Thankful for friends past and present, family alive and gone, good health, and a more-or-less fortunate life. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Aaron Copland got mail:
Category: Daily Dispatch
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Virgil Thomson: Thanksgiving Composer
When it falls to America’s great composers to wrest the Tesseract from Thanos, these are the guys Nick Fury assembles. Then Bernstein conducts “West Side Story,” and it is the orchestra that snaps.
Back-to-front, we have Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Walter Piston, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson – all of them, with the exception of Lenny, recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Piston was honored twice.
At the fore, Thomson defies us to take our best shot. His superpower is that he was not only a respected composer, but also a feared critic at the New York Herald-Tribune. This is a man even Thanos would think twice about crossing.
He is especially powerful on this date every seven years or so, during the alignment of his birthday with Thanksgiving.
I understand there are some who remain resistant to his charms. His brand of “faux-naïf” Americana is perhaps not for everyone.
His “Symphony on a Hymn Tune” was composed during his Paris years. Thomson, like Copland and so many others, studied there with Nadia Boulanger. The symphony was inspired by the composer’s memories of his Kansas City boyhood. The “Sunday best” of the church hymns occasionally gets tangled up in a few modernistic burrs – the exchanges between the violin, cello, trombone, and piccolo at the end of the first movement, for instance – but in 1928, it was a landmark in terms of helping to establish a distinctly American idiom. To me, it is perfect Thanksgiving music.
More austere, perhaps, is Thomson’s symphonic poem “Pilgrims and Pioneers” – but just stick around for the fiddle tunes.
Finally, a seasonal work: the Concertino for Harp, Strings and Percussion, “Autumn” – according to Thomson, actually more of a “portrait of an artist ageing.”
And Thomson sure did age. Hard to believe I was already doing radio in his later years.
Happy birthday, Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) – and Happy Thanksgiving!
Check out Thomson on TV!
PHOTO: Just don’t make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. THOMSON SMASH!
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Wooden Shoes & Thanksgiving A Tulip Festival Film
Thanksgiving needs more wooden shoes.
The film is “Seven Sweethearts” (1942), starring Kathryn Grayson and Van Heflin. The setting is the annual Tulip Festival in Little Delft (a.k.a. Nelis’ Dutch Village in Holland, Michigan), “recreated” on the M-G-M lot.
Not really Thanksgiving, but you can’t escape the hymn.
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Vivaldi’s Turkey Concerto Thanksgiving Gem
And so it begins: bracing for that first step onto the greased slide through the Crazy House. January 2, where art thou?
To get you in the proper mindset for Thanksgiving, here’s a rarely-heard work by Antonio Vivaldi.
The story goes that it was Igor Stravinsky who quipped that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. Without making claim to having heard all of them, I have to say, they seem to be of uniformly high quality, if in binge-listening they do tend to become a mite indistinguishable. Would “The Four Seasons” ever have gained the traction it has without its programmatic associations?
Anyone familiar with classical music can tell you that concertos and symphonies with nicknames tend to have a better chance of getting played or at the very least remembered.
A few years ago, one of my colleagues was searching through the station’s CD library, when he stumbled across an album titled “Viva Vivaldi: The Unknown Gems” (Centaur Records #3299). From this disc, we were astonished to learn of a certain “Turkey” Concerto, RV 506.
It turns out the canny artists themselves named it such, because of the “fiendish, cascading broken third passages in the solo lines in the 3rd movement.” In any case, it’s a good way to get your disc played. On reflection, why should a nickname bestowed in the 18th century be any more valid?
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Shakers Hawthorne & Thanksgiving Music
Wouldn’t you know, as soon as my Shaker show wrapped up the other night on “The Lost Chord,” I opened up my collection of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories and randomly selected “The Canterbury Pilgrims” – which turned out to be about the Shakers!
If you missed the broadcast on WWFM – The Classical Network, it’s been posted as a webcast at wwfm.org. What are you waiting for? Get shaking!
https://www.wwfm.org/post/lost-chord-november-21-all-shook
The “Picture Perfect” pre-Thanksgiving show has also been archived. Enjoy selections from “Friendly Persuasion” (Dimitri Tiomkin), “Our Town” (Aaron Copland), “Plymouth Adventure” (Miklós Rózsa), and the building-the-barn sequence from “Witness” (Maurice Jarre).
https://www.wwfm.org/post/picture-perfect-never-too-early-give-thanks
4:30… Time for milking!
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