The Great Gatsby - February 12, 2022
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John Harbison
Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra)
A graduate of Harvard, Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and Princeton, John Harbison has been teaching at MIT since 1969. His musical development has been shaped by his experience as an accomplished jazz pianist, violist in a string quartet and conductor of choral music. He has been composer-in-residence with many musical organizations (the Pittsburgh Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Santa Fe Festival, Tanglewood and others) and received the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1987 for his cantata The Flight Into Egypt. In 1989 was named a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow.
Rereading F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby in the early 1980s, Harbison conceived the idea of making it into an opera. He shaped his initial musical ideas into Remembering Gatsby, composed for the Atlanta Symphony in 1985. It is a nostalgic look at the foxtrot, the primary dance rhythm of the 1920s. In 1995, when Harbison was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to compose an opera based on Gatsby, he incorporated Remembering Gatsby into the overture. The opera was premiered by the Met in December 1999.
This short work encompasses some of the most important aspects of Gatsby's character. Set entirely to an underlying quickstep beat, it opens with darkly passionate chords,
reflecting Gatsby's obsessions, ambition and love for Daisy, which drive his life.
These are followed by the cool understated foxtrot melody that appears to
portray the emotionally empty and mendacious persona Gatsby displays at his lavish parties for people he barely knows but craves to impress.
Harbison continues with four increasingly emotive variations on the foxtrot
theme
which eventually fades into the wee hours - like Gatsby's parties and the man himself.
Florence Price
Piano Concerto in One Movement
Florence Price joined the already small field of African-American classical composers to become the first African-American woman composer to have a work played by a major orchestra. Born into a middle-class family in Little Rock, Arkansas, she received support from her dentist father in addition to early training in piano from her mother. Given the impossibility of getting a proper musical education in Little Rock, she traveled to Boston, where she earned degrees in organ performance and piano pedagogy.
Rather than remain in a more comfortable northern environment, Price returned to Little Rock and established a teaching career between 1907 and 1927 in two African-American colleges. She eventually became head of the music department at Clark College in Atlanta. After her marriage, she moved with her husband to Chicago, where she continued her education in composition. In 1932, she achieved national recognition when she won first prize in the Wanamaker competition for her Symphony No. 1, which was premiered the following year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Like so many Black composers of this period, Price supplemented her income by playing organ gigs for silent movies and writing choral or vocal arrangements for churches. And like so many women composers, she produced a significant body of art songs. Contralto Marian Anderson featured her arrangement of the spiritual "My soul's been anchored in de Lord" and Price's own Songs to the Dark Virgin with a text by Langston Hughes.
Most of her manuscripts were thought to have been lost, but in 2009 a trove of them were discovered in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois. It turned out that the house had been the Price's summer home.
Price composed the Piano Concerto in 1931-32 and premiered it in Chicago in 1934 with her as soloist. There is no record of any further performances, and the score disappeared, only a two-piano version and a few orchestral parts surviving. In 2011, composer Trevor Weston (b. 1967) reconstructed the Concerto successfully, and it began to enter the repertoire. Then, in 2019, a copy of the original orchestration appeared at auction. Finally, in February 2021, after some 85 years, the original version was heard again, with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In a letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Price acknowledged the two big strikes against her: Her race, and her sex. But there was a third: in the 1920s and 30s, her late-Romantic musical language was unacceptable to Classical music trend-setters - unless your name was Rachmaninov, whose musical language this Concerto speaks.
While it is referred to as "in one movement", the Concerto is actually in three distinct sections, played without pause. While the first and longest section recalls Rachmaninov with all the pianistic flourishes, the main theme offers echoes of African-American spirituals. The second, Adagio, is a more direct exposition of a Black spiritual, including blue notes. The playful third section brings in the joyous rhythm and tunes of the Juba dance.
As we emerge into an era of "politically correct" discourse and art, it is interesting to note that Florence Price came from a different world in which her musical education and subsequent career depended on her adapting to white - even elitist - aesthetic standards. Yet Price balanced the two traditions of her heritage and education with brilliance and grace.
Aaron Copland
Quiet City
In 1938, Aaron Copland was asked to write incidental music for an experimental drama by Irwin Shaw called The Quiet City. The play involved a young trumpet player who imagines the nocturnal fantasies of other people in a great city. The play, however, was too experimental and was cancelled after the dress rehearsal; all that remained is Copland's music, scored for trumpet, saxophone, clarinet and piano. Not willing to let a good thing go to waste, the composer re-scored the work for trumpet and strings, and added an English horn "...for contrast and to give the trumpeter breathing space." The suite was completed in September 1940 and premiered in January 1941.
