PROGRAMME NOTE While America’s culture of performance VIOLIN CONCERTOS inevitably turned to Europe for its models, it ROY HARRIS • JOHN ADAMS Among the enduring transformations that gradually gathered strands of American identity coursed through the United States in the – complete with works by native musicians – to decades following the Civil War, one stands set alongside classics by Handel, Mozart and proud in the history of the nation’s musical life. Beethoven and more recent scores from It concerns what the scholar and critic Joseph the Old World. The New York-born composer Horowitz calls the “culture of performance”, Edward MacDowell, for instance, directed his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1949) Roy Harris (1898-1979) the creation of civic institutions devoted to thoroughly European training in France and 1 Section One [8.46] the making of music and the rise of a new Germany to the intentional cultivation of a 2 Section Two [9.53] generation of American musicians determined distinct brand of musical nationalism, “a 3 Section Three [6.05] to build their own traditions of ‘classical music which should be American”, as he 4 Section Four [3.24] music’. The process was already in train put it. The nature of what ‘American’ meant, before the war in many east coast cities, as so often with debates about cultural Concerto for Violin & Orchestra (1993) John Adams (b. 1947) where orchestral and choral societies arose identity, varied according to perspective. Many 5 I – [15.51] to meet the needs of a growing middle-class Americans at the last century’s turn were 6 II Chaconne: Body through which the dream flows [10.58] audience; it gathered pace in postbellum concerned with survival, whether by eking a 7 III Toccare [7.22] times in pioneer towns in the west and living from the land, toiling in the mills and Midwest, setting substantial foundations for stockyards of robber baron industrialists, or everything from new concert halls and labouring night and day in the sweatshop Total timings: [62.22] opera houses to municipal bandstands and slums of New York’s Lower East Side. Others conservatories. The production and consumption were driven by ideals of freedom, hard work, of classical music became one of the many social mobility and prosperity, so deeply markers of social aspiration during America’s ingrained in the national consciousness and Gilded Age, backed by donations from patrons broadly reflected in the rise of world-class TAMSIN WALEY-COHEN VIOLIN and philanthropists with a keen eye for orchestras, opera companies, soloists and BBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA personal prestige and dynastic legacies. music colleges. ANDREW LITTON CONDUCTOR www.signumrecords.com - 3 - The story of Roy Harris could serve as a case with his college mentor, Arthur Farwell, who noted how “that wonderful, young, sinewy, all about,” noted Harris in an article for study for the great American Dream and for encouraged Harris to read Walt Whitman and timorous, browbeaten, eager, gullible” American Modern Music in 1940. “Singing and dancing its realisation in the world of music. He was find his own voice as a composer. society was “slowly kneading consistent your heart out for yourself and the people born in the log cabin where his parents racial character from the sifted flour of you were born among – whose daily lives farmed in Oklahoma’s sparsely populated The sounds and sights of nature, of the experience and the sweat of racial identity”. you share through the seasons, through thick Lincoln County. The Harrises, descended echoing train whistles Harris heard during his The rhetoric, of its time, was more in line and thin. From the hearts of our people they from a potent mix of Irish, Scots and Welsh formative years in the San Gabriel Valley, and with positive nationalist sentiment than have come….” The composer, by now acclaimed ancestry, weathered tough conditions and metaphors of organic growth and cultivation social-Darwinist theories: Harris was no for works such as his Third Symphony and the burdens of poverty in Oklahoma until combined to condition the young composer’s racist, as his later statements against racial When Johnny Comes Marching Home, understood 1903, when young LeRoy’s father auctioned musical development. In 1926 he travelled segregation and inequality made plain; above better than most the ‘thick and thin’ of life the family farmstead and moved to a new plot east for the premiere of his Andante for all, he was a socially conservative populist, and the transcendent joys of music made of land in the San Gabriel Valley in southern orchestra and stayed at the MacDowell an artist determined to discover the essence by America’s farmsteaders and sharecroppers. California. Father and son farmed hard and Colony in New Hampshire, an artists’ colony of American music and deliver it to the began to see good returns from their efforts. comparable to those established in continental masses. Rhythmic