiling richness in his often bare-bones textures and mainly diatonic harmonies. Despite a few years as MacDowell's first American pupil and apart from the largely ideological influence of the Russian nationalist Balakirev, Gilbert was basically self-taught. And given his own porcupine-prickly independent nature and the fact that for much of his life he was on his own, forced to make a hard living often entirely outside music, it is scarcely surprising that his musical training was in many respects eccentric and lopsided.
The Dance in Place Congo was composed as a symphonic poem in 1906-8, after Gilbert had abandoned the Uncle Remus opera, and revised in 1916. When submitted for a Boston Symphony performance, the mighty Karl Muck contemptuously disdained it as “Niggah music.” So Gilbert prepared a ballet version based on the work’s original program, one suggested by an article, also titled “The Dance in Place Congo” (Century magazine, February, 1886), by George Washington Cable (1844-1925), noted author of the once best-selling stories Old Creole Days (1879) and of the novel The Grandissimes (1880), from which Delius drew the libretto for his opera Koanga. Cable’s article, together with its April, 1886, supplementer “Creole Slave Songs,” described, with pictorial and musical illustrations, the Sunday-afternoon revels of off-duty New Orleans slaves in a “no-’count open space [Congo Square] at the fag-end of Orleans Street”—revels that, before they were suppressed in 1844, undoubtedly had some musical influence on the very young Louis Moreau Gottschalk before he left New Orleans for Europe.
Gilbert's score, “dedicated in friendship to Otto H. Kahn” (the financier, who was a patron of the Metropolitan Opera), calls for an orchestra enlarged to include bass clarinet, double bassoon, a third trumpet, tambourine, glockenspiel, xylophone, and a big bell (tubular chime in E flat). It was first performed in its ballet version, with some added dances, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on March 23, 1918. Pierre Monteux conducted then, again in the April 26, 1918, Boston performance of the same production, and in the first performance as a symphonic poem by the Boston Symphony on February 20, 1920 (from whose program notes by the composer I lift the quoted phrases in the following description).
Structurally the score is orthodox, with a “gloomy and elegiac” introduction and coda as “frame or tragic background” for the A-B-A “dances-pictures” body of the work. It opens, Allegro moderato in E minor, with “quasi-barbaric” rhythms and the working-up of first a fragmentary and then a fuller statement of the “poignant cry of rage and revolt” of the Creole slave song “Eh! pou' la belle Loyotte.” The first main section is devoted to a “furious” dance, the bamboula, here in Gilbert's composite of rhythmic and melodic motives drawn from two more Creole slave songs, “Quand patate la cuite na va mange li” and “Musieu Bainjo.” Following the frenzied climax of the bamboula there is a Quasi recitante, deciso transition to the second main section, a lyrical Quasi andante in A flat with calmer, more gracefully lilting variants (flute, oboe, harp, strings, later solo violin) of the “Belle Loyotte” motives of the introduction. Gilbert, more reticent verbally than musically, describes this often quite rapturous section merely as the “more romantic aspects of the picture: love-making, etc.” Its grandioso climax is “rudely interrupted by a sudden and insistent reassertion of the barbaric element”—an Agitato third section redevelopment of, or “free fantasie” on, the two key motives of the bamboula, broken up when the six-o'clock big bell summons the slaves back to their quarters. The coda's grim reminiscences of earlier motives work up to a final Maestoso return of the “tragic cry of the introduction: the cry of racial revolt against slavery.”
It is not at all surprising that music like this, “ripped out in all its triumphant vulgarity,” should have raised genteel eyebrows. And although most of Gilbert's major works were performed at least once, few if any of the performances in his own lifetime did him justice. (“Give me a third-rate American conductor over the best European any day!”, I once heard him plead.) Yet that he could appeal to a wide public was shown by the success consistently scored by his “Pirate Song” (“Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest”) in recitals and recordings by David Bispham, Herbert Witherspoon, ReinaldWerrenrath, and others. And at least one characteristic work by this ur-Amerikaner, the Comedy Overture on Negro Themes, fascinated Russian audiences when Reinhold Gliere conducted it in the first two of a projected series of performances aborted by the onset of war in 1914. And in striking contradiction to the adverse verdicts or sheer obliviousness of both conservative and avant-garde native critics and musicians, there were such shining Gilbertian proponents as Olin Downes and Elliott Carter.
As a fervent partisan of recorded music as well as of Gilbert, I believe that the best of his works—perhaps the present one and his last major composition, the Symphonic Piece of 1925-26, in particular—well might win favor among today's less stuffy home when skillfully presented by empathetic interpreters. Sorely his idiosyncratic expression of the American spirit (“energetic—optimistic—nervous—impatient of restraint—and, in its highest aspects, a mighty protest against the benumbing traditions of the past”) is more potently infectious nowadays than it ever was before.