While we usually associate the trumpet with loud, assertive music, The Quiet City opens and closes gently and meditatively conjuring the palpable stillness of the night
and the loneliness of the trumpeter.
Even the middle, forte, section is gentle and introverted.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Suite from Music to Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, Op. 11
Erich Wolfgang Korngold is a representative of the last gasp of the late Romantic spirit in Vienna. He never veered from this established idiom and never ventured into modernistic experiments. A true child prodigy, his works were performed in public in Vienna by the time he was 11 (a fact that may have been helped his father, the music critic of Vienna's most prestigious newspaper, Neue Freie Presse).
In the early part of the century Korngold was known mainly through his operas (Violanta, Die tote Stadt, Das Wunder der Heliane) but today he is primarily remembered by his pioneering film music, an art he embraced wholeheartedly when he came to Hollywood in 1934 at the urging of the director Max Reinhardt, with whom he had staged Die Fledermaus in Berlin in the 1920s.
By the time Korngold came to Hollywood, his "classical" compositions were considered dated by the proponents of serialism and atonality and were regarded as superficial and irrelevant to the mainstream of twentieth-century modernism. But Hollywood adored him. Korngold saw film as the true successor to the operatic stage. His success as film music composer was phenomenal; two of his scores - Anthony Adverse (1936) and Robin Hood (1938) - were awarded Oscars.
Korngold composed fourteen numbers for a production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing in 1920. The play itself contains numerous musical references, three songs and the requirement for instrumental music. In the 1623 folio edition, the stage directions include "Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio and Jack Wilson", the latter a famous stage singer who took the part of Belthasar, who is asked to sing together with Benedick and Claudio. Even before the play was staged, Korngold combined five of the numbers into a suite. Much of the music gives a foretaste of his film music to come.
The Overture is a spirited, lighthearted piece that sets the mood for the spirit of the play. It is composed, as are most concert overtures, in
sonata allegro form
, which in this case sets up a perfect dichotomy between the farcical
and romantic
aspects of the play. The light
staccato
playing conveys the overall mood, while the trill
motive
imitates laughter.
Movement 2, Maiden in the Bridal Chamber is gentle and dreamy, reflecting the romantic subplot with Hero and Claudio.
Movement 3, March of the Watch, presents Dogberry and Verges, two of Shakespeare's inimitable low-IQ law enforcement agents, in a grotesque, three-footed march.
Note that although Korngold did not yet have Hollywood in his sights, the kind of music for this section would eventually become the composer's iconic
background music for such comic scenes in film.
Movement 4, Intermezzo, comes from the garden scene, in which Beatrice becomes aware of her feelings for Benedick. In many ways, it is the most romantic
music in the suite, symbolizing how Beatrice's completely succumbs to power of love.
The final movement, Masquerade-Hornpipe, is the dance music played following Benedick's order "Strike up, pipers", but it is a hornpipe with an odd beat.
George Gershwin
Gershwin in Hollywood
arr. Robert Russell Bennett
George Gershwin was the first American composer to make jazz acceptable to the classical music audience. The son of poor Jewish immigrants in lower Manhattan, he was a natural-born pianist and left school at 16 to become a pianist with a Tin-Pan Alley firm, plugging their new songs. He soon commenced writing songs himself, eventually teaming up with his brother Ira as lyricist to become one of the most successful teams of song and musical comedy writers on Broadway.
He transformed that success into a string of immensely successful musicals. From Lady be Good in December 1924 to Let 'em Eat Cake in October 1933, the opening night of a George Gershwin musical comedy was a social and media event with Gershwin himself usually leading the orchestra.
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) was an American composer and expert arranger and orchestrator, best known for his arrangements of Oklahoma!, The King and I, South Pacific, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. He was famous for his phenomenal memory, usually putting down the final form of his scores in calligraphic notation without having to revise them. He made a medley from eight of Gershwin's most popular songs from the musicals:
I "The Back Bay Polka" from The Shocking Miss Pilgrim
II "A Foggy Day" from A Damsel in Distress
III "Slap That Bass" from Shall We Dance?
IV "Love Walked In" from The Goldwyn Follies
V "Nice Work if You Can Get It" from A Damsel in Distress
VI "One, Two, Three" from The Shocking Miss Pilgrim
VII "Love Is Here To Stay" from The Goldwyn Follies
VIII "They Can't Take That Away From Me" from The Barkleys of Broadway
