Classic Ross Amico

Tag: American Music

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at 100

The most widely-recognized of American classics? Perhaps. Next to “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” I can think of few others. George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is 100 today.

I once heard it performed on a New Year’s Day concert in Milan. As late as the mid ‘90s, it seemed European musicians still hadn’t acquired that innate ability to swing. But the world’s a lot smaller place now, and they seem to have gotten it.

Here’s the first recording, with Gershwin at the piano and Paul Whiteman conducting. The work is abridged and played a little faster than we’re accustomed to hearing today, in large part to be able to fit it onto two sides of a 12-inch 78 rpm record.

The first recording I acquired, on LP, was with Leonard Bernstein as conductor and pianist with the New York Philharmonic, made for Columbia Records in 1964. The performance really is more expansive than most. As the years went by, I enjoyed hearing different takes on the piece, some of them attempting to recreate its original jazz band debut.

The work has been dismissed by cognoscenti as corny. In 1934, composer Constant Lambert derided it as “neither good jazz nor good Liszt.” As recently as two weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article under the title “The Worst Masterpiece,” with pianist Ethan Iverson making a straw man argument that Duke Ellington was a more important composer. Of course the “Rhapsody” is not true jazz, any more than Brahms’ Hungarian riffs could be construed as authentic Hungarian music. But it is 100 percent American.

“Rhapsody in Blue” is one of those rare pieces of classical music whose appeal transcends genre. I have an uncle, who is by no means a classical music person, who is obsessed with the work. It’s a crowd-pleaser, and deservedly so. If anything, its winning combination of optimism, energy, and naiveté reminds us of America’s “better angels” (a phrase I borrow from Lincoln on his birthday). The work is as refreshing now as it ever was, even if, one hundred years on, it seems more and more like a distant dream. It’s still a dream to be celebrated.

Bernstein, 1964

Bernstein live, 1976

Michael Tilson Thomas’ quite different conception

Incorporating Gershwin’s 1925 piano roll

Peter Nero and the Philly Pops at Independence Hall

In Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”

Paul Whiteman, who conducted the premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue,” introduces and leads it here, beginning at the 51-minute mark (with interlude for “voodoo drums???”) in the insane, pre-Code curio, “King of Jazz” (1930). Just don’t watch it too close to bed!

Live footage of Gershwin playing “I Got Rhythm” in 1931

PHOTO: (left to right) Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s orchestrator and later composer of the “Grand Canyon Suite;” Gershwin at the piano; theatrical impresario Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel; and Whiteman, with his baton

February 12, 2024
Daniel Gregory Mason Rediscovered

“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in his preface to “Walden” (now on my bedstand, just in time for the season of consumerism run amuck).

The quote serves as a superscription for Daniel Gregory Mason’s “Chanticleer Festival Overture.” Mason was born in Brookline, MA, on this date 150 years ago. His father was Henry Mason, cofounder of the Mason & Hamlin piano company, and his grandfather was Lowell Mason, composer of some 1600 hymn tunes, including “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

Daniel studied theory and composition at Harvard under John Knowles Paine, continuing his lessons with George Whitefield Chadwick and others. He became a writer on music and a lecturer at Columbia University. After 1907, his compositional output increased. He acquired further polish in Paris, studying with Vincent d’Indy, in 1913.

Of course, 1913 was the year that Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” shook the musical world, but Mason remained resistant to its charms. Instead, he continued to create cocooned in a Romantic sensibility, and a rather conservative one.

In his way, he sought to increase respect for American music, incorporating indigenous and popular themes into a number of his works, urging native composers to stop imitating European models (though he himself evidently admired the Austro-German canon), and criticizing European conductors working in the U.S. for not including American works on their programs. On the other hand, he wasn’t overly happy with George Gershwin or Aaron Copland, nor was he thrilled by jazz or the influence of Stravinsky.

In common with many of his time, Mason held some complicated views. He publicly condemned anti-Semitism and embraced what were then described as Negro spirituals. However, he was pretty firm in his belief that American culture should be “Anglo-Saxon,” and went a little overboard in expressing his xenophobia, to the extent that he felt compelled to write an apology in the New York Times in 1933, stating that he had been misinterpreted and clarifying that he was opposed to “jingoism and Hitlerian nationalism.”

Mason was a man of contradictions, to be sure. Among his writings are 18 books on music, so there is certainly plenty to sift through. One can only imagine what he made of American music at the time of his death in 1953.

Mason’s “Chanticleer Festival Overture” dates from 1926. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was composed in 1924, and Copland’s jazz-inflected “Music for the Theater” appeared in 1925.

“All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag.”

Mason’s own music is now virtually forgotten. But it is not without its charms. His Thoreau-derived rooster portrait is still something to crow about. A tip of the cockscomb to Daniel Gregory Mason on his sesquicentennial.

Symphony No. 3 “Lincoln,” conducted by Sir John Barbirolli

String Quartet in G minor on Negro Themes

“Variations on Yankee Doodle in the Styles of Various Composers”

November 20, 2023
Harry T. Burleigh: The Voice That Shaped Dvořák

Harry T. Burleigh is one of the great unsung figures in American music – which is ironic, since it was his singing that changed the course of history.

