Here’s another piece I used to play every year for Thanksgiving, but like so many other recordings I drew from my own collection, it disappeared from the air waves when I was given the boot during COVID and was never asked back. One of these days, I’ll have to send it out into syndication on “The Lost Chord.”
Quincy Porter is yet another one of those largely forgotten American composers of the generation of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. Born in New Haven, CT, in 1897, he attended Yale, where he studied with Horatio Parker (Charles Ives’ longsuffering teacher) and David Stanley Smith. He also studied with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and Ernest Bloch in New York.
In 1923, he joined the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music. He was there for five years, until he made the decision to devote himself exclusively to composition. A Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to return to Paris. The money held out for three productive years, but in the end he was back at the Cleveland Institute. Briefly. The next year he was teaching at Vassar. In 1938, he was appointed dean and later director of the New England Conservatory of Music. In the 1946, he returned to Yale, where he taught until 1965.
With Copland and Howard Hanson, he cofounded the American Music Center in 1939. He served as chairman of the organization’s board from 1958 until his death in 1966.
In 1944, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his “Concerto Concertante” for two pianos and orchestra. Where is he now?
“New England Episodes” was given its premiere in Washington, D.C., in 1958. According to the liner notes to my recording, “The subject of this evocative suite is the puritan past of New England with its hymns, its rigidities, its moments of lightness and its melancholy.”
There’s a moment when the chimes take on the character of church bells, which I find an especially nice touch, but I find the entire work transporting. I hope you do too.
