Inaugural
Concert of American Music
Washington Ethical
Society
7750 16th St. NW,
Washington, DC
Saturday, 1/24/09 at
8:00
Click HERE
to see the complete Concert
Program
Tickets are $20 ($10 for Students/Seniors) and may be bought at
the
door or online from Brown Paper Tickets
Program notes by Neil Gladd
This is not an "official" event, but I was inspired by the Inauguration
of Barack Obama to produce it. As a classical musician, I love Bach,
Mozart and
Beethoven, but not ALL
classical music was written by dead European white males! Come extend
the celebration with a concert of diverse American music,
including (Gasp!) living composers, women composers, black composers,
and at least one gay composer (that we're aware of). The program
covers the gamut from marches and ragtime to art songs and contemporary
chamber music, and includes three world premieres, as well as the first
American mandolin sonata and the first American mandolin concerto, both
of which were written by black composers.
The Mandolin Music
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the mandolin was one of the
most popular amateur instruments in America. Virtually every town and
college had a mandolin club, even if they had no
other musical
organization. (Including Virginia
Tech, my own alma mater.) The instrument was so popular, that
the
works of
America's most famous composer, John
Philip Sousa, were issued in
multiple mandolin arrangements by
his original publisher. There were
more versions for mandolin than for any other instrument! In 1993, I
was
asked to play his Washington Post
for the PBS American
Experience
series, but we were not able to locate a copy of the published mandolin
edition. So, I made my own arrangement, working from the piano version
and a set of the original band parts.
From this huge grass roots popularity, we got one generation of
brilliant American mandolin soloists, mostly born in the 1870s and
1880s. Among the more famous were Valentine Abt, Samuel Siegel,
Aubrey Stauffer and William Place, Jr., as well as Italian immigrants
such as Giuseppe Pettine and Bernardo de Pace. To the best of
my knowledge, Seth
Weeks was
the only black professional mandolin
soloist during this golden age, and among his published compositions is
a
mandolin concerto from 1900, the first by an American composer. Weeks
toured in vaudeville on the Keith circuit,
and had many
compositions published by Arling Shaeffer, one of the leading mandolin
publishers. In 1901, he
traveled to England, and spent most of the rest of his career in
Europe. More of his mandolin compositions and a number of songs were
published in England, where he also began recording. In addition to his
Concerto, the program also includes two of his concert polkas, one from
his time in England and one published here. I am currently editing all
of these pieces for publication, as all of his music is more than a
hundred years out of print. Click HERE
to
hear his recording of The Handicap March, recorded in London on
February 4,1901! Oh, and did I mention that he was from Chicago?
James Reese Europe (1881-1919)
was an important transitional figure from late ragtime to early jazz,
and used a mandolin section in both his Society Orchestra and his Clef
Club Orchestra. He was also the first to present a concert at Carnegie
Hall, entirely by black musicians of black composers, in 1912. The
second half of our concert, which is also entirely by black composers,
opens with his Clef Club March
(1910) and ends with the Castle House
Rag (1914). In 1986,
conductor Maurice Peress recreated the Clef Club concert at Carnegie
Hall, and I was lucky enough to be part of the "rainbow coalition"
orchestra, in
the mandolin section. The orchestra consisted of the usual strings,
winds, brass and percussion, plus 10 mandolins, 10 guitars, 10 banjos,
10 pianos and chorus. (!!!)
In 1965, New York mandolinist Howard Frye (1920-1967) announced a
competition for new mandolin music. Carman Moore's Sonata: Variations for Mandolin and Piano
was judged to be the winner, but when Frye died two years later, he had
still not performed the piece. The composer did not know anyone else
who played the mandolin, so he put the piece away and forgot about
it. The Sonata might never have seen the light of day, were it
not for Wayne Shirley, a Music Specialist at the Library of Congress
(now retired).
Wayne knew about the piece because he and the composer had been friends
in graduate school, and he knew me from my constant trips to the
Library, in search of mandolin music. After he told me about the
piece, I wrote to Mr. Moore, and he wrote back that if I was ever in
New York, he would be happy to show it to me. So, I hopped on a train
to New York, we had a quick 15 minute meeting, he made a copy for me, I
spent a few more hours visiting the American
Music Center, came home,
and gave the first performance in Washington, DC in 1981, 16 years
after it was written.
The Vocal Music
Among the gems of the mandolin repertoire are two songs by Mozart with
mandolin accompaniment. There was never anything to program with them,
though, so I was thrilled to discover Clara
Lyle Boone's Slumber Song. The piece was written for
voice
with an unspecified melody instrument, but works very well on the
mandolin, and I have programmed it with Mozart many times. Ms. Boone is
a native of Kentucky, a descendent of Daniel Boone, a current resident
of Capitol Hill, and has the distinction of being the only composer on
our program to have run for Congress! She studied composition with
Walter Piston and Darius Milhaud, and was the first woman to receive a
Masters Degree in Composition from Harvard. It was extremly
difficult for women composers to get published at that time, so she
saved her money while working as a music teacher in the DC public
school
system, and in 1974 founded her own company, Arsis Press, to
publish
concert and sacred music by living women composers.