Personal Apologia: It is only fair to make explicit my bias not only as an admirer of the relatively few Gilbert works I have had the opportunity of knowing well but as a onetime friend who had the privilege of knowing the extraordinary man himself in his last few years of life. That life, as the general public has never known, was in itself something of a medical miracle as well as a paradigm of courage. For Gilbert had to battle not only the usual handicaps of any artist and the special difficulties of so ornery a one as he chose to be but also the burden of a congenital cardiac defect—the tetralogy of Follot, or “blue-baby's” disease, which first cripples and then usually kills its victims at an early age. The Bostonian heart specialist Dr. Paul Dudley White reported Gilbert's case as unique: both because Gilbert, at sixty, lived more than twenty-three years longer than any other known sufferer from the disease and because, despite its typical cyanosis and clubbing of the fingers, he was still able (in Dr. White's words) “to make of his life a great success . . . as a pioneer of American music.
John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951) - Krazy Kat
Like Gilbert and Powell, Carpenter could boast of a very old family tree, in his case rooted in this country's soil by the pilgrims Patricia Mullins and John Alden. Like Ives, he long practiced music only as an avocation: until 1936 he was engaged in a family shipping-supplies business in Chicago, which, however, gave him leeway and the means to study under John Knowles Paine at Harvard, with Edward Elgar for a time abroad, and back in Chicago with Bernhard Ziehn. Yet contemporaneous French Impressionistic styles played a more influential role than his formal studies, and he first established a reputation as a polished craftsman rather than a mere dilettante in his song cycles Gitanjali (after Tagore; 1913) and Water Colors (after Chinese poems; 1918). He was technically proficient even in his first major orchestral work, Adventures in a Perambulator (1915). What made this programmatic suite a unique if minor masterpiece was its delectable blend of fancy and humor in persuasively evoking, without sentimentalizing, a baby's impressions of the world.
It was of course so lively an imagination and sense of humor—all too rare in the world of “serious” music—that enabled Carpenter to recognize the ballet potential of the comic-strip exploits of George Herriman's quixotic Krazy Kat. Composed in early 1921 and first performed as an orchestral piece on December 23 of that year in Chicago, Krazy Kat was first done in its intended ballet-pantomime form, with Herriman's rolling-backdrop pictorial scenery, on January 20, 1922, in New York's Town Hall with choreography—and the role of the eponymous protagonist danced—by Adolf Bolm, Georges Barrere conducting.
Although the work is subtitled a “jazz pantomime” and its relatively small orchestra includes a saxophone and piano and calls for occasional wa-wa trumpet and trombone passages, this is jaunty Jazz Age music rather than true jazz—such as was concurrently flourishing in Carpenter's city if not in his circle (by this time, according to Marshall Stearns, the “hypothetical peak of jazz intensity” had already “shifted from New Orleans to Chicago”). The typically episodic comic-strip story was told in full in the composer's program notes for the original ballet production and later reprinted as foreword to the published piano score and in the Krazy Kat chapter of Gilbert Seldes' Seven Lively Arts. It begins with the awakening of Krazy, for whom there's an expressive theme, from an afternoon katnap; he sights a grand-ball announcement poster and makes a serendipitous discovery of a ballet skirt hanging on a clothesline and of a conveniently dropped makeup kit; he succumbs to the temptation to make use of them while Ignaz Mouse (perky piccolo theme), with his brick at the ready, is frightened off by Offisa Pup; the now warmed-up Krazy does a one-man (or -kat) “zippy but languorous” Spanish dance, complete with castanets; he receives a bouquet of katnip from a mysterious stranger (betrayed by the piccolo as Ignaz in disguise); the soon stoned Krazy abandons all decorum in a “Katnip Blues” dance, at the conclusion of which Ignaz, throwing off his disguise, finally gets to fling his brick. The exhausted, masochistically ecstatic Krazy totters back to the base of his napping tree as Offisa Pup, swinging his club, passes by again. “The moon comes out. Krazy sleeps. Krazy dreams. Indomitable Kat!”
The stir this work caused in the dance world led the great Diaghilev to commission Carpenter to write a “ballet of modern American life,” Skyscrapers, belatedly produced at the Metropolitan Opera House on February 19, 1926. It too proved to be more characteristic of the Jazz Age than of jazz itself, but it did include (in its moments of merrymaking “at any Coney Island”) some notably invigorating use of ragtime materials.
After Carpenter retired from business in 1936, he composed even more prolifically, including the grandiose narrator-with-chorus-and-orchestra Song of Faith for the George Washington bicentennial of 1932. But although he was extensively honored (honorary Mus.D. degree, Knight of the French Legion of Honor, Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, etc.), and although his music was widely performed and recorded, none of his later works matched the charm of Adventures in a Perambulator or provoked as much publicity as Krazy Kat and Skyscrapers.
But in all likelihood Krazy Kat’s failure to hold a place in the orchestral repertory is in large part a consequence of the predominance of its visual over its sheer sonic appeals. Now that the score has been completely recorded for the first time, it still demands that listeners do it the justice of simultaneously seeing—actually or mentally—the incomparable Herriman scenes and karacters. The fourteen pages of these that are interleaved in the published piano score are embellished with appropriate thematic illustrations bearing such Herrimanic tempo specifications as jazzando, pizzi-kat-to, kurioso, kantando, and the above-mentioned “zippy but languorous.” Next best is dipping at random into the book collection of Herriman comic strips while reading the pantomime's detailed story in the Seldes Seven Lively Arts.
