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Home , Agnes de Mille, Irwin Shaw, Piano Concerto (Copland), Rodeo (ballet), Rubin Goldmark

Program

ONE HuNdrEd TwENTiETH SEaSON Chicago Symphony riccardo muti Music director Pierre Boulez Helen regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, November 4, 2010, at 8:00 Friday, November 5, 2010, at 8:00 Saturday, November 6, 2010, at 8:00 michael Tilson Thomas Conductor Scott Hostetler English Horn Christopher martin Paul Jacobs Organ music by aaron SCOTT HOSTETlEr CHriSTOpHEr MarTiN Symphony for Organ and Orchestra prelude: andante Scherzo: molto—Moderato Finale: lento—allegro moderato paul JaCObS First Chicago Symphony subscription concert performances

InTermISSIon

Orchestral Variations First Chicago Symphony subscription concert performances

Appalachian Spring

Friday evening’s concert is generously sponsored by Audrey Love Charitable Foundation.

Steinway is the official of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. CommenTS by pHillip HuSCHEr

aron Copland, the “president of American music” (Virgil AThomson’s phrase) grew up in , lived most of his life in , and knew the rest of this country largely by hearsay. His music for ’s Wild West ballet , his first great success, was composed on the rue de Rennes in Paris (he had packed a book of cowboy songs), and the only real live cow he ever encountered was the one that hit his car one summer night on a coun- try road near Tanglewood. Even his “home- town” , a -saturated New York cityscape, wasn’t composed at home, but in a villa in the French countryside. But Copland was the first composer to find a musical style that perfectly captured the vast open spaces, the homespun plainness, , the “presi- dent of American music” and the bracing pioneer spirit of this great country. It was fellow composer Thomson, reflecting on his first impression of Copland’s work, who said it best: “I thought that it was the voice of America in our generation. It spoke in the same way that Kerouac did thirty years later.” In work after work, Copland defined forever a distinctly “open” American sound: the music of our own Arcadia, with its silos and patchwork plains, its covered bridges and furrowed hills. Copland first studied music through a correspondence course and then, like fellow Brooklynite , began formal lessons with Rubin Goldmark (nephew of Viennese composer ). Copland finally went to Europe, where, in the 1920s, “it was clear that you had to be ‘finished,’ ” as he later recalled, and ended up as one of the first Americans to study with Nadia Boulanger. There, in her Paris salon,

2 she helped him find his own distinctive way of writing—and, ironically, the “voice” of American music. Copland’s long career embraced Carnegie Hall and Hollywood, Broadway and TV, teaching and writing, playing the piano and conducting—he first led the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival in 1956, returned there often in the 1960s, played his Piano Concerto with the CSO in Orchestra Hall in 1964, and conducted the Orchestra in a program of his own music, as well as that of Berlioz, Carter, and Tippett, here in 1970. This week’s program spans several decades of Copland’s career, from the Organ Symphony of 1924 to the Orchestral Variations he made in 1957 of his early Piano Variations— each of them, Composer Aaron Copland leads the musicians of the Civic Orchestra in a reading session in July 1968. in its own individual way, confirming that Copland had an uncanny knack for putting his finger on the musical pulse of this country.

3 aaron Copland Born November 14, 1900, Brooklyn, New York. Died December 2, 1990, Peekskill, New York.

Quiet City

arly in his career, Copland of the troupe’s biggest hits—and Ewas so eager to write theatri- Irwin Shaw. cal music that he composed a Although Irwin Shaw is remem- score for a nonexistent play: bered today as the bestselling Music for the Theatre, originally author of the 1970 novel Rich Man, called “Incidental Music for an Poor Man, which became a suc- Imaginary Play.” But during the cessful TV miniseries, he began 1930s, Copland became involved his career working in radio and in the Group Theater, a company writing film scripts and plays. In founded by Lee Strasberg and 1939, after the Group had suc- to present socially cessfully staged Shaw’s The Gentle relevant drama at popular prices. People, Copland agreed to write Copland’s studio at Steinway Hall incidental music for a production was even one of the group’s first of Shaw’s Quiet City later that year. meeting places. Clurman later “The script,” Copland recalled, recalled that Copland’s own efforts “was about a young trumpet player to create a distinctly American who imagined the night thoughts body of music had inspired the of many different people in a great Group in the beginning. Copland city and played trumpet to express often attended rehearsals, and he his emotions and to arouse the became friendly with several of the consciences of the other characters Group’s members, including Elia and of the audience.” But the story Kazan, —whose of Gabe Mellon, who had changed 1937 play, The Golden Boy, was one his name in rejection of his Jewish

