Clinton Symphony Orchestra

The Clinton Symphony Orchestra will be kicking off their 66th season on Saturday, September 21 at 7:30 pm. The concert, entitled “From the Countryside” will take place in the Centennial Auditorium of Sterling High School in Illinois. More information about the concert may be found here. Please enjoy the following program notes about this portion of our concert.

Béla Bartók – Rumanian Folk Dances

The first decade of the 20th century was a decisive period of discovery in the musical development of Hungarian composer Béla Viktor János Bartók (1881-1945). During this span he came under the influences of several strands of musical invention which led him to recognize his own musical core values.

In 1902, while a student at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, Bartók met German composer Richard Strauss at the Budapest premiere of Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, and the composer and his music had an immediate effect on Bartók, for the young man set to work on his first major orchestral composition, a piece to honor his countryman Lajos Kossuth. The resulting piece Kossuth is a late-Romantic work of the first order, clearly reflecting the influences not only of Strauss, but those of Hungarian Franz Liszt as well. He completed the work in short order during the spring and summer of 1903; Kossuth was accepted for performance by the noted conductor Hans Richter for his orchestra at Manchester, England, which led the Budapest Philharmonic Society to beg Bartók for the privilege to hold the premiere in Budapest in January 1904. The Manchester performance took place the following month, the 18th of February. These were the only two performances of Kossuth during the composer’s life.

Bartók’s fascination with Strauss was short lived. In mid-decade Bartók met fellow composer Zoltán Kodály with whom he forged a lifelong friendship. It was through Kodály that Bartók came to know the music of Claude Debussy. Bartók was so captivated by the French master’s use of harmonics that Debussy’s influence is present in the Fourteen Bagatelles of 1908 and in Bluebeard’s Castle (1910-11), Bartók’s only opera. Critical and public reception of the opera was so negative that Bartók took a hiatus from composing to concentrate his musical talents in another field – that of folk music research.

Even as he struggled to find his own musical ‘voice’ through attachments to Strauss, Liszt, and Debussy, the young composer and his colleague Kodály undertook ‘field trips’ into the Hungarian back country to collect and research old folk melodies. To their surprise, they discovered that the Gypsy songs performed in cafés and salons and popularized by Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies had little correlation to authentic Gypsy folk melodies as performed by local bands. Based on their findings, both Bartók and Kodály began to incorporate folk elements into their music. Bartók believed that a composer has three options in the use of folk music – he can quote the music literally; he can write imitation folk tunes; or, he can strive to embody the essence or ‘spirit’ of a peoples’ music in his compositions. Bartók followed the third option, sure that on the foundations of his studies he could base his original music on folk elements.

That first foray into the Hungarian hinterland in 1907 also took the two composers into Transylvania, a largely Romanian district which at the time was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here, Bartók observed, listened and took notes which he later transcribed and embellished into several collections of folk-song arrangements. One of these sets is Rumanian Folk Dances (1915), a suite of six short piano pieces which he later orchestrated for chamber ensemble (1917). The suite is based on seven Romanian fiddle tunes from the Transylvanian region (The last dance incorporates two tunes).

Program notes are graciously written by William Driver

Join us as the Clinton Symphony Orchestra kicks off their 66th season on Saturday, September 21 at 7:30 pm. The concert, entitled “From the Countryside” will take place in the Centennial Auditorium of Sterling High School in Illinois. More information about the concert may be found here. A featured piece on the concert is Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Please enjoy the following program notes:

Aaron Copland—Appalachian Spring

When Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was born at the turn of the twentieth century, the one piece of serious music considered to be “American” was written by a Czech composer. As head of the newly-founded New York Conservatory of Music, Antonín Dvorak had composed a symphony to illustrate to his students—and to America’s classical composers—how to incorporate native American influences into their compositions, so that their works were reflective of American culture rather than the European trends of Wagner and Brahms.

Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 in E minor, “From the New World,” was viewed by many as incorporating slave melodies and Native American music into, particularly, the second and third movements, respectively. Sensitive to any suggestion that he might have copied verbatim from native musical sources, Dvorak vehemently denied doing so, stating that he only sought to capture the essence of the American spirit in his work. Long after his American sojourn, he explained to one music journal writer

…I am sending you Kretschmar’s analysis of the Symphony [No 9], but the nonsense-that I made use of “Indian” and American motifs leave out, because it is a lie, I only sought to write in the spirit of these American folk-melodies.

Only after World War I did American composers take seriously the task of presenting idiosyncratic American music to world audiences. The most notable instances was Broadway composer George Gershwin’s venture into classical music with his jazz-infused scores: Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Piano Concerto in F (1925), and An American in Paris (1928).