Adolph Weiss (1891-1971) - American Life
The youngest of our foursome, Weiss was the only first-generation American—born in Baltimore of German parents, which well may have influenced his becoming a professional orchestral player as well as (for his time) avant-garde composer. He was only sixteen when he became first bassoonist of the Russian Symphony in New York. His later affiliations included posts with the New York Philharmonic under Mahler, the New York Symphony under Damrosch, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (It is tantalizing to guess what Gilbert, Carpenter, and Powell works he may have played in and what he thought of them.)
As a composer he became, after preliminary studies at Columbia University and in Chicago, the first American-born pupil (1924-27) of Arnold Schoenberg. Some, if by no means all, of his later works were written in the Schoenbergian twelve-tone system; all of then reportedly were first notated in a numerological technique all Weiss’s own—a forerunner of the more elaborate no note notation schemes of later, more revolutionary composers. Yet although Weiss's music, like Schoenberg’s, was generally considered unduly cerebral, it often had not only poetic connotations but distinctive poetic expressiveness. Witness his probably most widely successful work, the 1931 Air and Variations for large orchestra, which in its so far only recorded version won an accolade from the authoritative Alfred Frankenstein: ''I know of no American twelve-tone piece, at least on records, that is as moving and eloquent as this.”
Weiss’s American Life was originally (1929) described as a scherzo for large orchestra: later, (on its 1932 publication in Henry Cowell's New Music Orchestral Series) it was subtitled, jocosely no doubt, a “Scherzoso Jazzoso.” It has no explicit program (or at least none ever was revealed), but the composer's apodictic intention must have been to express musically the high-voltage tensions, restlessness, and motoric drives of contemporary urban life in this country. The work was first performed by the Conductorless Orchestra in New York on February 21, 1931, later in Paris on June 6, 1931, in a Nicholas Slonimsky concert (which included works by Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Amadeo Roldan) sponsored by the Pan-American Association of Composers. The New York Times reviewer of the premiere found the Weiss “strident and blatant and raucous” yet nevertheless an “intriguing novelty.” The German critic Hans Stuckenschmidt described it as a “synthesis of jazz, tone-clusters, and twelve-tone row.” And Slonimsky himself termed it (in his Music Since 1900) an “overture in an atonal jazz idiom.”
Despite all this, the work is not a blend of true jazz and true dodecaphony—an oxymoron if there ever was one! The jazz elements are principally the inclusion of three saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor), wood block, pseudo high-hat suspended cymbal, and brushed snare drum in the scoring, and the prominent use of the double Scotch snap. The harmonic idiom actually is, as Gilbert Chase has pointed out, not twelve-tone but “quartal”—that is, based on the interval of a fourth (rather than the usual third and fifth), here in particular on the augmented fourth, the ancient forbidden tritone or diabolus in musica. This quartal harmonic technique doesn't burst the bonds of tonality to plunge into absolute atonality, but it is tonally highly ambiguous; and as practiced by such composers as Scriabin (in his “mystic chord”), Hindemith, Bartok, and others, it has served as an important way station on the road from post-Wagnerian chromaticism to serialism.
The two most markedly distinguishing characteristics of American Life are proclaimed in the double-Scotch-snap rhythmic and augmented-fourth melodic motives of the very first two bars, Lento, for trumpets, which crescendo into the third bar's Allegro tutti. These distinctive motives are twice repeated (saxophones and woodwinds, woodwinds and strings) before leading into the first of the work's two main sections. This is a Fox Trot (slow tempo), Allegretto grazioso, with a muted-trumpet dotted-note theme (of course featuring augmented fourths) later taken up, molto ritmico, by the violins and some woodwinds. Reminiscences of the opening Lento/Allegro materials lead to the second main section, Blues Tempo, slow, rubato, with a floridly flute-decorated English-horn theme (with more augmented fourths) later given to the soprano sax. After an allargando fortissimo tutti climax and a pause, there are final reminiscences of the opening materials in an extended rush to an emphatic triple-forte conclusion.
Weiss left an impressively large body of works, many of them for chamber ensembles, but also the large-scale Air and Variations and the “choreographic cantata” The Libation Bearers (after Aeschylus). Yet despite high critical esteem and such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship (1931) and membership in the National Academy of Arts and Letters (1955), little of his music has commanded general attention. But now that the original difficulties of his Schoenbergian-accented idiom have come to seem negligible even to tender ears at least in comparison with those of more outre serialists and aleatorists there well may be a better chance for his arresting ideas and expert craftsmanship to achieve, however belatedly, a more favorable reception.
John Powell (1882-1963) - Rhapsodie Negre
Powell, the epitome of the antebellum cultured southerner, proudly traced his ancestry paternally to a Welsh king of Alfred's era, maternally to Nicholas Lanier or Laniere, court composer to Charles I and Charles II. The son of a schoolmaster father and amateur musician mother, Powell was born and bred, and was to die, in Virginia. But on his graduation from the University of Virginia in 1901 he went to Europe for some years of study (with the pianist-pedagogue Theodor Leschitizky and the Czech composer Karl Navratil) and a Berlin debut as pianist in 1908. On his return from a European concert tour he began the first of many American tours, and his earliest compositions were for his own performance or participation as a pianist. Among them the present rhapsody and the 1919 Sonata Virginianesque for violin and piano used Negro materials; most of his later works used or were influenced by Anglo-American traditional materials, of which he was an assiduous collector.