ComPoSed October 21, 1943, Orchestra InSTrumenTaTIon 1940, based on incidental Hall, désiré defauw english horn and trumpet music written in 1939 conducting with strings

FIrST PerFormanCe moST reCenT aPProxImaTe January 28, 1941, CSo PerFormanCeS PerFormanCe TIme July 23, 1964, ravinia 10 minutes Festival, the composer FIrST CSo conducting PerFormanCeS October 5, 1986, Orchestra July 26, 1941, ravinia Hall, Sir Georg Solti Festival, Carlos Chávez conducting conducting

4 background and became a wealthy (Copland recycled other music businessman, and his struggling from the complete score for parts of brother, trumpet player David .) From the soft, Mellnikoff, obviously resonated gauzy opening to the haunted, nos- strongly with Copland at the time, talgic trumpet melodies, the piece and he wrote music of unexpected is a pitch-perfect city scene from depth and beauty. the 1930s. Copland was amused When the Group Theater produc- when reviewers noted its affinity to tion of Quiet City never made it Whitman’s “mystic trumpeter” and beyond a couple of tryout perfor- Ives’s The Unanswered Question, with mances, Copland decided to salvage its yearning trumpet solos. To him, parts of his score. During the sum- it was simply a portrait of Shaw’s mer of 1940, while he was teaching restless and troubled trumpet at the first season of the Berkshire player (Copland marks the opening Music Center at Tanglewood, he trumpet solo “nervous, mysteri- fashioned a short “suite” for trumpet ous”). Copland’s short, atmospheric and string orchestra from the inci- piece has become one of his most dental music, adding a solo english performed works, and as Copland horn “for contrast and to give pointed out, “David Mellnikoff has the trumpeter breathing spaces.” long since been forgotten!”

Symphony Center Information

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5 Symphony for organ and orchestra

mmediately after Walter and direction of his career was IDamrosch led the premiere of quite unpredictable at the time. Copland’s Organ Symphony at He had just emerged from three Aeolian Hall in New York, he years in Nadia Boulanger’s creative turned to the hothouse in Paris, the “shop” that audience and would eventually turn out Virgil said, “Ladies Thomson, , and Philip and gentle- Glass, among many others. Also, men, I am instead of the genial, homespun sure you will Americana we tend, unfairly, to agree that if a associate single-handedly with gifted young Copland today, this concerto was man can write unmistakably Modern Music. “It a symphony was a joke, of course,” Copland like this at later said of Damrosch’s remark, twenty-three, “and I laughed along with the rest within five of the audience, but it was also years he will Damrosch’s way of smoothing the German-born American be ready ruffled feathers of his conserva- conductor and composer Walter Damrosch to commit tive Sunday afternoon ladies faced murder.” with modern American music.” This is one Copland entered the larger musical of the most world that day as one of its daring beloved stories in American music, young men, his notoriety sealed and it touches on a number of issues with the unfortunate newspaper in what would eventually become headline: “Young Composer to the great Copland saga. For one Commit Murder!” thing, Copland was very young It was Boulanger who got and almost completely unknown in Copland the job of writing the 1925—and the future importance piece in the first place. A highly

