American Classics

[Lat-Literal]

Richard

I have a Delos CD, number DE3074, which has Piston 2, 6, and the Sinfonietta.
The symphonies are with the Seattle Symphony and the Sinfonetta is with the New York Chamber Symphony, all conducted by Schwarz.
The symphonies got reissued on Naxos:

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Naxos/8559161

Not sure where the subtitle Gettysburg comes from: that's not mentioned on the Delos CD.

You can pick up a used copy of the Delos CD here, for $0.87 (plus p and p):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...=used&qid=&sr=

Isn't the Harris 6 "Gettysburg" or, originally, "Gettysburg Address"?

(Oddly, Robert Strassburg in "Roy Harris. A Catalog of his Works, California State Univ., 1973" only mentions Harris 1-5 and 7 - he was that overlooked at that time not even he could say which symphonies Harris had written - but I don't think presto are right in saying the subtitle goes to Piston)

[richardfinegold]

Richard

I have a Delos CD, number DE3074, which has Piston 2, 6, and the Sinfonietta.
The symphonies are with the Seattle Symphony and the Sinfonetta is with the New York Chamber Symphony, all conducted by Schwarz.
The symphonies got reissued on Naxos:

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Naxos/8559161

Not sure where the subtitle Gettysburg comes from: that's not mentioned on the Delos CD.

You can pick up a used copy of the Delos CD here, for $0.87 (plus p and p):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...=used&qid=&sr=

Thanks! The Piston 6 with Scwarz wasn't 't listed in Amazon or Arkiv Musik when I last looked and that may be as long as 2 years ago,; I should double check before I write something.
I also found a Slatkin St Louis version

[Suffolkcoastal]

Are you getting confused with the Piston 3rd Symphony RFG? The 3rd was the only Piston symphony commercially recorded by Hanson, I have the LP which plays ok. Piston's 6th Symphony was composed several years after Koussevitsky's death, it was written for Munch and the BSO.

Harris's 6th is just titled 'Gettysburg'.

[Lat-Literal]

Daniel Kellogg - O Greening Branch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au_wnmCSM9M
Christopher Rouse - Symphony No 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R8hcdINo4I
Arthur Foote - Four Character Pieces - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgLzAYoIrA
David del Tredici - Paul Revere's Ride - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-FYoeCHBY0

[richardfinegold]

My bad. I was confused between the Piston 3rd and 6th

[Lat-Literal]

Tentative Steps from the Boston Six via Rosner to the Eights and Nines

......Any trek to find the great American symphonies is likely to take as long as walking from the East Coast to the West. Ferney was right to suggest that many composers have been prolific so perhaps Diamond was momentarily being a bit forgetful. I am using some poetic licence here to incorporate all compositions. However, when it comes to being specific on symphonies, to the list of the eights and nines we can now add Persichetti and no doubt several more. Persichetti decided to "lose" his first two and isn't that just a common theme in the United States of the modern American symphony? Not to everyone of course. Not, for example, to Rosner who was never very typical of anything:

"Though in many ways a staunch traditionalist, he didn’t align himself with more conservative approaches either. While he decried what he saw as the sterility of the serialists and the experimentalists, as well as the mindlessness of the minimalists, he also loathed the sentimentality of the neo-romantics and the dry formalism of the neo-classicists. He developed his vision of a musical ideal around the time he entered high school, and, though he refined and elaborated this vision throughout his life, he never repudiated it, and paid a significant price for his stubborn adherence to it."

I haven't got a full grasp - or even a little finger - on any of these people. Not on Rosner himself, some of whose music I understand was predicated on the modal polyphony of the Renaissance and early Baroque, as well as on the pre-tonal harmony of late Medieval dance music. And, no, I haven't even heard any of Rosner's symphonies and possibly I never will. Whether I could hate what he produced, though, is questionable, having stopped off now on umpteen occasions to view the countryside en route. I didn't especially like what I heard of the "Missa" but the brass in "Songs of Lightness and Angels" was reasonably enjoyable and, yes, there was an approximate appreciation of "The Tragedy of Queen Jane".