Several Powell works, the Rhapsodie Negre in particular, enjoyed considerable success, especially while the composer remained active as a pianist. While he (like the others in our present foursome) never became closely associated with other composers in a definite coterie or school, he was a favorite of such a traditionalist as composer-critic-educator Daniel Gregory Mason; and his fellow Virginians honored him on an official “John Powell Day,” November 15, 1951, with a performance of his Symphony on Virginian Folk Themes and in the Folk Modes. Outside his musical activities, Powell was an amateur astronomer, awarded honorary membership in the Societe Astronomique de France for the discovery of a comet, and was the founder, in 1913 and 1916 respectively, of the Fresh Air Art Society in Europe and the Society for the Preservation of Racial Integrity at the University of Virginia.
The Rhapsodie Negre was commissioned in 1917 by Modest Altschuler, conductor of the Russian Symphony, with which the composer was soloist in the work's first performance in Carnegie Hall in New York. The date was March 23, 1918, by one of life's unnerving coincidences the same day that Gilbert's Dance in Place Congo was first performed in the Metropolitan Opera House. The rhapsody was dedicated “To Joseph Conrad in appreciation of and gratitude for 'Heart of Darkness.’” The noted novella of 1899 had stimulated Powell to visit Conrad in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the author to sanction an opera-libretto version of his evocative African-jungle story. Instead, Conrad persuaded Powell to settle for a symphonic poem or, in the event, a piano-and-orchestra rhapsody loosely based on a program in which the novella's wild, cannibalistic African tribesmen became transported Afro-American slaves.
This program is elaborated in lurid detail in notes for the 1922 Powell/Monteux/Boston Symphony performances (and presumably other earlier and later ones)—notes provided by Richard Brockwell, an authorized spokesman for, if not the alter ego of, the composer himself. More significant than the music's purported story, however, well may be Brockwell's prefatory expression of what must have been Powell's, as well as his own, attitudes toward Negroes and their music. A few key sentences and the use, and non-use, of capitalization are representative:
. . . the negro. . . is, au fond, in spite of the surface polish and restraints imposed by close contacts with Caucasian civilization, a genuine primitive. His musical utterance, when really direct, not imitative, brings with it always the breath of the tropical jungle. ... The negro is the child among the peoples, and his music shows the unconscious, unbounded gaiety of the child, as well as the child's humor; sometimes ?sopian, often, unfortunately too often, Rabelaisian. But it has, also, the warm religious emotionality of the child, which at its best glows with naive simplicity and deep fervor, at its worst descends to a nadir of frantic sensual fanaticism.
In somewhat less empurpled prose, the rhapsody (which is scored for a moderate-size orchestra, with winds in twos and threes, and solo piano) may be described as loosely constructed in three main sections. The introductory first section (in another wholly coincidental similarity with Gilbert's Place Congo) begins with a plaintive woodwind “Cry,” Lento, which leads immediately into an Allegro moderato based on a tom-tom-rhythmed dance theme first heard in the piano. After repetitions, developments, and a Lento transition, the Andante con moto second section begins with the work's principal theme announced by the piano over its own accompaniment of syncopated organ-point octaves featuring, as does the theme itself, the double-Scotch-snap rhythm. After some working-up, a Sostenuto il tempo recitative for clarinet introduces as the rhapsody's second principal theme a variant of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which is developed antiphonally and with floridly bravura arabesques for the soloist. After a pause comes the Allegro third section, based on another spiritual, the exuberantly syncopated “I Want to Be Ready.” It too is worked up elaborately, eventually together with a return of the first-section dance theme in what for Brockwell is the,
frenzy of a Voodoo orgy, which degenerates into a maniacal licentiousness. The flood of madness is interrupted for a moment by the “Sweet Chariot” theme, which is, however, incapable of maintaining itself, and is overwhelmed in a flood of primal sensuality. The Rhapsody closes with a shriek from the brass, accompanied by a tempestuous crescendo streaming up the full range of the pianoforte. Alas, they don't write program notes like Brockwell's any more. For that matter, efforts to combine such inherently immiscible elements as black idioms, southern white accents, and European (here mostly Lisztian) rhetoric are no longer in vogue. Nevertheless, Powell’s rhapsody remains a virtuoso's showpiece and a provocative example of one approach—once widely practiced—toward a distinctive American musical language.
John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951)
01. Krazy Kat, ballet for Orchestra (1921) 13:00
Henry F. Gilbert (1868-1928)
02. The Dance in Place Congo, symphonic poem (1906-08) 11:29
Adolph Weiss (1891-1971)
03. American Life, Scherzo-Jazzoso for Orchestra (1929) 5:16
John Powell (1882-1963)
04. Rhapsodie Negre for Piano and Orchestra (1917) 16:18
Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra
Calvin Simmons, conductor (1-2,4)/Lawrence Foster, conductor (3)
Zita Carno, piano (4)
1977, Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc.
https://mega.co.nz/#!oAMQUCIa!lKgZgaie_CNCJh_yEMET8LuZreId9GL8oUEckzg 08Rk
FLAC + COVERS + BOOKLET, 225mb
Henry F. Gilbert (1868-1928) - The Dance in Place Congo
The oldest of our four composers was in many respects the most quintessentially American—an ur-Amerikaner, indeed, as one German critic called him. Certainly he was our music's archetypal plain, rock-salty, crabbed, dryly ribald Yankee maverick—the poor-relation, bad-boy truant from the New England School, thumbing his nose at the establishment. Yet he was properly born in it as a descendant of Bay State colonists of 1631 (maternal side) and 1640 (paternal side).
