My heart’s not really in Presidents Day this year. Draw your own conclusions. I started typing something up this morning, but as I warmed to the topic, it grew and grew, and then I didn’t have time to come back to it and wrangle it into shape. It’s a shame, because the material is time sensitive. Maybe I’ll rework it for the Fourth of July, when hardly anyone will see it. In the meantime, here’s a comic featuring antifa George Washington, making America great.
Also, to keep it musical, I’ll include a link to Virgil Thomson’s ballet, “Parson Weems and the Cherry Tree,” a Bicentennial commission which, for some reason, is not to be found on the internet in its orchestral guise. Who knew that my recording would turn out to be such a collector’s item? Here, the work is posted in a transcription for piano. If you’re interested, it plays continuously over twelve tracks.
Looking for Lincoln? Search for my post for February 12, Honest Abe’s birthday.
Neither of these guys could tell a lie. Remind you of anyone we know? Me neither. Happy Presidents Day.
Aware of his shortcomings. Strove to improve himself. Assembled “team of rivals” to unify and learn from those with differing viewpoints. Understood leadership and sacrifice. Risked everything to preserve the Union.
16th president of the United States.
Abraham Lincoln was born on this date in 1809. They sure don’t make ‘em like they used to.
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
———
James Earl Jones in Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait”
Paul Turok, “Variations on an American Song: Aspects of Lincoln and Liberty” – conducted by Leonard Slatkin, newly-designated music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra
Carl Sandburg was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry, and a third for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He was also known for his 1927 anthology “The American Songbag,” espousing our native folk song and anticipating the folk song revivals the 1940s and ‘60s. On top of everything else, he was awarded a Grammy for his recording of Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait.” When Sandburg died in 1967, at the age of 89, Lyndon Johnson observed that “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He WAS America.”
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear music inspired by this popular – and populist – figure, with two works especially appropriate for Memorial Day and, in between, a piece after a poem evocative of the American heartland.
Philadelphia composer Romeo Cascarino (1922-2002), who had served in the U.S. Army, composed a plaintive elegy, “Blades of Grass,” in 1945, just after World War II. He expressed a preference, on several occasions, that Sandburg’s poem “Grass” be read before performances. You’re probably familiar with it:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
Leo Sowerby (1895-1968) was born in Grand Rapids, MI, and spent much of his career in the Midwest. Sometimes referred to as the “Dean of American church music,” he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1946 for his cantata, “The Canticle of the Sun.”
The published score of his symphonic poem after Sandburg, titled “Prairie,” from 1929, bears the following lines:
“Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?
“Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?”
Last, but certainly not least, Roy Harris, who shared Lincoln’s birthday (though born 89 years later), was reared in a log cabin in Lincoln County, OK, only adding to his sense of destiny. Indeed, he went on to become one of America’s greatest composers.
Harris’ Symphony No. 6 is subtitled “Gettysburg.” It’s one of a number of works the composer wrote with a Lincoln connection. Each movement of the symphony bears a superscription taken from the Gettysburg Address: the first, “Awakening (‘Fourscore and seven years ago…’);” the second, “Conflict (‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war…’);” the third, “Dedication (‘We are met on a great battlefield of that war…’);” and the fourth, “Affirmation (‘…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…’).”
Prior to composing the work, Harris read – you guessed it – Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln.
I hope you’ll join me for “Lincoln Logger,” an hour of music inspired by Carl Sandburg, on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
One never told a lie. The other gave everything to keep us united. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Hard to believe, but Virgil’s Thomson’s George Washington ballet “Parson Weems and the Cherry Tree” (a Bicentennial commission) doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere online in the version for chamber orchestra. I did, however, find it for piano. You just have to let it play through, from tracks 10-21.
Concert overture “McKonkey’s Ferry (Washington at Trenton)” by Trenton’s own George Antheil. Curious that a local boy would spell McConkey with two k’s!
John Lampkin, “George Washington Slept Here”
Roy Harris’ setting of Vachel Lindsay’s “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.” (The poem is posted below the video.)
Florence Price’s setting of the same poem
From “Abraham Lincoln: A Likeness in Symphony Form,” by Robert Russell Bennett
More Lincoln music under my post for Lincoln’s birthday on February 12
