Program Notes: December 12, 1999
In many respects, Aaron Copland and George Gershwin would have seemed unlikely candidates for creating the most persuasively American musical identities to appear in the twentieth-century concert hall. Outwardly, their remarkably similar circumstances defined them as outsiders within American culture; both were Jews born in Brooklyn at the turn of the century to immigrant parents who had fled from rampant persecution in eastern Europe. Yet this background placed them well within the prescription that Dvorák had offered a few years before their births, for an American nationalist music that would blend the musical idioms of European immigrants, former slave populations, and American Indians. To be sure, Dvorák's prescription has not been well-understood, in part because his advocacy for a nationalist music stemming from the underprivileged components of American society was not exactly welcomed by the guardians of western-European "high" culture who had brought him to America. Nevertheless, in the words of Charles Hamm, "what [Dvorák] proposed did in fact come about, within a generation. And it was the Anglophiles' worst nightmare: music by immigrant and first-generation Jewish composers with names like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, drawing on black, Jewish, and Irish materials, and accepted both at home and abroad as the most distinctive and distinguished American music of its time."
Despite their shared ethnic heritage, Copland and Gershwin entered the concert hall, figuratively, through quite different doors. Copland's training was considerably more cosmopolitan than Gershwin's, incorporating first-hand experience with European ballet traditions; consequently, he developed his famous "prairie" idiom, which has seemed to capture so well the open expanses of the American landscape, originally for the ballet stage. The first of his American ballet scores, Billy the Kid (1938), soon assumed the guise of a concert suite, in which form it has found lasting favor with audiences through its adaptations of folk tunes such as "Old Paint," its "programmatic" depiction of a gun battle, and the characteristic "prairie" music that serves as its frame. The suite leaves out Billy's escape and death, which are romantically rendered in the ballet as a universalizing emblem of the American West (however remote from the realities of William H. Bonney's short life as a frontier terrorist), ending its narrative component with the celebratory music that follows his capture. Gershwin's much less advantaged boyhood experiences, on the other hand, led him to a career centered in and around Tin Pan Alley, and it was partly from its jazz-influenced materials that he created his distinctive concert style. Always acutely aware of what he perceived to be deficiencies in his training, Gershwin tried in the Concerto in F to adapt his style to what he could learn, virtually overnight, of the forms and processes of the classical concerto tradition. The result is one of his most rewarding pieces, combining the familiar Gershwin energy with much subtle (and some not-so-subtle) interplay among its various themes.
Charles Ives's pedigree as an American is considerably longer than Copland's or Gershwin's; a Connecticut Yankee educated at Yale, Ives is often celebrated as the father of American music in the twentieth century. Yet he had much difficulty reconciling American musical materials with his own penchant for knotty textures and the demands of the public concert hall, so that his more serious work has seldom found favor with audiences. The popular success of his Variations on "America" stems largely from its tongue-in-cheek attitude, evident in his treating with mock seriousness the most familiar and trivial of tunes; this attitude is adroitly reinforced by William Schuman's orchestration of what was originally an organ piece, intended more as a private amusement than a public statement.
--- Raymond Knapp
Please enjoy these additional links about the composers and compositions. Charles Ives
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