The Seven Ancient Greek Lyrics
(2007) by Victor Kioulaphides
came about in the same way that the election was won: On the
internet! We have yet to meet in person, but Victor and I are
both regulars in the Classical
section of the Mandolin
Cafe Message Board. He had written
many vocal works, and then produced quite a bit of mandolin solo
and chamber music over the last several years. (Six mandolin
quartets!!!) He had yet to combine mandolin and voice, though, so
I started dropping hints and reminders on the message board until he
eventally wrote a piece for me! It was scheduled to be premiered in
2007, but the concert was canceled, so this concert will be the first
performance. More music to play with Mozart on my future concerts!
We are performing three songs from the song cycle, Another Sleep, by Ned
Rorem - "The Bed" (Thom Gunn), "This Room" (John Ashbery),
and "The Waves" (Virginia Woolf). In the composer's note to the
cycle, he writes:
"When Jim Holmes died on January 9, 1999, the world
instantly took a new meaning--or rather, a new lack of meaning. Nothing
mattered now, neither life nor
death. He was nearly sixteen years younger than I; we had lived
together since 1967.
But the world goes on turning, and I'm supposed to
be a composer. So I've sewn together a memorial for Jim, nineteen songs
based on texts (prose and poetry)
by fourteen authors..." [complete text here]
I first met Elizabeth Vercoe through Clara
Lyle Boone. Clara knew that I wanted to encourage composers to write
new music for mandolin, so she began
to introduce me to the composers in the Arsis Press catalog. (The
direct result being that, to date, I have premiered 9 new mandolin
works written by women!) Elizabeth
eventually wrote three pieces for me, the most recent being Herstory IV
(1997), for mezzo and mandolin. Marjorie Bunday and I plan to
record it, but for this
concert, I
lobbied my fellow performers to learn her most popular work, Irreveries From Sappho, for
voice and piano. The combination of the ancient Greek lyrics with
classical takes on Ragtime, Blues and Boogie just fit into this
program too perfectly!
Nearly all of my own compositions involve the mandolin, but my two
premieres on this concert are both vocal music with piano. My song
cycle, In the Dark Times, was
started after the 2004 presidential election, and is the only political
music on the concert. Rather than moving to Canada, I decided to
put my outrage at the prospect of a second Bush term into my music, and
the result is these songs. I found many poems that would have
worked from various countries and time periods, but the ones that fit
most perfectly were written by Bertolt
Brecht, in Germany of the 1930s.
The first three are from his German War Primer, and are extremely
short, only two or three lines apiece. The only full length song
is The Ballade of Paragraph 218,
which had previously been set to music by Hans Eisler. For my setting,
I made a conscious effort to channel the music of Brecht's most
famous collaborator, Kurt Weill. The songs also owe something to
Charles Ives, in the way that they quote snippets of familiar melodies
(two popular Texas tunes, and one from Germany.) Paragraph 218
was the section of German law that made all abortions illegal. Not for
any moral reason, but simply because they needed more warm bodies to be
soldiers and factory workers. Brecht wrote the poem nearly 80 years
ago, to protest a government that was both pro-war and anti-choice.
As I am writing these notes, I am still putting the finishing touches
on my other song, The Atonal Blues.
Your typical blues song is for someone that has lost their man, their
woman, their job, their dog, etc. This is a blues song for a new
music performer that has lost their funding from the National Endowment
for the Arts! (OK, so it's a niche market...) I probably started
it some 20 years ago, and would occasionally pull it out and write a
few notes just to amuse myself. As above, this song also contains some
musical quotes, but this time they're from Stravinsky and
Schönberg.
From the first planning stages, I was determined that the program had
to
include the Grand Old Man of modern American music, Charles Ives (1874-1954),
considered by many to be our greatest American composer. Although
largely unknown for much of his lifetime, Ives won the Pulitzer Prize
for Music in 1947 for his Symphony No. 3, which was written in 1904,
but not performed until 1946. His 114 Songs were printed in 1922
at his own expense, and are amazing in their scope. Hymn tunes, circus
bands, cowboy songs, classical and American literature, and the avante
garde all coexist and comingle.
Equally amazing is how he blythely ignored the fact that most pianists
have only ten fingers! The five songs we have chosen are a good
representative sampling, and one, in particular, demonstrates Ives'
sense of humor. He had done a setting of Rudyard Kipling's poem, Tarrant Moss, but as his 114 Songs
were going to press, it appeared that he was not going to receive
permission to reprint the poem. He included the music, anyway,
but without the lyrics, giving only the first few words followed by
"etc." He later wrote his own poem to fit this music (a parody of
Kipling), sped up the tempo, and changed the title to Slugging a Vampire!
It is extremely unlikely that you will ever hear all of this music on
the same program again, so please join us as we celebrate the
Inauguration of Barack Obama and the amazing diversity of American
music!