The lush lyricism of Samuel Barber and other Neo-Romantics – including William Schuman, Howard Hanson and Leonard Bernstein – were sidelined after World War II by the academic dominance of atonality and serialism in American classical music. Although Barber and his “retro” colleagues eschewed the avant-garde in favor of old-fashioned tonality and lush melodic lines, they introduced into their music harmonies and intervals that would have shocked the audiences of the late nineteenth century.
But it was not enough to make them acceptable, and they were in good company: on the bench with them were the vast majority of American audience members. During the past 20 years, however, these mid-twentieth-century works are being resurrected and even imitated with the return to a more eclectic, and even tonal, array of musical styles.
Barber showed early on a prodigious talent for composing, encouraged by his family, especially his aunt and uncle, the contralto Louise Homer and the composer Sidney Homer. The two served as his mentor for more than 25 years and profoundly influenced his aesthetic development. At age 14 he enrolled in the newly founded Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia, studying voice, piano and composition, graduating in 1934. Two of his early compositions, a Violin Sonata in 1928 and his first published large-scale work, The School for Scandal Overture (1931), won him prestigious prizes and, more importantly, public performances that brought him to the attention of the leading conductors of the day.
Barber’s use of the term “essay” represents an analogy to the literary form, a brief but serious consideration of a single subject. The three Essays for Orchestra are works with themes explored concisely from several different perspectives. He wrote his First Essay for Arturo Toscanini, who premiered it in 1938 with his NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Barber finished the Second Essay in March 1942, using themes and ideas going back about three years. A popular composer at the time, Barber presented it to Bruno Walter, who premiered it with the New York Philharmonic the following month.
The orchestration of the Second Essay is more complex than in its predecessor, with extensive use of timpani solos, brass choirs and individual woodwinds – somewhat like a one movement concerto for orchestra. Also, as in the First Essay, Barber transforms the concept of a written essay, a careful written consideration of an idea, to music.
The work consists of a single theme, but as in the Finale to Beethoven’s Symphony No.3, it unfolds gradually; at the beginning we hear only its skeleton beginning in the solo flute. Barber then fills it in harmonically, transforming it into a lilting 6/8 melody that gets passed around the orchestra. Later he presents it as a lively dance-like fugue in duple time beginning on the clarinet and the winds and moving from section to section. Towards the end, there is a return to the opening scaffolding, this time blasting forth in the horns and trombones, almost like the cantus firmus hymn tune in a chorale prelude.
George Gershwin
1898-1937
George Gershwin
Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra
The musical idiom of jazz evolved in New Orleans in the early part of this century from ragtime and from the blues. It was however in Europe, where American dance bands were very popular, that composers first incorporated the new American idioms into their classical compositions: Claude Debussy in Golliwog's Cakewalk (1908); Igor Stravinsky in Ragtime (1918); and especially Darius Milhaud in the ballet La création du Monde (1923).
George Gershwin was the first American composer to make jazz acceptable to the classical music audience. The performance of his Rhapsody in Blue at the Paul Whitman concerts in 1924 made history as a groundbreaker. It was however his Concerto in F, commissioned by Walter Damrosch for the New York Symphony and which premiered in December 1925, which was the first large-scale jazz composition in a traditionally classical form.
Gershwin, who by that time was already a famous composer of songs and musical comedies, had no experience in orchestration. In the Broadway tradition, this was usually left to professional orchestrators. Even the Rhapsody in Blue had not been orchestrated by Gershwin, but by his colleague Ferde Grofé. But for the Concerto in F he decided to score it himself. From the telling results we can see what a fast learner he was.
Although billed as a concerto for the concert hall, the Concerto in F adheres only to the most basic elements to the classical models for form and structure: three movements, fast-slow-fast. There is no attempt at recreating sonata form in the movements themselves, although the finale is a rondo.
Gershwin employed different jazz styles in the three movements. The First movement, Allegro, employs the quick and pulsating rhythm of the Charleston. The unusual opening is for timpani and trap set, which sets the prevailing rhythm of the movement and announces in no uncertain terms: This is jazz! The main theme, introduced by the piano, becomes a motto for the concerto, recurring in the Finale. Instead of developing core thematic material, the tunesmith Gershwin rolls out a series of melodies in contrasting rhythms and moods, expanding each one in the manner of a jazz riff, the first a Charleston, the second more Latin in feel and the next, another Charleston. The climax of the movement is full orchestral repeat of the main theme.