Burleigh was a student at the National Conservatory of Music in New York, where he studied with, among others, Rubin Goldmark, the conservative pedagogue who later gave lessons to Aaron Copland and George Gershwin.

It just so happens that Burleigh’s attendance there coincided with the tenure of Antonin Dvořák as the conservatory’s director. Dvořák overheard the young man singing African American spirituals in a corridor adjacent to his office and was transfixed. This was his first exposure to the spiritual, and it had the force of an epiphany. Thereafter, Burleigh was a regular guest at the Dvořák home. He frequently sang for Dvořák and worked as his copyist beginning in 1893.

Reflecting on his own debt to the folk idioms of his native land in the development of a Czech national sound, Dvořák was eager to share his impressions with American composers, and to encourage them to embrace this unique and neglected resource.

“I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies,” he wrote. “This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. When I first came here last year I was impressed with this idea and it has developed into a settled conviction. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.”

This was quite the pronouncement for 1893.

Spirituals, of course, became an important part of the “New World” Symphony’s DNA. Since Dvořák’s masterwork was intended, in part, as instructional, leading American composers by example to a distinctly national sound, the significance of Burleigh’s influence becomes inescapable.

Burleigh also served as a double-bassist and timpanist in the school’s orchestra, which Dvořák conducted. He was born in Stamford, CT, on this date in 1866.

Happy birthday, Harry T. Burleigh, and thank you!

More about Burleigh:

“Goin’ Home”

“Wade in de Water”

Dvorak, Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT8dqLoRIVU

December 2, 2022
Phillips, Hanson, and American Music

I began yesterday by cracking the back of my skull on the bathroom floor, and then I had to drag my carcass to the polls, so I hope you will forgive me for taking the day off. I just react poorly to vaccines. And before anyone suggests it’s because I had tiny submarines injected into me, “Fantastic Voyage”-style, I hasten to add I know very few people who suffer anything worse than a sore arm. I’m just lucky to be blessed with an overachieving immune system, I guess. Either that, or I’m a bigger threat than I thought, a threat that can only be eliminated by tiny Donald Pleasence.

Be that as it may, I hate to miss a day posting. It’s purely egotism, I know, since in the scheme of things, it doesn’t make any damn difference, but it does make me feel out of sorts. It’s part of my morning routine, like filling the birdfeeders and drinking a cup of coffee.

This lengthy preamble has nothing to do with Burrill Phillips, who was born on this date in 1907. Phillips was a product of the Eastman School, and later taught there. His best-known music is “Selections from McGuffey’s Reader,” which takes its name from the old schoolhouse primers. Its three movements – “The One-Horse Shay,” “John Alden and Priscilla,” and “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” – are inspired by writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and possibly the Revere painting by Grant Wood. Can’t get much more consciously “American” than that.

Phillips confided to his diary in 1933, “I don’t think anyone had written such ‘American-sounding’ music before. On the first night, the students said it was corny. And it was. But I didn’t care, because it was a huge success.” It still is.

Later, Phillips evolved from that early, populist style to embrace more experimental techniques. I confess I don’t know any of his later work, but I try to play “Selections from McGuffey’s Reader” every year around Thanksgiving.

Fortuitously, this also gives me the opportunity to tip the top of my skull to Howard Hanson, whose birthday (October 28, 1896) I passed over in the run-up to Halloween. For some 40 years, Hanson was director of the Eastman School. In that capacity, and as conductor of the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, he did a world of good for American music. Hanson would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1944 for his Symphony No. 4, “Requiem,” dedicated to the memory of his father. But his best-known piece is unquestionably his Symphony No. 2, “Romantic,” still mined by Hollywood composers.

Both Phillips and Hanson were Nebraska natives. (Phillips was from Omaha, and Hanson hailed from Wahoo). My heart is in the Heartland, even as the back of my head is on the bathroom floor.

“Selections from McGuffey’s Reader” (posted separately as a YouTube playlist, so you may have to skip ads in between movements)

Burrill Phillips’ Piano Concerto

Howard Hanson’s “Romantic” Symphony

History of McGuffey’s Reader

Go Eastman, young men: Burrill Phillips (left, with music typewriter) and Howard Hanson

November 9, 2022
American Music Greats Born on This Day

A great day for American music.

Seminal jazz artist and pop cultural icon Louis Armstrong was born on this date in 1901. Armstrong’s birth certificate didn’t come to light until years after his death, so he always celebrated his birthday on July 4. Can’t get much more American than that.

William Schuman, president of the Julliard School (1945-61) and Lincoln Center (1961-69), and first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his cantata “A Free Song” in 1943, was born on this date in 1910. In his day, he was regarded as one of our great American symphonists. His Symphony No. 3 (1941) was especially well-regarded.

Film composer David Raksin, who got his start working with Chaplin on “Modern Times,” but best-remembered for his music for the noir classic “Laura,” was born in Philadelphia on this date in 1912. Due to his longevity – Raksin lived to see 92 – he became an invaluable fount of information about old Hollywood.

Pretty great country, that could produce that array of talent. Happy birthday, gentlemen. Thanks for all the music.

Armstrong live in 1933

With Velma Middleton, “All That Meat and No Potatoes”

William Schuman on “What’s My Line?”

Schuman, Symphony No. 3

Raksin talks about working with Chaplin on “Modern Times”

Raksin plays “Laura”

August 4, 2022

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