Cover 800_NEWDACOCD 769 1+8 03/09/18 18.52 Side 1 DACOCD 800 Anthology of American Piano Music Vol. 3 American Landscapes Copland · Mason · MacDowell · Grant Still · Farwell · Ornstein Cecile Licad piano Anthology of American Piano Music Vol. 3 AMERICAN LANDSCAPES Cecile Licad, piano [ 1 ] Aaron Copland Down a country lane 2:30 [ 2 ] Anthony Philip Heinrich The Minstrel's March or The Road to Kentucky 3:57 [ 3 ] Percy Grainger Spoon River 2:38 [ 4 ] William Mason Silver Spring, Op. 6 5:48 Edward MacDowell Woodland Sketches, Op. 51 23:55 [ 5 ] I. To a Wild Rose 1:41 [ 6 ] II. Will o'the Wisp 1:26 [ 7 ] III. At an Old Trysting Place 2:01 [ 8 ] IV. In Autumn 1:45 [ 9 ] V. From an Indian Lodge 3:29 [10] VI. To a Water Lily 3:03 [11] VII. From Uncle Remus 1:22 [12] VIII. A Deserted Farm 3:21 [13] IX. By a Meadow Brook 1:03 [14] X. Told at Sunset 4:44 [15] Arthur Farwell Sourwood Mountain, Op. 78 No. 3 4:28 [16] Leo Ornstein A Morning in the Woods, SO 106 6:53 2 William Grant Still A Deserted Plantation 13:06 [17] Spiritual 4:17 [18] Young Missy 6:00 [19] Dance 2:48 Arthur Farwell From Mesa and Plain, Op. 20 8:22 [20] Navajo War Dance 1:52 [21] Pawnee Horses 1:07 [22] Prairie Miniature 1:46 [23] Wa-Wan Choral 2:04 [24] Plantation Melody 1:33 [25] Roy Harris Streets of Laredo 2:10 [26] Charles Wakefield Cadman From the Land of the Sky-blue Water, Op. 54, No. 2 2:43 Produced and engineered by Judith Sherman Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis Recorded June 5 - 7, 2018, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Executive producer: Thomas Nickelsen Work selection: Thomas Nickelsen and David Dubal New York Steinway D concert grand (CD 89) supplied by Steinway & Sons, New York Technician: Li Li Dong Booklet editor: Jeremy Nicholas Photographs of Ms. Licad by Natalie Nesser Back booklet illustrations: Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935), 1.Bornero Hill, Old Lyme, Connecticut. 2. Harney Desert 1 Courtesy of www.frederickhassam.org 3 Walking down a country lane to the land of pieces for the piano are deeply rooted in New the sky-blue water England. It can be hypothesized that the woods of his Woodland Sketches were not very distant American landscapes vary widely, and so does geographically from those where Leo Ornstein the music that originates from them. When you would wander, spending A Morning in the start walking Down a country lane somewhere Woods, perhaps to find William Mason's in the northeast and continue going southwest ominous Silver Spring that had been bubbling you may find quite a few of the places portrayed there for more than a century of oblivion. in music on this CD. They are spread out all over mainland USA, from New England to the By contrast, William Grant Still, who was born in Old South and from the Midwest to the West. the state of Mississippi and who was to become And your travel guides, the composers, use the first widely recognized Afro-American very different means of locomotion, depending composer, didn’t have to leave the Old South in on the period when they lived and on the search of A deserted plantation to get a glimpse amount of money in their pocket. of daily life there after the end of the Civil War. It sufficed to visit Uncle Josh, its sole occupant, In 1817, Anthony Philip Heinrich traveled a ‘who delights in dreaming of the [plantation’s] substantial part of his Road to Kentucky from past glory’. Philadelphia on foot. Having gone bankrupt twice, first as businessman and then as a music With few exceptions (Silver Spring, A Morning in director, he composed his musical travel diary the Woods, Down a Country Lane) all works in a log-cabin near Lexington where he fell in recorded here are partly or entirely inspired by, love with the (still) untamed nature of the or thematically based on, folklore such as surrounding landscape and its Native American American Indian themes, popular songs, inhabitants who would later inspire his poems, and dances. A collection of the poems orchestral works and make him the early is provided in the booklet. Many of them tell precursor of the American Indianist movement tragic stories, reaching their culmination in the of the late 19th century. sad fate of the captive maiden From the Land of the Sky-blue Water and the lonely cowboy's By the time when Arthur Farwell and Charles premature death in The Streets of Laredo. Wakefield Cadman followed his footsteps and were prominent members of the Indianist group, however, the frontier between the United States Thomas Nickelsen 2018 and Indian territories had moved way out west, to Mesa and Plain. Which didn't hinder Edward MacDowell to sometimes use Native American themes, although