Although Gilbert may have been as close as we've ever come to a musical Mark Twain, he never succeeded in winning even a remotely comparable status. Nor has his pioneering work yet earned even a belated acceptance remotely comparable to that of his more revolutionary, slightly younger contemporary Charles Ives. For that there were and still are two strong reasons: the lack of empathy with so rowdy a character on the part of the more gentlemanly, pre-dominantly European-oriented musicians and proper Bostonian audiences of Gilbert's time; and, more decisive, the lack of either daring innovation or beguiling richness in his often bare-bones textures and mainly diatonic harmonies. Despite a few years as MacDowell's first American pupil and apart from the largely ideological influence of the Russian nationalist Balakirev, Gilbert was basically self-taught. And given his own porcupine-prickly independent nature and the fact that for much of his life he was on his own, forced to make a hard living often entirely outside music, it is scarcely surprising that his musical training was in many respects eccentric and lopsided.
The Dance in Place Congo was composed as a symphonic poem in 1906-8, after Gilbert had abandoned the Uncle Remus opera, and revised in 1916. When submitted for a Boston Symphony performance, the mighty Karl Muck contemptuously disdained it as “Niggah music.” So Gilbert prepared a ballet version based on the work’s original program, one suggested by an article, also titled “The Dance in Place Congo” (Century magazine, February, 1886), by George Washington Cable (1844-1925), noted author of the once best-selling stories Old Creole Days (1879) and of the novel The Grandissimes (1880), from which Delius drew the libretto for his opera Koanga. Cable’s article, together with its April, 1886, supplementer “Creole Slave Songs,” described, with pictorial and musical illustrations, the Sunday-afternoon revels of off-duty New Orleans slaves in a “no-’count open space [Congo Square] at the fag-end of Orleans Street”—revels that, before they were suppressed in 1844, undoubtedly had some musical influence on the very young Louis Moreau Gottschalk before he left New Orleans for Europe.
Gilbert's score, “dedicated in friendship to Otto H. Kahn” (the financier, who was a patron of the Metropolitan Opera), calls for an orchestra enlarged to include bass clarinet, double bassoon, a third trumpet, tambourine, glockenspiel, xylophone, and a big bell (tubular chime in E flat). It was first performed in its ballet version, with some added dances, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on March 23, 1918. Pierre Monteux conducted then, again in the April 26, 1918, Boston performance of the same production, and in the first performance as a symphonic poem by the Boston Symphony on February 20, 1920 (from whose program notes by the composer I lift the quoted phrases in the following description).
Structurally the score is orthodox, with a “gloomy and elegiac” introduction and coda as “frame or tragic background” for the A-B-A “dances-pictures” body of the work. It opens, Allegro moderato in E minor, with “quasi-barbaric” rhythms and the working-up of first a fragmentary and then a fuller statement of the “poignant cry of rage and revolt” of the Creole slave song “Eh! pou' la belle Loyotte.” The first main section is devoted to a “furious” dance, the bamboula, here in Gilbert's composite of rhythmic and melodic motives drawn from two more Creole slave songs, “Quand patate la cuite na va mange li” and “Musieu Bainjo.” Following the frenzied climax of the bamboula there is a Quasi recitante, deciso transition to the second main section, a lyrical Quasi andante in A flat with calmer, more gracefully lilting variants (flute, oboe, harp, strings, later solo violin) of the “Belle Loyotte” motives of the introduction. Gilbert, more reticent verbally than musically, describes this often quite rapturous section merely as the “more romantic aspects of the picture: love-making, etc.” Its grandioso climax is “rudely interrupted by a sudden and insistent reassertion of the barbaric element”—an Agitato third section redevelopment of, or “free fantasie” on, the two key motives of the bamboula, broken up when the six-o'clock big bell summons the slaves back to their quarters. The coda's grim reminiscences of earlier motives work up to a final Maestoso return of the “tragic cry of the introduction: the cry of racial revolt against slavery.”
It is not at all surprising that music like this, “ripped out in all its triumphant vulgarity,” should have raised genteel eyebrows. And although most of Gilbert's major works were performed at least once, few if any of the performances in his own lifetime did him justice. (“Give me a third-rate American conductor over the best European any day!”, I once heard him plead.) Yet that he could appeal to a wide public was shown by the success consistently scored by his “Pirate Song” (“Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest”) in recitals and recordings by David Bispham, Herbert Witherspoon, ReinaldWerrenrath, and others. And at least one characteristic work by this ur-Amerikaner, the Comedy Overture on Negro Themes, fascinated Russian audiences when Reinhold Gliere conducted it in the first two of a projected series of performances aborted by the onset of war in 1914. And in striking contradiction to the adverse verdicts or sheer obliviousness of both conservative and avant-garde native critics and musicians, there were such shining Gilbertian proponents as Olin Downes and Elliott Carter.