Born in 1945, Rosner's clear vision owed more to the past than the future, albeit that his music was something of a mixed bag. That is to say it seems the Big Boston Five - or Six if you include Chadwick - felt that they knew their purpose. I have to confess here that Chadwick is one of the people I still need to see but I have met the others. Was Paine the oldest? If so, I suppose his first symphony has a claim to being the first real American symphony. All of them were, after all, Realists as only those who could have influenced Ives could inconceivably be. But Paine's Symphonies 1 and 2 do seem somewhat Germanic. I find them rather dull. The "Sonata for Violin and Piano", what I have heard of "Mass in D" and even the "Moorish Dance from Azara" fare little better. And from those early steps, where one might have expected expansiveness to have been at the heart of American music - especially in the symphony - what one has often sadly got instead is huge output, sizable clannish innovation and a massive sense of statement which continues to this day.

Maybe another of those five or six foresaw it all as if perched on Louis and Bebe Barron's "Forbidden Planet". Arthur Foote did not choose to attempt a symphony, settling instead for the underwhelming in all ways "Suite in D Minor". In contrast, his more modest exercises, often less focussed on Mendelssohn and Wagner, are thrillingly nuanced. Forget the references to Omar Khayyam which could lead them to be placed in the ark. "Four Character Pieces" and "Five Poems" are both wonderful works which can easily stand alongside the piano music of Amy Beach and much of the work of MacDowell - his second piano concerto, "Lamia" and "New England Idylls". Much as I love Beach's music, I have doubts about her "Gaelic Symphony" just as I am doubtful about Horatio Parker's "Hora Novissima", "Vathek" and "Fairyland Suite" although "A Northern Ballad" is not without merit. Somehow we need to get from here via Mason to Corigliano, Del Tredici and Zwilich without mentioning Copland or Barber etc. We can probably do that in a small number of posts.

[Lat-Literal]

Samuel Jones - Symphony No. 3 - Palo Duro Canyon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiGNcHLEgKc

[BBMmk2]

Anyone been following Ed Gardner's cycle of Copland's works on Chandos

[Lat-Literal]

Anyone been following Ed Gardner's cycle of Copland's works on Chandos

That sounds interesting.

Thank you.

A 20th Century Fork, Pivotal Sessions and the Driven Over 50s

Bolcom 3. Rochberg 4. Hanson 7. Mennin 8. Persichetti 9. Sessions 9. Schuman 10. Hovhaness 21-43 with a few gaps here and there. Yes, this was the decade that was the 1970s. Even setting aside the latter on the grounds that he is America's Havergal Brian, the numbers are very high. A rare work that wasn't in line with this trend was Del Tredici's "Alice". That most significant symphonies were produced by those who had been writing symphonies for a long time wasn't something that had suddenly commenced in 1970. Let us look at the key numbers for the previous decade minus Hovhaness. While the moon could be reached and there was extensive social change in the 1960s, the symphonic soundtrack was Fine 1, Bolcom 2, Porter 2, Lees 3, Bernstein 3, Rochberg 3, Sessions 5-8, Hanson 6, Mennin 7, Piston 7-8, Schuman 7-9, Persichetti 8, Harris 8-12 and Cowell 14 and 17-20. Of the first five composers, two had produced their first symphonies long before 1950 and of the fourteen that was true of ten so most that was then new was actually getting on a bit.

By the 1980s, much had changed including in music. Only Mennin, Bolcom, Lees and Diamond who had waited since the 1950s to follow up on his 1-8 had the temerity to offer symphonies of a high or medium number. There was also Harrison's 3rd. But most symphonists were new - Harbison, Corigliano, Rouse, Zwilich, Hailstork. In a sense what that represented was a return to a very old way. Beach 1 (1890s), Chadwick 1-3 (1880s), Paine 1-2 (1870s) and Fry's "Niagara" and "Santa Claus" from the 1850s even if the symphonic nature of those two will be open to debate. Back in that century there were, of course, quite a few works that could have been symphonies or not. Gottschalk's "A Night in the Tropics" and "A Montivideo", Strong's "Sintram" and Bristow's Niagara", unrecorded. All of them in their way were an early "Alice" before the arrival of four symphony Ives.

