NWCR890 Fond Affection Music of Ernst Bacon Baritone Songs: Settings of poems by Walt Whitman (8-12); Carl Sandburg (13); Emily Dickinson (14-15); A.E. Housman (16); and Ernst Bacon (17). 8. The Commonplace ................................... (1:05) 9. Grand Is the Seen ..................................... (2:48) 10. Lingering Last Drops ............................... (1:57) 11. The Last Invocation .................................. (2:23) 12. The Divine Ship ....................................... (1:04) 13. Omaha ...................................................... (1:29) 14. It’s coming—the postponeless Creature ... (2:36) 15. How Still the bells .................................... (2:01) 16. Farewell to a name and a number ............. (1:28) 17. Brady ........................................................ (2:07) William Sharp, baritone; John Musto, piano Soprano Songs: Settings of poems by Emily Dickinson (18- 21); William Blake (22); 17th-century English text (23); Cho Wen-chun, tr. Arthur Waley (24); and Helena Carus (25) 18. It’s All I Have To Bring ........................... (1:16) 19. Velvet People ........................................... (1:37) 20. The Bat ..................................................... (1:56) 21. Wild Nights .............................................. (1:18) 22. The Lamb ................................................. (2:43) 23. Little Boy ................................................. (2:42) 24. Song of Snow-white Heads ...................... (2:35) 25. A Brighter Morning .................................. (0:50) Soprano Songs: Settings of poems by Emily Amy Burton, soprano; John Musto, piano Dickinson (1-3); Nicholas Lenau (4); Robert Burns (5); Emily Brontë (6); and Anonymous (7). Sonata for violin & piano 1. Is there such a thing as day? ...................... (1:01) 26. With Dignity ............................................. (6:39) 2. My river runs to thee ................................. (1:17) 27. Allegretto ................................................. (6:59) 3. When roses cease to bloom, dear .............. (1:37) 28. Lento ........................................................ (5:56) 4. Schilflied ................................................... (2:39) 29. Allegro Moderato ..................................... (7:15) 5. The Red Rose ............................................ (1:59) Ronald Copes, violin; Alan Feinberg, piano 6. Gentle Greeting ......................................... (1:50) Total Playing Time: 73:58 7. Fond Affection .......................................... (2:11) Ê & © 2002 Composers Recordings, Inc. Janet Brown, soprano; Herbert Burtis, piano © 2007 Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. Notes Ernst Bacon (b Chicago, IL, 26 May 1898; d Orinda, CA, 16 At the age of nineteen, while majoring in mathematics at March 1990) was one of that pioneering generation of Northwestern University, Bacon wrote a complex treatise composers, along with Thomson, Copland, Harris, and others, exploring all possible harmonies, which was published by the who found a voice for American music. Born in Chicago, his Open Court Publishing Company (“Our Musical Idiom,” The Austrian mother gave him a love of song and an early start on Monist, October 1917). However, when he began to compose the piano. Although his varied career included appearances as music in his twenties, he rejected a cerebral approach, taking pianist and conductor, along with teaching and directing the position that music is an art, not a science. He felt that its positions, his deepest preoccupation was always composing. source should be intuitive and imaginative, rather than abstract His musical awards included a Pulitzer Fellowship in 1932 for and analytical. his Symphony in D Minor and three Guggenheim Fellowships. From his first job as opera coach at the Eastman School in the As a composer, Bacon belonged to no “school” and followed mid ‘20s, he went on to receive a master’s degree from the no fads. He was largely self-taught in composition, except for University of California at Berkeley and to teach at the San two years study with Karl Weigl in Vienna in the early ‘20s. Francisco Conservatory of Music under Bloch. During the ‘30s While there, he experienced the depression of post-war Europe he was director of the WPA Federal Music Project and first hand and concluded that the European avant-garde move- Orchestra in San Francisco and was a founder of the Carmel ment, reflecting the pessimism of that era and region, was not Bach Festival. From 1938 to 1945 he headed the School of appropriate to America. Returning to Chicago, he set out to Music at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, write music that expressed the vitality and affirmation of our where he established