As a fervent partisan of recorded music as well as of Gilbert, I believe that the best of his works—perhaps the present one and his last major composition, the Symphonic Piece of 1925-26, in particular—well might win favor among today's less stuffy home when skillfully presented by empathetic interpreters. Sorely his idiosyncratic expression of the American spirit (“energetic—optimistic—nervous—impatient of restraint—and, in its highest aspects, a mighty protest against the benumbing traditions of the past”) is more potently infectious nowadays than it ever was before.
Personal Apologia: It is only fair to make explicit my bias not only as an admirer of the relatively few Gilbert works I have had the opportunity of knowing well but as a onetime friend who had the privilege of knowing the extraordinary man himself in his last few years of life. That life, as the general public has never known, was in itself something of a medical miracle as well as a paradigm of courage. For Gilbert had to battle not only the usual handicaps of any artist and the special difficulties of so ornery a one as he chose to be but also the burden of a congenital cardiac defect—the tetralogy of Follot, or “blue-baby's” disease, which first cripples and then usually kills its victims at an early age. The Bostonian heart specialist Dr. Paul Dudley White reported Gilbert's case as unique: both because Gilbert, at sixty, lived more than twenty-three years longer than any other known sufferer from the disease and because, despite its typical cyanosis and clubbing of the fingers, he was still able (in Dr. White's words) “to make of his life a great success . . . as a pioneer of American music.
John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951) - Krazy Kat
Like Gilbert and Powell, Carpenter could boast of a very old family tree, in his case rooted in this country's soil by the pilgrims Patricia Mullins and John Alden. Like Ives, he long practiced music only as an avocation: until 1936 he was engaged in a family shipping-supplies business in Chicago, which, however, gave him leeway and the means to study under John Knowles Paine at Harvard, with Edward Elgar for a time abroad, and back in Chicago with Bernhard Ziehn. Yet contemporaneous French Impressionistic styles played a more influential role than his formal studies, and he first established a reputation as a polished craftsman rather than a mere dilettante in his song cycles Gitanjali (after Tagore; 1913) and Water Colors (after Chinese poems; 1918). He was technically proficient even in his first major orchestral work, Adventures in a Perambulator (1915). What made this programmatic suite a unique if minor masterpiece was its delectable blend of fancy and humor in persuasively evoking, without sentimentalizing, a baby's impressions of the world.
It was of course so lively an imagination and sense of humor—all too rare in the world of “serious” music—that enabled Carpenter to recognize the ballet potential of the comic-strip exploits of George Herriman's quixotic Krazy Kat. Composed in early 1921 and first performed as an orchestral piece on December 23 of that year in Chicago, Krazy Kat was first done in its intended ballet-pantomime form, with Herriman's rolling-backdrop pictorial scenery, on January 20, 1922, in New York's Town Hall with choreography—and the role of the eponymous protagonist danced—by Adolf Bolm, Georges Barrere conducting.
Although the work is subtitled a “jazz pantomime” and its relatively small orchestra includes a saxophone and piano and calls for occasional wa-wa trumpet and trombone passages, this is jaunty Jazz Age music rather than true jazz—such as was concurrently flourishing in Carpenter's city if not in his circle (by this time, according to Marshall Stearns, the “hypothetical peak of jazz intensity” had already “shifted from New Orleans to Chicago”). The typically episodic comic-strip story was told in full in the composer's program notes for the original ballet production and later reprinted as foreword to the published piano score and in the Krazy Kat chapter of Gilbert Seldes' Seven Lively Arts. It begins with the awakening of Krazy, for whom there's an expressive theme, from an afternoon katnap; he sights a grand-ball announcement poster and makes a serendipitous discovery of a ballet skirt hanging on a clothesline and of a conveniently dropped makeup kit; he succumbs to the temptation to make use of them while Ignaz Mouse (perky piccolo theme), with his brick at the ready, is frightened off by Offisa Pup; the now warmed-up Krazy does a one-man (or -kat) “zippy but languorous” Spanish dance, complete with castanets; he receives a bouquet of katnip from a mysterious stranger (betrayed by the piccolo as Ignaz in disguise); the soon stoned Krazy abandons all decorum in a “Katnip Blues” dance, at the conclusion of which Ignaz, throwing off his disguise, finally gets to fling his brick. The exhausted, masochistically ecstatic Krazy totters back to the base of his napping tree as Offisa Pup, swinging his club, passes by again. “The moon comes out. Krazy sleeps. Krazy dreams. Indomitable Kat!”
The stir this work caused in the dance world led the great Diaghilev to commission Carpenter to write a “ballet of modern American life,” Skyscrapers, belatedly produced at the Metropolitan Opera House on February 19, 1926. It too proved to be more characteristic of the Jazz Age than of jazz itself, but it did include (in its moments of merrymaking “at any Coney Island”) some notably invigorating use of ragtime materials.
After Carpenter retired from business in 1936, he composed even more prolifically, including the grandiose narrator-with-chorus-and-orchestra Song of Faith for the George Washington bicentennial of 1932. But although he was extensively honored (honorary Mus.D. degree, Knight of the French Legion of Honor, Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, etc.), and although his music was widely performed and recorded, none of his later works matched the charm of Adventures in a Perambulator or provoked as much publicity as Krazy Kat and Skyscrapers.