Fresh from his studies in Europe, Aaron Copland sought in his early works in the 1920s and ‘30s to fashion a music that truly embraced the singularities of a unique American tradition in subjects and tonalities. His first attempts were, like Gershwin’s, jazz-inspired, but had negligible impact in forwarding his career. However, when he turned his considerable skills to western-themed subjects, to writing in his “vernacular style”, as he put it, he struck a chord with critics and the public that brought him broad recognition. His two notable ballets of that period were Billy the Kid (1939) and Rodeo (1942), both for the Martha Graham Dance Company and funded by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation.

Copland began working on Appalachian Spring in late 1942, following the success of Rodeo; again, the score was for the Graham Dance group and commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation. His fee was a quite generous five-hundred dollars.

When he started composing for the ballet, Copland had no clear idea of what the story concept was. According to the composer, Graham gave him only the barest of hints, “the legend of American living.” Happily, Copland’s inspiration arrived in the form of a book by Edward Deming Andrews, The Gift to be Simple—Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers. Copland stated that the book’s title song jumped out to him immediately. But his Ballet for Martha, stressed the characteristics of Graham herself:

I was thinking primarily about Martha and her unique choreographic style, which I knew well. There’s something prim and restrained, simple yet strong, about her which one tends to think of as American. Appalachian Spring would never have existed without her special personality. The music reflects…the unique quality of a human being, an American landscape and a way of feeling.

The ballet is set in the Pennsylvania countryside during the early nineteenth century. The bride-to-be and her future husband along with their neighbors are celebrating the construction of the couple’s new farmhouse. The young couple depict the joy and apprehension that await them, while the neighbors attempt to moderate their naive expectations with anecdotes of human frailty and fate. But the couple end the celebration in the quiet and calm of a new resolve.

Copland made liberal use of the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”, composed in 1848 by Elder Joseph Bracket. Copland later learned to his chagrin that the Shakers had never resided in the part of Pennsylvania referenced in the ballet. The title of the ballet was chosen by Graham shortly before its premiere, suggested by a Hart Crane poem, “The Dance,” from his book The Bridge.

Copland’s original orchestration of thirteen instruments was determined by the venue for the ballet—the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.:

There simply wasn’t room for any more instruments in that little pit in front of the stage, so there could be no question of scoring the ballet for a larger orchestra.

The ballet was first performed at a concert on October 30,1944, at the Coolidge

Auditorium in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. with Graham in the lead role of the bride, as part of a festival of chamber music celebrating Mrs Coolidge’s eightieth birthday. The suite that Copland subsequently prepared in 1945 is a reworked version of the original, scored for full orchestra.

In total, four versions of Appalachian Spring exist in performing editions, dating from 1944 (13-player complete), 1945 (orchestral suite), 1954 (orchestral complete) and 1972 (13-player suite).

Appalachian Spring received the Pulitzer Prize for music as well as the Music Critics Circle of New York Award for the outstanding theatrical work of the 1944-45 season.

Program notes are graciously written by William Driver.

The Clinton Symphony Orchestra will be in concert at 7:30 pm on Saturday, April 27. Our featured guest will be pianist Lorraine Min. The concert will open with Franz Shebert’s Overture to Rosamunde. Please enjoy the following program notes written by William Driver.

Schubert – Rosamunde

Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) wrote the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, Princess of Cypress, for a friend Helmina von Chézy. Already ridiculed for her libretto to Carl Maria Weber’s Euryanthe, the Viennese critics likewise derided Chézy for the ineptness of her writing. The romantic drama made it through two performances with the only saving graces being the incidental music that Schubert composed for the venture. Despite the success of the music, Schubert saw little merit in arranging a suite from the music, but instead used some of the score in other works such as a string quartet.

Bits and pieces of the original score were published as independent works over the years, but a unified version of the complete incidental music (Gesammtausgabe) was not made available until after the discovery of the original manuscript by Arthur Sullivan and George Grove in a closet in Vienna in 1867. Breitkopf & Härtel issued the completed score in 1891.

Schubert wrote no specific overture for Rosamunde. Instead he dusted off an overture to his unperformed 1820 opera Alfonso und Estrella for the opening night of the play, but when the Rosamunde manuscript was published in 1891 as Op. 26, it was not with the Alfonso und Estrella Overture, which had actually introduced the play in the theater, but with a still earlier one which Schubert had composed in 1820 for a different play by a different writer, called The Magic Harp.

Thus, the Overture to Rosamunde may be said to have served a double duty for two independent works.