his late cycles of character 4 American Piano Music, Vol. 3 years later and without any knowledge of harmony, he began to compose music. Cecile Licad In 1820, Heinrich’s ‘Opera Prima’ appeared entitled The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Aaron Copland (1900-90) Solitudes of Nature. The same year saw the Down a Country Lane publication of his ‘Opera Seconda’: The Copland’s output for piano is comparatively Western Minstrel, A Collection of Original, small. Though by one of America’s most Moral, Patriotic, & Sentimental Songs, for the significant composers, it is a body of work Voice & Piano Forte, Interspersed with Airs, generally overlooked by today’s pianists (Cecile Waltzes, &c. The Minstrel’s March features Licad included his 1972 Night Thoughts: towards the end of the collection. Every four Homage to Ives on Vol. 2 of this series). bars or so of the score identifies a different part This charming miniature with its of the trip thus: Tempo giusto (da Filadelfia) [sic] stepwise progression of even crotchets (quarter / Post Horn – Market Street Hill – Toll Gate – notes) is marked ‘Gently flowing, in a pastoral Schuylkill Bridge – Turnpike – Lancaster – mood’. It was a commission from Life magazine Alleghanies – Fort Pitt – Embarcation [sic] – who asked Copland for a short piece for piano Passage on the Ohio – The Rapids – Standing students and published it in the issue of 19 in for Port – Casting Anchors – Landing and June 1962. ‘This composition is a bigger cheers. It ends with an arpeggiated chord of the challenge than it looks,’ warned Copland in an much-repeated tonic (E major) marked ‘Sign of introduction, ‘and even third year students will the Harp’. have to practice before trying it in public.’ Not by any stretch of the imagination can The Minstrel’s March be called great music (and, on this showing, comparisons of Heinrich with Haydn and Beethoven by some of his Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861) contemporaries are risible) but it is an important The Minstrel’s March or Road to Kentucky piece in the history and development of Born Anton Philipp Heinrich, the Bohemian-born American keyboard music. Heinrich was the composer emigrated to America in 1810 and first composer to use American Indian themes began his professional life in Philadelphia as a in large scale works in which can be seen hints wholesale merchant and banker. The Minstrel’s of nascent nationalism. Heinrich died in abject March is a kind of autobiographical keyboard poverty in New York. travelogue that charts the journey from Philadelphia to Kentucky. It was one made by Heinrich in 1817 after business failures led him to move there. Established in Lexington, two 5 Percy Grainger (1882-1961) William Mason (1829-1908) Spoon River Silver Spring, Op. 6 Spoon River is an American folk-dance. In the William Mason was born into an eminent family preface to his keyboard setting, Grainger not of American musicians, studied in Leipzig under only reproduces the music for the solo fiddle Moscheles (1846), then Dreyschock in Prague tune ‘as heard in 1857 at a dance at Bradford, and finally with Liszt in Weimar. Returning to his Illinois, U.S.A. by Capt. Charles H. Robinson’, native country in 1855, he established himself but also includes a note by Edgar Lee Masters as one of America’s most celebrated pianists on the tune’s provenance. and teachers. Masters (1868-1950) was an American Silver Spring was Mason’s signature lawyer, poet, novelist, biographer and dramatist. piece, very much a product of his European Among his books is Spoon River Anthology studies and the sort of top end salon music that (1915) a collection of poems that tells the was then fashionable in America. Though stories of the former inhabitants of Spoon River, simple in structure (most of Mason’s works a fictional town named after the real Spoon have an ABA pattern), it is an expertly-wrought River that ran near Master’s home town of virtuoso piece evoking Liszt and Raff in its Lewiston, Illinois. ‘The fiddle tune,’ wrote delicate bravura figuration and cadenza-like Masters (11 February 1922), ‘was sent me by flourishes. More specifically, it recalls Capt. Charles H. Robinson in the summer of Sigismond Thalberg whose speciality (not 1915, at my request, after he had written me in invented by him but developed to the highest regard to Spoon River Anthology that he had degree) was to play a central melody using the heard the old fiddlers play this tune when he thumb of either hand and surround it with lived in Stark County, Illinois, in 1857.’ brilliant passagework and arpeggios to give the Grainger – Australian-born but who impression of three hands playing.