The slow second movement has, as Gershwin himself explained, “...a poetic nocturnal atmosphere which has come to be referred to as the American blues...” It is about two big themes, both of which are delayed to produce a sense of expectation that drives the movement and reflect the melancholy sense of longing that characterize the blues in general. The movement begins with a long introductory section for solo winds, including clarinets, saxophone, trumpet and oboe based on a small rhythmic motive that sets the bluesy atmosphere and contains little hints of the important themes to come. As in the first movement, the piano introduces the main theme, the accompaniment to which contains the motivic germ of the movement's second big theme that will come into its own a full eight minutes into the movement. Note that both main themes contain within them no harmonic resolution. This Gershwin further delays until the end of the movement.
The Finale, the only movement with a classical structure, is a rondo, actually a toccata consisting of rapidly repeated notes. From a pop music perspective, the movement is a quickstep. The first episode brings back in variation the motto from the first movement. The theme of the next episode is original to this movement. In the third episode, Gershwin brings back the main theme from the second movement as a quickstep. The climax of the movement is a near repeat of the fully orchestrated motto. A rapid coda recalls the rondo theme with a timpani flourish and jazz trill for the horns.
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68,
While many of Beethoven’s symphonies broke new ground, the Sixth is both innovative – as it prefigures the Romantic tone poems – and traditional. Beethoven and his audience were readily able to attach literary, emotional or extra-musical concepts to music. Beethoven himself had conjured the image of Napoleon, and then when the little emperor let him down, simply a hero in his Third Symphony. His Wellington’s Victory was the latest in a centuries’-long tradition of musical battles. And of course, there were musical models for many of the images in the Pastorale Symphony – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, bucolic Christmas pastorals with bagpipe drones, such as those from Handel’s Messiah or Corelli’s Christmas Concerto – not to mention an extensive vocabulary of rhetorical musical figures from the Baroque, bird calls and other perennial tone painting devices.
But Beethoven seemed to be searching for something different, an ideal way to portray and “express” nature. "Any painting, if it is carried too far in instrumental music, loses expressive quality...The overall content, consisting of more feelings than of tone paintings, will be recognized even without further description," he wrote in his sketchbook while working on the Sixth Symphony. This and other comments to himself as he worked reveal the Symphony as more than a sentimental outpouring. The Pastorale Symphony was another of the composer’s projects, another creative challenge to be met in the context of the trajectory of his self-fulfillment as an artist. As Beethoven’s biographer Barry Cooper puts it: “He was faced with two main problems in writing a symphony in the pastoral style: the first was to prevent the music from degenerating into scene-painting or story-telling; the second was to combine the pastoral style, leisurely and undramatic, with the thrust and dynamism of the symphonic style.”
Beethoven wrote more words about this symphony than about any of his other compositions. He provided descriptive titles to each of the five movements, while at the same time commenting that the music was self-explanatory and needed no titles. The first movement, “Cheerful feelings awakened on arriving in the country,” builds up none of the intense tension so common in Beethoven's first movements, being instead an unhurried study in tranquility. The second movement, “Scene by the brook,” is full of soft, murmuring accompaniment, which captures the sound of a flowing brook, interspersed with the birdcalls and chirping insects – all within a tradition in tone painting common since the renaissance.
In a break with the classical symphonic structure, the last three movements run together as a continuous whole. The third movement, “Merry gathering of country folk,” suggests a village band with the lower strings imitating the drone of a bagpipe. The dance is interrupted by the “Thunderstorm,” a superb impressionistic evocation of lightning, thunder and howling winds. As the storm approaches, the thunderclaps come faster and faster and then slow down as the storm passes. After the final rumbles, a solo clarinet, followed by a solo horn, lead into the “Shepherd's song: Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.” The developing peaceful and bucolic scene ends in the final chords with the shepherd's pipe figure fading away into the distance.
Beethoven started the Symphony in the summer of 1807 and finished it in June 1808. It was premiered at a concert (Musikalische Akademie) of his recent compositions in the Imperial Theater in Vienna on December 22, 1808. The program, which was over four hours long, also included the premiere of the Fifth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the concert aria “Ah Perfido,” some improvisations by the composer, three movements from the Mass in C Major and, to top it all off, the Choral Fantasia, which Beethoven composed as a grand finale to the occasion. Such monster concerts were the norm in the early nineteenth century, with people coming and going in the middle as they pleased. Not surprisingly, few stayed for the duration.
The gentle atmosphere of the Sixth Symphony is in sharp contrast to the high voltage and intensity of the Fifth, completed only a few weeks earlier. With his cantankerous nature, Beethoven fought, quarreled and argued with everyone, friend, foe or patron. But with nature he was at peace.