But in all likelihood Krazy Kat’s failure to hold a place in the orchestral repertory is in large part a consequence of the predominance of its visual over its sheer sonic appeals. Now that the score has been completely recorded for the first time, it still demands that listeners do it the justice of simultaneously seeing—actually or mentally—the incomparable Herriman scenes and karacters. The fourteen pages of these that are interleaved in the published piano score are embellished with appropriate thematic illustrations bearing such Herrimanic tempo specifications as jazzando, pizzi-kat-to, kurioso, kantando, and the above-mentioned “zippy but languorous.” Next best is dipping at random into the book collection of Herriman comic strips while reading the pantomime's detailed story in the Seldes Seven Lively Arts.
Adolph Weiss (1891-1971) - American Life
The youngest of our foursome, Weiss was the only first-generation American—born in Baltimore of German parents, which well may have influenced his becoming a professional orchestral player as well as (for his time) avant-garde composer. He was only sixteen when he became first bassoonist of the Russian Symphony in New York. His later affiliations included posts with the New York Philharmonic under Mahler, the New York Symphony under Damrosch, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (It is tantalizing to guess what Gilbert, Carpenter, and Powell works he may have played in and what he thought of them.)
As a composer he became, after preliminary studies at Columbia University and in Chicago, the first American-born pupil (1924-27) of Arnold Schoenberg. Some, if by no means all, of his later works were written in the Schoenbergian twelve-tone system; all of then reportedly were first notated in a numerological technique all Weiss’s own—a forerunner of the more elaborate no note notation schemes of later, more revolutionary composers. Yet although Weiss's music, like Schoenberg’s, was generally considered unduly cerebral, it often had not only poetic connotations but distinctive poetic expressiveness. Witness his probably most widely successful work, the 1931 Air and Variations for large orchestra, which in its so far only recorded version won an accolade from the authoritative Alfred Frankenstein: ''I know of no American twelve-tone piece, at least on records, that is as moving and eloquent as this.”
Weiss’s American Life was originally (1929) described as a scherzo for large orchestra: later, (on its 1932 publication in Henry Cowell's New Music Orchestral Series) it was subtitled, jocosely no doubt, a “Scherzoso Jazzoso.” It has no explicit program (or at least none ever was revealed), but the composer's apodictic intention must have been to express musically the high-voltage tensions, restlessness, and motoric drives of contemporary urban life in this country. The work was first performed by the Conductorless Orchestra in New York on February 21, 1931, later in Paris on June 6, 1931, in a Nicholas Slonimsky concert (which included works by Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Amadeo Roldan) sponsored by the Pan-American Association of Composers. The New York Times reviewer of the premiere found the Weiss “strident and blatant and raucous” yet nevertheless an “intriguing novelty.” The German critic Hans Stuckenschmidt described it as a “synthesis of jazz, tone-clusters, and twelve-tone row.” And Slonimsky himself termed it (in his Music Since 1900) an “overture in an atonal jazz idiom.”
Despite all this, the work is not a blend of true jazz and true dodecaphony—an oxymoron if there ever was one! The jazz elements are principally the inclusion of three saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor), wood block, pseudo high-hat suspended cymbal, and brushed snare drum in the scoring, and the prominent use of the double Scotch snap. The harmonic idiom actually is, as Gilbert Chase has pointed out, not twelve-tone but “quartal”—that is, based on the interval of a fourth (rather than the usual third and fifth), here in particular on the augmented fourth, the ancient forbidden tritone or diabolus in musica. This quartal harmonic technique doesn't burst the bonds of tonality to plunge into absolute atonality, but it is tonally highly ambiguous; and as practiced by such composers as Scriabin (in his “mystic chord”), Hindemith, Bartok, and others, it has served as an important way station on the road from post-Wagnerian chromaticism to serialism.
The two most markedly distinguishing characteristics of American Life are proclaimed in the double-Scotch-snap rhythmic and augmented-fourth melodic motives of the very first two bars, Lento, for trumpets, which crescendo into the third bar's Allegro tutti. These distinctive motives are twice repeated (saxophones and woodwinds, woodwinds and strings) before leading into the first of the work's two main sections. This is a Fox Trot (slow tempo), Allegretto grazioso, with a muted-trumpet dotted-note theme (of course featuring augmented fourths) later taken up, molto ritmico, by the violins and some woodwinds. Reminiscences of the opening Lento/Allegro materials lead to the second main section, Blues Tempo, slow, rubato, with a floridly flute-decorated English-horn theme (with more augmented fourths) later given to the soprano sax. After an allargando fortissimo tutti climax and a pause, there are final reminiscences of the opening materials in an extended rush to an emphatic triple-forte conclusion.
Weiss left an impressively large body of works, many of them for chamber ensembles, but also the large-scale Air and Variations and the “choreographic cantata” The Libation Bearers (after Aeschylus). Yet despite high critical esteem and such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship (1931) and membership in the National Academy of Arts and Letters (1955), little of his music has commanded general attention. But now that the original difficulties of his Schoenbergian-accented idiom have come to seem negligible even to tender ears at least in comparison with those of more outre serialists and aleatorists there well may be a better chance for his arresting ideas and expert craftsmanship to achieve, however belatedly, a more favorable reception.