ComPoSed onlY PrevIouS and , four 1924 CSo PerFormanCe horns, three , december 7, 1981; Orchestra three and , FIrST PerFormanCe Hall; Frederick Swann, timpani, xylophone, cymbals, January 11, 1925, New york organ; leonard Slatkin woodblock, bass drum, City, with Nadia boulanger conducting (special concert) snare drum, tambourine, two as soloist and walter harps, celesta, strings damrosch conducting InSTrumenTaTIon solo organ, two flutes and aPProxImaTe two piccolos, two PerFormanCe TIme and english horn, two 24 minutes , two

6 regarded organist, as well as a later remembered, “that instead of teacher and composer, she was going around the block to the stage invited by Damrosch and Serge entrance, I yanked open the front Koussevitzky, the new music direc- door of the main hall—suddenly I tor of the Boston Symphony, to got a blast of my own orchestration!” come to the United States and per- It was a moment he would never form with their . Rather forget, and it reaffirmed his desire than play one of the few popular to spend the rest of his life compos- works for organ and orchestra, such ing music: “I was absolutely over- as Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony, whelmed to hear my own orchestra- Boulanger wanted to commission tion for the first time. It sounded so a new work for the program, and glorious to me, so much grander than she had Copland in mind from I could have possibly imagined.” the start. When Copland was At first, Copland had planned informed of the important new to write a symphony in the tradi- assignment, a major coup for a tional four movements, but as work composer so young, Boulanger progressed he lapsed into her strictest professo- realized he rial tone: “Only if you are ready by needed just the first of September, though, not three, the the second!” Copland complied, to second larger the day. “I can’t tell you my joy,” than the first, Boulanger wrote him when the the finale the finished score arrived. “The work is longest of all. so brilliant, so full of music.” Despite the Copland, in his own slightly three move- different account of the commis- ments, this is sion, confessed that “I had never not a standard heard a note of my own orchestra- concerto tion or written anything for the (as the title organ. Moreover, the organ was makes clear), French composer and organist Nadia Boulanger not a favorite instrument of mine.” but rather a In any event, he wisely set his symphonic reservations aside, recognizing the work with “the organ treated as importance of a major premiere in an integral part of the orchestra the hands of Boulanger, Damrosch, rather than as a solo instrument and Koussevitzky—obviously with orchestral accompaniment,” as never suspecting the headlines the Copland explained. work would eventually make. For Copland opens with a quiet a composer so green that he had Prelude—“an introductory reverie not yet heard an orchestra play for the organ, with some incidental his own music, Copland got the material for solo instruments from shock of a lifetime when he arrived the orchestra,” in the composer’s at the first rehearsal. “I was in words. The middle movement is such a hurry to get in the hall,” he the one that Copland heard when

7 he walked in on the first rehearsal: particularly prominent in the finale, “It was the scherzo movement, even playing without the orchestra very brilliant, brassy, and glamor- from time to time, suggesting that ous sounding.” It begins coolly Copland was thinking both “con- and then heats up quickly, even- certo” and “symphony” as he wrote tually reaching the “glamorous” this movement. full orchestral pages that offered The Organ Symphony was Copland his first exposure to the Copland’s calling card, and it sounds of his own music. Copland introduced a major new voice recalled that this was the move- in twentieth-century music. ment that most impressed both When Boulanger asked Virgil Boulanger and Koussevitzky. Later, Thomson—as important a critic speaking to his invaluable oral as he was a composer—what he biographer Vivian Perlis, he said: “I thought of the piece, he told her he was not yet using jazz openly and wept when he first heard it. “But directly. Nevertheless, if you listen why did you weep?” she wanted to to the scherzo even now, you hear know. “Because I had not written it rhythms that would not have been myself!” Copland himself remained there if I had not been born and fond of his work, arranging it for raised in Brooklyn.” There is also a orchestra (without organ) as his suggestion of the French song “Au First Symphony in the late 1920s, clair de la lune,” a sly reference to and transcribing the opening Boulanger’s homeland amidst the Prelude both for chamber orchestra sounds of Brooklyn. The organ is and for piano trio.

