Americana!

CONDUCTOR'S NOTES BY JOHN CURRIE

To give a grand survey of American music in all its aspects- native, imported commercial, non-commercial, early and contemporary - would take a life-time of concerts. Hence the lighter title of this concert: AMERICANA. In it we hope to visit a number of pleasant musical areas which have become beloved and are typically American in history, style, and flavor. All national flavors are defined as much by foreigners as by the nationals themselves. What is typically German, English, Norwegian or whatever, is crystallised (and, alas, often caricaturised) by outsiders. I would like to think, then, that our program tonight would be recognised by members of any nation as a broad selection of typically American music. I also hope that the selection is broad enough not only to please by its variety, charm, and familiarity, but also to give some inkling of those indefinable things, national spirit and character. From senior living composers who have entered the Americana hall of fame, I could not but choose, in one of his dimensions, Copland. In his long life, he has come to typify much that is essentially American in music. Here is the European tradition invested with the wide open spaces of a new land with its own folk-music and its own distinctive view of man's nobility. The Tender Land may not have made its way internationally as a whole work, but those "Americana" sections which we sing and play tonight are known and loved everywhere, as is the strong heroic Fanfare For The Common Man. (Copland, however, is a large and complex artist, and music in one of his other dimensions, cerebral and less extrovert, would not be recognised as belonging in a program of this title.) Different, although of the same generation, is the music of Barber, whose late-Romantic glow has an unmistakably American color. I felt it would be right to choose slow music to represent him here. His setting of Hopkins' Heaven-Haven is typical both of the dissonance and sonority of Romantic American unaccompanied choral music. Structurally it is a perfect miniature, the climax perfectly placed. For me, Heaven-Haven is to the symphonic music of Barber what a motet of Bruckner is to his huge symphonies. The very familiar Adagio For Strings holds the same place in the U.S.A. as do Elgar's Nimrod variation and Vaughan Williams' Fantasia On A Theme Of Tallis in Britain. The string movement, like Heaven-Haven, is an amazing fusion of lyrical intensity and structural design. Its sanctified place in any gallery of Americana is, of course, now doubly assured after its highly effective use in the Vietnam War film Platoon. The music of Gordon Getty, from the generation after Copland and Barber, seemed appropriate for inclusion under "Americana." The two premieres tonight are typical Getty. Direct, attractive, seemingly naive in musical idiom, they appeal by simplicity. These songs join one of the traditional streams of the American choral and orchestral repertoire. In the realms of early Americana, the choice is wider than you may expect. Here I have not gone for the early military music, political songs, music of Spanish influence, nor for the early sacred music of the somewhat unskilled Mr. Billings. Rather, to represent all the reli gious musical traditions which planted themelves here, I have chosen the music of the Moravian Church. Those of you who heard their trombone choir, before the concert on the plaza, and later as the Curtain-raiser, will have had a taste of their trombone tradition. But we now include, also, two examples of the Moravian's love of and delight in choral and orchestral music. I have included one work by an early immigrant (Peter) and one by a later fully assimilated composer, Hagen. After much suffering in early days in Europe their joyful tradition continues here today. In the area of folk-song, we have stayed with the now standard arrangements by Copland. They have never been surpassed for liveliness and invention, without destroying the essential character of the songs. Similarly, from the vast repertoire of black spirituals I have chosen four titles which are known the world over, two in unaccompanied arrangements (the one by Shaw is particularly fine) and two with orchestra. Hovering somewhere around folk, drawingroom ballad, and early music theatre, are the songs of Stephen Foster. Written in a time when social attitudes were different, and describing a romanticised South (which he had scarcely visited), why have these songs surl'ived as World-famous Americana? Because, dammit, the man wrote good tunes. His list of world-wide hits is lengthy: Swanee River, Old Black Joe, Beautiful Dreamer, Camptown Races, and so on. Tonight we include Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair, typically slow and sentimental, and one from his fast , perky, "Southern" genre, The Glendy Burk. I have tried to preserve the original flavor of these gems of Americana. Foster has suffered cruelly from swinging re-arrangement. The original harmony and piano accompaniment has been presented in both songs, with the addition of some simple orchestral backing. If there is any lingering doubt that Foster was a "commercial" composer, that can be swept aside in the case of Gershwin and composers of the American Musical generally. Here is the style which, supremely, typifies "Americana" to the rest of the world. And yet Gershwin does not quite fit. For that reason, I have included his less ll'ell known orchestral Promenade side by side with the very familiar, but beautiful, Summertime. from Porgy And Bess. Promenade is a mixture of urbanity, wit, and elegant orchestral restraint. And yet its roots are so distinctly American, with its sideways glance at the soft-shoe shuffle, and its gently jazzy clarinet solo. The selection from My Fair Lady stands for that unique world of American show business where theatrical and melodic talent combines happily with profits. Why My Fair Lady? Why not? ...see pdf for more historical notes...