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