8 orchestral variations

hen the Louisville Orchestra Copland’s Piano Variations were Wbegan its landmark series of widely considered one of the land- commissions in 1948, Copland was mark piano works of the twentieth one of first composers it contacted. century. When Copland returned But, five times in a row, Copland to France in the spring of 1949, was forced to turn down the offer curious about the new generation of because he was too busy or the composers then setting the music budget didn’t suit the kind of works world on edge, he played the score he had in mind. Finally, in 1957, he for a dazzling young firebrand replied to yet another request with named Pierre Boulez. Copland a proposal that he hoped would had heard Boulez play parts of his satisfy all parties. “I have for a long pioneering Second Piano Sonata, time wanted to make an orchestral once at Boulez’s apartment and version of my Piano Variations,” once at Ned Rorem’s. On the he wrote, mentioning that this second occasion, as Rorem later great work of 1930 was gener- recalled, “Aaron sat down and ally considered one of his most played his Variations, no doubt important compositions. “I noted to prove he was just as hairy as that Luigi Dallapiccola fulfilled a Boulez.” Although Copland and Louisville commission through a Boulez were hardly kindred spirits similar orchestral transcription of at that time, and continued to move a series of variations,” he contin- farther apart, each a central figure ued. “This encourages me to make in unfriendly and sometimes down- a similar suggestion in my own right combative circles, they found case.” Copland’s offer was quickly a rare plot of common ground accepted, and he set to work in Copland’s Variations. (As for turning his Piano Variations into a Boulez’s wild and nearly unplayable major orchestral score. Second Piano Sonata, Copland

ComPoSed InSTrumenTaTIon xylophone, tubular bells, 1930, as piano Variations; three flutes and two piccolos, antique cymbals, cow bell, orchestrated in 1957 two oboes and english horn, harp, piano, strings two clarinets, E-flat and bass FIrST PerFormanCe clarinets, two bassoons and aPProxImaTe March 5, 1958, louisville, contrabassoon, four horns, PerFormanCe TIme Kentucky three trumpets and piccolo 13 minutes trumpet, three trombones onlY PrevIouS and tuba, timpani, snare CSo PerFormanCe drum, tenor drum, bass July 10, 1962, ravinia drum, bongos, conga Festival, the composer drum, cymbals, tom-tom, conducting woodblock, glockenspiel,

9 thought it somewhat monotonous taut, and tightly written, the score but highly impressive in its “con- does reveal Stravinsky’s influence, viction, particularly when Boulez particularly in its rhythmic punch himself plays it.”) When Copland and the spacing of certain chords. sent Boulez a copy of the Variations Copland described the piece as in 1950, Boulez openly admired “a theme of dramatic character the piece, telling John Cage: “It followed by twenty variations and is the best work I know of him. a coda.” Copland’s pacing is brisk: It is evidently under Stravinsky’s twenty-two pieces (theme, varia- influence. But it is good Stravinsky, tions, and coda) in little more than i.e., a good influence.” (Later, half as many minutes. The essence in the , when Boulez was of the theme itself is just four notes, music director of the New York leaping off the page in wide, jagged Philharmonic, he even conducted intervals. Those notes and their the orchestral version.) nervous energy color the entire set The Variations, in either the of variations, even the slower ones. original version for piano or as The coda is Copland at his grandest, orchestrated, is one of Copland’s and here, using the full resources of most impressive works. Compact, the orchestra, grander than ever.