John Powell (1882-1963) - Rhapsodie Negre
Powell, the epitome of the antebellum cultured southerner, proudly traced his ancestry paternally to a Welsh king of Alfred's era, maternally to Nicholas Lanier or Laniere, court composer to Charles I and Charles II. The son of a schoolmaster father and amateur musician mother, Powell was born and bred, and was to die, in Virginia. But on his graduation from the University of Virginia in 1901 he went to Europe for some years of study (with the pianist-pedagogue Theodor Leschitizky and the Czech composer Karl Navratil) and a Berlin debut as pianist in 1908. On his return from a European concert tour he began the first of many American tours, and his earliest compositions were for his own performance or participation as a pianist. Among them the present rhapsody and the 1919 Sonata Virginianesque for violin and piano used Negro materials; most of his later works used or were influenced by Anglo-American traditional materials, of which he was an assiduous collector.
Several Powell works, the Rhapsodie Negre in particular, enjoyed considerable success, especially while the composer remained active as a pianist. While he (like the others in our present foursome) never became closely associated with other composers in a definite coterie or school, he was a favorite of such a traditionalist as composer-critic-educator Daniel Gregory Mason; and his fellow Virginians honored him on an official “John Powell Day,” November 15, 1951, with a performance of his Symphony on Virginian Folk Themes and in the Folk Modes. Outside his musical activities, Powell was an amateur astronomer, awarded honorary membership in the Societe Astronomique de France for the discovery of a comet, and was the founder, in 1913 and 1916 respectively, of the Fresh Air Art Society in Europe and the Society for the Preservation of Racial Integrity at the University of Virginia.
The Rhapsodie Negre was commissioned in 1917 by Modest Altschuler, conductor of the Russian Symphony, with which the composer was soloist in the work's first performance in Carnegie Hall in New York. The date was March 23, 1918, by one of life's unnerving coincidences the same day that Gilbert's Dance in Place Congo was first performed in the Metropolitan Opera House. The rhapsody was dedicated “To Joseph Conrad in appreciation of and gratitude for 'Heart of Darkness.’” The noted novella of 1899 had stimulated Powell to visit Conrad in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the author to sanction an opera-libretto version of his evocative African-jungle story. Instead, Conrad persuaded Powell to settle for a symphonic poem or, in the event, a piano-and-orchestra rhapsody loosely based on a program in which the novella's wild, cannibalistic African tribesmen became transported Afro-American slaves.
This program is elaborated in lurid detail in notes for the 1922 Powell/Monteux/Boston Symphony performances (and presumably other earlier and later ones)—notes provided by Richard Brockwell, an authorized spokesman for, if not the alter ego of, the composer himself. More significant than the music's purported story, however, well may be Brockwell's prefatory expression of what must have been Powell's, as well as his own, attitudes toward Negroes and their music. A few key sentences and the use, and non-use, of capitalization are representative:
. . . the negro. . . is, au fond, in spite of the surface polish and restraints imposed by close contacts with Caucasian civilization, a genuine primitive. His musical utterance, when really direct, not imitative, brings with it always the breath of the tropical jungle. ... The negro is the child among the peoples, and his music shows the unconscious, unbounded gaiety of the child, as well as the child's humor; sometimes ?sopian, often, unfortunately too often, Rabelaisian. But it has, also, the warm religious emotionality of the child, which at its best glows with naive simplicity and deep fervor, at its worst descends to a nadir of frantic sensual fanaticism.
In somewhat less empurpled prose, the rhapsody (which is scored for a moderate-size orchestra, with winds in twos and threes, and solo piano) may be described as loosely constructed in three main sections. The introductory first section (in another wholly coincidental similarity with Gilbert's Place Congo) begins with a plaintive woodwind “Cry,” Lento, which leads immediately into an Allegro moderato based on a tom-tom-rhythmed dance theme first heard in the piano. After repetitions, developments, and a Lento transition, the Andante con moto second section begins with the work's principal theme announced by the piano over its own accompaniment of syncopated organ-point octaves featuring, as does the theme itself, the double-Scotch-snap rhythm. After some working-up, a Sostenuto il tempo recitative for clarinet introduces as the rhapsody's second principal theme a variant of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which is developed antiphonally and with floridly bravura arabesques for the soloist. After a pause comes the Allegro third section, based on another spiritual, the exuberantly syncopated “I Want to Be Ready.” It too is worked up elaborately, eventually together with a return of the first-section dance theme in what for Brockwell is the,
frenzy of a Voodoo orgy, which degenerates into a maniacal licentiousness. The flood of madness is interrupted for a moment by the “Sweet Chariot” theme, which is, however, incapable of maintaining itself, and is overwhelmed in a flood of primal sensuality. The Rhapsody closes with a shriek from the brass, accompanied by a tempestuous crescendo streaming up the full range of the pianoforte. Alas, they don't write program notes like Brockwell's any more. For that matter, efforts to combine such inherently immiscible elements as black idioms, southern white accents, and European (here mostly Lisztian) rhetoric are no longer in vogue. Nevertheless, Powell’s rhapsody remains a virtuoso's showpiece and a provocative example of one approach—once widely practiced—toward a distinctive American musical language.