the New Spartanburg Music Festival. At own country. Syracuse University, he was director of the School of Music NWCR890 - Fond Affection: Music of Ernst Bacon Page 1 of 8 from 1945 to 1947 and composer-in-residence and professor of this honor from Sandburg, but it might well have been piano until his retirement in 1963. “Brady.” In 1964 he returned to the West, settling in the small town of The discovery of Emily Dickinson’s poems was a revelation to Orinda, California, east of the Berkeley hills. Here, as Bacon. In his words, she could “with an economy as great as everywhere else, he drew his greatest inspiration from nature, the classical Chinese poets and painters, conjure ecstasy, jotting down notes, as he explored local trails. His fertile imag- poignancy, immensity, grief, passion, and intimacy with ination and constant creative efforts left little time for self- nature.” Bacon felt that his affinity for Dickinson was similar promotion, and although nearly blind in old age, he continued to Schumann’s for Heine and sometimes spoke of a “spiritual to compose until the very end of his ninety-one years. marriage” to her. The first major composer to have set Throughout his long career, Ernst Bacon’s chief aim as a Dickinson’s poetry to music, he wrote about thirty settings composer was to express the spirit of America in music as before 1930. The settings are miniatures, like the poems Whitman, Emerson, Melville, and others had done in literature. themselves, and he sometimes referred to them as “water He was deeply immersed in our country’s history and folklore, colors.” Bacon’s Dickinson settings number over sixty-five. as well, as its indigenous music; and was inspired by the From the late ‘20s to the late ‘30s, he came to know poetry, folk songs, jazz rhythms, and geography of America as Whitman’s poems, of which he made about twenty settings. In well as the landscape itself—which he hiked, climbed, and also describing Ernst Bacon’s attunement to two such diverse poets painted. All of these elements found their way into his music. as Dickinson and Whitman, Victoria Etnier Villamil writes: Those who influenced Bacon included Carl Sandburg, “comfortable with the Amherst spinster’s words and sensibi- Thornton Wilder, and Roland Hayes. Bacon’s music expresses lities, amazingly his virile, forthright, expansive [composer’s] the common touch and humor of Sandburg; the profound voice never overwhelms her delicate, cryptic, economic simplicity of Wilder; and the melodic beauty that Roland verse...Conversely, in his settings of Walt Whitman, Bacon Hayes expressed so movingly in his singing. As with Schubert, perfectly matches the amplitude, mystery, vision, and challeng- a large body of more than 250 art songs is the heart of an ing exuberance of the grand poet, who in his free-wheeling oeuvre that also includes numerous chamber, orchestral, and celebration of America, the common man, life, and the choral works, as well as descriptive pieces for piano. unknown, was surely Bacon’s soul mate.” (A Singer’s Guide to In 1998 numerous vocal-chamber concerts of Bacon’s music the American Art Song 1870-1980, Scarecrow Press, 1993.) were held in honor of his centennial. These events took place The Violin Sonata was commissioned by the McKim Fund in at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City; the Longy School the Library of Congress in honor of Ernst Bacon’s eighty-fifth of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Coolidge Auditorium birthday and was premiered there on March 30, 1983. Juilliard at the Library of Congress; the Free Library of Philadelphia; Quartet violinist Ronald Copes and pianist Alan Feinberg Syracuse, New York; Evanston and Chicago, Illinois; also in performed it again when the Library of Congress honored Berkeley and Walnut Creek, California. The centennial Bacon’s centennial on April 22 and 23, 1999. concerts were jointly planned by the Ernst Bacon Society with The Violin Sonata was one of five chamber works that Ernst Ernst's sister, Madi Bacon, who was a force in the music world Bacon composed in the last decade of his life. During this in her own right. Some of the highlights of the centennial are period he had more time to devote to composing than ever featured on this CD. before; but the loss of sight in one eye and advancing Madi, who died on January 10, 2001, was deeply devoted to glaucoma in the other meant that his vision was curtailed to a her brother and his music, especially his songs, which she small part of a page, on which he required super-enlarged taught to all of her voice students in Berkeley. Madi studied staves. Because of these limitations, he no longer attempted to music with Serge Koussevitsky and Nicolai Malko. She taught write orchestral music but confined himself to smaller genres.