American Made – a program of music by American Composers

How It All Began
American music diverged from its Eurasian roots very early: Distinctive sounds and texts were developing before America became a nation. Much of the earliest music was surely lost, although some hymns and songs were in print before the Revolution. American folk songs, however, were not collected until the early 20th century; we owe John and Alan Lomax, a great debt for beginning to plow that pasture— efforts that did not begin formally until 1906. (The title of this concert duplicates a 1990’s Smithsonian TV series built largely on the Lomaxes’ research.)

While American classical music received little attention before about 1890, popular songs were being printed, played on pianos, and, by the 1880’s, memorialized on music boxes— a technology that predates the phonograph— and on player piano rolls. The latter, by great luck, preserve for us not only the music 0but also the styles of some pianists who were never otherwise recorded in their own time. The years surrounding the Civil War brought patriotic songs (such as those of George F. Root), and songs memorializing the culture of that time— especially those of Henry C. Work and Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864). Minstrel shows— which typically featured exaggerated stereotypes of black speech and mannerisms— also furnished a market for music, and Pennsylvania native Stephen Foster churned out material to be used in that entertainment, which was performed in the North as well as in the South. (such shows were still being performed, without apparent public reproach, when the author of these notes was in his teens!) Foster, especially, produced material of lasting value, and is represented in this concert by three numbers: “Oh, Susanna” (1848) and Camptown Races (1850), both intended for minstrel shows; and I Dream of Jeanie (1854), a “parlor song” written for Foster’s wife.

The Twentieth Century
Most of this concert’s other selections were composed – or arranged, in the case of folk songs– after 1900, and, in keeping with our overall theme, were not intended for stage works, i.e., operettas or musicals. Aaron Copland (1900-1990), the dean of 20th-century American composers, is represented by his arrangements of two folk songs: Long Time Ago, and Ching-A-Ring-Chaw. Also on our program are four settings of the nonsense poetry of English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a/k/a Lewis Carroll— author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Two of those songs,  Father William and The Lobster Quadrille, are settings by Irving Fine (1914-1962), a compatriot of Copland and a composer of classical works as well. (Fine also made the choral transcriptions of the two Copland songs mentioned above.) The other two Carroll settings are Jabberwocky, by Sam Pottle (1934-1978)— who was associated with the Muppets and “Sesame Street”–, and Acrostic Song from Final Alice by Pulitzer Prize winner David Del Tredici (1937–). The latter poem is external to Through the Looking-Glass—it is sort of a dedicatory epilogue, in which the first letters of each line spell out the name of the original Alice— Alice Pleasance Liddell. Jabberwocky, on the other hand, is a satire of the heroic stories so dear to 19th-century Europe (think Wagner’s Ring!) just as the poems set by Fine satirize The Spider and the Fly by Mary Howitt (the Lobster
Quadrille) and The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them by Robert Southey (Father William). Alice Liddell and her sisters, who accompanied Professor Dodgson on a river trip, would have recognized these parodies easily.

Randall Thompson is represented here by The Leave-Taking, which is a selection from his Requiem. Thompson (1899-1984) was a longtime faculty member at Harvard University, from which he received his education; he also served for shorter periods at Wellesley, Princeton, University of Virginia, and U/C Berkeley. He is probably best known for his widely-performed Alleluia; the Chorus has also performed, among other works, several of his Frostiana (settings of the poetry of Robert Frost), and, in December, 1984, a cantata, The Peaceable Kingdom.The remaining 20th-century works, all by relatively young composers, include

Sing Creation’s Music On by Stephen Paulus (1949–), from Songs Eternity ; Toccata of Praise by Joseph M. Martin (1959–); A Place in the World by Mark
Lathan— who is an Assistant Professor at Waubonsee Community College— and Across the Vast, Eternal Sky by the Norwegian-born, but American-based,
composer, Ola Gjeilo (1978–), with text by an American, Charles A. Silvestri (1965–).