exuberance, flowing melodies Harris created his Violin Concerto in 1949 Harris, who shortened his given name to Europe during the late 1800s. It was here uninterrupted by decisive cadence points, to fulfil a commission from the Cleveland Roy during his teens, received his first piano that he met Aaron Copland, who suggested modal harmonies and textural nuance Orchestra for its esteemed concertmaster, lessons at home from his mother and later that Harris should study with Nadia served the development of Harris’s musical Joseph Gingold. The new composition’s intended took up clarinet. He secured his own land and Boulanger in Paris. He did so from 1926 to language; the worldview of Henry David premiere, scheduled to take place under the worked it for a time after graduating from 1929, aided by financial support from the Thoreau, with its invitation to ‘simplify, simplify’ baton of Georg Szell that year, was cancelled high school in 1916, while taking lessons philanthropist Alma Morgenthau Wertheim and on the one hand and expression of life’s when a multitude of discrepancies between in organ and music theory; he also drove a two Guggenheim Fellowships, and created his complexities and contradictions on the other, the orchestral parts and conductor’s score truck for a dairy company, which helped Concerto for piano, clarinet and string quartet also found a place in the prolific composer’s surfaced during rehearsal and could not be support his studies in philosophy and economics under Boulanger’s guidance. work, not least in the optimistic cast of so corrected in time for the first performance. at the University of California at Berkeley. much of his output. The piece was set aside until Gregory Harris took his first steps in large-scale While Roy Harris absorbed and retained elements Fulkerson and the North Carolina Symphony composition while at Berkeley and received of his European training, he ultimately tapped Optimism is in abundant supply in the Violin brought it to life in 1984. Fulkerson’s recording, lessons there from, among others, Fannie into his local and regional roots in pursuit Concerto, so too a strong measure of nostalgia, made the following year, introduced Harris’s Charles Dillon, Henry Schoenefeld and Arthur of a distinctly ‘American’ contribution to evoked in folk-like melodies and clear-cut lyrical concerto to a wider audience. Tamsin Bliss. In 1924-25 he studied composition classical music. In an essay of 1933 he dance rhythms. “Now that’s what folksong is Waley-Cohen traced the work’s manuscript - 4 - - 5 - source in Washington’s Library of Congress and section, Harris’s ‘weakness’ proves a strength: belonged to the Harris generation and took career as a clarinettist, deputising with the was enchanted by its rhapsodic solo writing. his melodic ideas here flow as a stream of part in the boom years that followed Boston Symphony and Boston Opera Company; consciousness, echoing thought’s random America’s intervention in the First World War. he also conducted the city’s Bach Society Although cast in a single movement, the Violin nature. The work’s third section, introduced The Adams family was rocked by the Great Orchestra. His outlook changed when he Concerto falls into four sections. The work opens by a pulsating orchestral prelude, harbours Depression; young John’s father, meanwhile, moved to San Francisco to become head with a bustling orchestral call-to-attention, an images of the American West, of open spaces struggled to make a living as a travelling of the composition department at the city’s invitation to a hoedown perhaps, the energy made sacred by their vast scale, timeless salesman, selling what he described as ‘nuts Conservatory of Music. He served on the of which is readily spent and replaced by presence and remoteness from human and bolts’ in and around Concord, New faculty there from 1972-83, and was music the solo violin’s languid first entry. Harris commerce. It would be hard to imagine a Hampshire. Adams made swift progress on the adviser and composer-in-residence to the relishes in crafting what appears to be an more direct or impassioned response to what clarinet, especially so when he took lessons San Francisco Symphony from 1978-85, endless fiddle melody, setting it in periodic Harris described in one essay as the “lonesome from Felix Viscuglia, a member of the Boston inaugurating the orchestra’s acclaimed ‘New dialogue with solo oboe, flute and clarinet hunger that gnaws within the … heart, Symphony Orchestra. He enrolled at Harvard and Unusual Music Series’ in 1978. As a above a bed of sustained modal harmonies. forcing us to search for an understandable University in 1965, graduating magna cum student Adams opened to the influence The clarity of scoring, a matter of sonorous race-expression”, a fully felt music inspired laude in 1969 and gaining his MA in of John Cage, to the sage West Coast instrumental choirs flecked with pizzicato by America’s “grandeur, dignity, and untold composition two years later.