There is something here about individuals. The 1920s and the 1930s especially saw the rise of some remarkable people who had a way with symphonic form. Many of them had long and successful careers in which there was often considerable musical development. There is something too about the state of a nation, whether it is for example undergoing a missile crisis or feeling hope with a President Reagan. And there is something about the extent to which individuals and nation - even nationalism - choose or not to align. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that by the year that World War 2 ended and Rosner happened to be born, the American symphony had reached a pivotal point. Copland had established his place as an all American sampler, taking bits of anything appealing that he spotted and turning them into something unique for the nation. His future position was assured.

But as early as the late 1920s, Sessions 1st Symphony had indicated the scope for a fork in the road, drawing as it - or at least he - did from Bloch and markedly distinct from the "American Sound" of Virgil Thomson's 1st Symphony at that time. If Thomson partially linked Ives to Copland in music terms - an immediately identifiable Americana driven through an individual composer's original lens with reference to some homespun religion rarely far away - then Sessions was possibly a link between the sheer bloody mindedness of Ives and a lot of what was to happen subsequently. Building on his revolutionary 1935 Violin Concerto, the key moment was in 1946 with a work that was the deliberate opposite of nationalistic music - Sessions had personal as well as the usual sensitivities about the Nazi atrocities and consequently shunned any notion of a music for any nation including the United States - while simultaneously it was dedicated to the late Franklin D Roosevelt. This was to be the future more than the past. It was only his 2nd. Others were on 3, 4 or 5.

[BBMmk2]

Many thanks, LatLit, for your most illuminating post about the American symphony tradition. Be good to have some of the unrecorded works published by some companies, instead of the well trodden areas.

[Pulcinella]

Anyone been following Ed Gardner's cycle of Copland's works on Chandos

I think you might mean John Wilson as conductor, Bbm.
Here's a link to the two volumes released so far:

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/advsearch.php?composer=Copland&work=&performer=Wilson&medium=all&label=Chandos&cat=

[BBMmk2]

I think you might mean John Wilson as conductor, Bbm.
Here's a link to the two volumes released so far:

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/adv...l=Chandos&cat=

Indeed, yes. thanks Pulci. Must be getti9ng confused with the recent Janacek series.

[Lat-Literal]

Many thanks, LatLit, for your most illuminating post about the American symphony tradition. Be good to have some of the unrecorded works published by some companies, instead of the well trodden areas.

Thank you very much indeed but I am still stumbing in the dark.

That is having experienced substantial amounts of seventy odd symphonies.

There will shortly be a (final) third post with some meandering thoughts.

I am now fully on Z for Zwilich.

But first a couple of light diversions from 1941 and 1958:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ofMC3CO9iU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbowH6D2l_c

.....and two short optimistic pieces from the early 1980s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8uMib5NM8U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2BWrXKaPPc

[BBMmk2]

I think at the moment, I have enough listening to do this week, what with Bruckner and Buxtehude and a foray into Chopin's Piano Concerto no.1

[Pulcinella]

The November 2016 issue of BBC Music Magazine has as its cover CD a reissue (though with playing order of the two pieces reversed) of this Carlton Classics BBC Radio classics recording of Reich's The Desert Music and Adams' Shaker Loops.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Desert-Music-Shaker-Loops-Steve/dp/B01KB3A6UE/ref=sr_1_9?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1475143162&sr=1-9&keywords=reich+desert+music

PS: Happy to send the Carlton issue (in the interest of keeping my BBCMM run complete) to any interested party who wants to PM me.

PPS: Offer taken up!