10 Appalachian Spring

o Copland score more perfectly and Copland. It took Graham and Ncaptures the vast open spaces, Copland a while to agree on their haunting plainness, and the bracing subject. Graham finally suggested pioneer spirit of our country than something that would capture the Appalachian Spring. “I felt,” he spirit of Thorton Wilder’s 1938 wrote, “that it was worth the effort play Our Town, and that became to see if I couldn’t say what I had to their touchstone. When Copland say in the simplest possible terms.” received Graham’s first script, he Appalachian Spring was written said, “This is a legend of American for , the doyenne living. It is like the bone structure, of American —the score’s the inner frame that holds together working title was Ballet for Martha, a people.” Eventually Graham set- replaced only at the last minute by tled on a simple tale, defined by the the now-familiar phrase Graham rituals of daily life and set in a small found in Hart Crane’s poem “The town in rural western Pennsylvania Dance,” from his epic cycle The (Graham had spent her childhood Bridge. (Crane meant spring as a in Allegheny County, not far from source of water, not a season.) Pittsburgh). Although Copland Graham had been commission- originally envisioned a work for ing scores since the thirties, and double string quartet and piano, he she also had begun working on set added double bass and woodwinds design with Alexander Calder and when he learned that Chávez . For years, she had intended to use them as well. wanted Copland to write a ballet Although Appalachian Spring has for her company; in 1941, armed taken on iconic status as a por- with money from Chicago-born trait of rural Americana, with its Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, she furrowed fields and radiant skies, commissioned both Carlos Chávez Copland was thinking primarily

ComPoSed moST reCenT InSTrumenTaTIon 1943–44 as a ballet for CSo PerFormanCeS two flutes and piccolo, two Martha Graham March 12, 2010, oboes, two clarinets, two Orchestra Hall, robert bassoons, two horns, two FIrST PerFormanCe Spano conducting trumpets, two trombones, October 30, 1944, library timpani, percussion, harp, July 11, 2010, ravinia of Congress piano, strings Festival, James Conlon conducting FIrST CSo aPProxImaTe PerFormanCeS PerFormanCe TIme CSo PerFormanCeS, august 1, 1946, 33 minutes aaron CoPland ravinia Festival, pierre ConduCTIng Monteux conducting July 23, 1964, ravinia October 9, 1947, Orchestra Festival Hall, artur rodzinski conducting april 1970, Orchestra Hall

11 about Graham “and her unique A pioneer celebration in spring choreographic style” when he wrote around a newly built farmhouse it. “Nobody else seems quite like in the Pennsylvania hills in the Martha: she’s so proud, so very early part of the last [nine- much herself. And she’s unques- teenth] century. The bride-to-be tionably very American: there’s and the young farmer-husband something prim and restrained, enact the emotions, joyful simple yet strong, about her which and apprehensive, their new one tends to think of as American.” domestic partnership invites. In a score that is suffused with An older neighbor suggests now the natural melodic charm of and then the rocky confidence , there’s just one actual of experience. A revivalist and folk song—the then-obscure his followers remind the new Shaker song “Simple Gifts” that, householders of the strange in a moment of true inspiration, and terrible aspects of human Copland picked out of a book fate. At the end the couple are on Shaker music and dance. left quiet and strong in their (Apparently a line in Graham’s new house. initial script, referring to a “Shaker rocking chair,” pointed him in A footnote about the music per- this direction. As Copland later formed this week. There are many admitted, “My research evidently versions of Appalachian Spring, was not very thorough, since I did including the original complete bal- not realize that there have never let, scored for a chamber ensemble been Shaker settlements in rural of thirteen instruments, and the Pennsylvania.”) From its first per- 1945 suite scored for large orchestra formance, with sets by Noguchi and that quickly became the most com- Graham herself dancing the young monly performed version—as well bride (and as as a chamber version of the suite the Preacher), Appalachian Spring and a full orchestral edition of the took its place in the history of complete ballet music—seemingly American culture. Copland’s score covering all possible permuta- won both the New York Music tions. At these performances, the Critics’ Circle Award and a Pulitzer Chicago Symphony performs a Prize. The ballet became a corner- version for full orchestra that lies stone of the Graham Company midway between the suite and the repertory (Martha continued to complete score: Michael Tilson dance the bride’s role for many Thomas has reinstated three of the years), earning its status not only as six tableaux Copland omitted in “one of Martha’s signature pieces,” scaling the music down to suite- in the words of Agnes de Mille, but like dimensions. as a landmark in American music. When the score was first pub- lished, Copland offered this sum- Phillip Huscher is the program annota- © 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra © 2010 Chicago mary of the ballet’s action: tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.