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Summary

The symphonic poem, as a genre, had a fitful beginning. As Hugh MacDonald notes, it grew out of such programmatic overtures as Beethoven's Leonore, and Berlioz's Rob Roy and Le Roi Lear overtures. He suggests that Mendelssohn's Die schöne Melusine and Die Hebriden are “direct prototypes of the Lisztian symphonic poem.” While some of Mendelssohn's overtures have programs, they are regarded primarily as concert overtures. And as we now know, the first versions of many of Liszt's symphonic poems were conceived as overtures as well; the final versions of most of the symphonic poems, as well as the Faust and Dante symphonies, date from his Weimar years, 1848 to 1858.

Because Liszt was seen as a radical avant-garde composer, the symphonic poem genre was not, in general, favored by other German composers. This attitude was not as pronounced outside of Germany. The Bohemian, Bedřich Smetana, who met Liszt in 1857, was one of the first composers to write symphonic poems. His early pieces, Richard III and Hakon Jarl, are based on literary subjects by Shakespeare and Schiller, respectively. His famous cycle of six poems, Má vlast, was completed in 1879. Modest Musorgsky's A Night on Bald Mountain (1867), Alexander Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880) and Mili Balakirev's Tamara (1882) represent the genre in Russia. Camille Saint-Saëns, who in his early years was part of Liszt's circle, completed four symphonic poems in the 1870s, the most famous being the Rouet d'Omphale, op. 31 (1872), and Danse macabre, op. 40 (1875). César Franck (Les Éolides, 1876) and Vincent D'Indy (La Forêt enchantée, op. 8 [1878]), also essayed the genre with some success. In the United States, William Henry Fry (1813-1864) experimented with the symphonic poem idea in a number of works during the 1850s and early ‘60s. Although Fry referred to them as symphonies, they are single- movement works with programs. Works like Santa Claus (1853), The Breaking Heart (1853), and Niagara (1854) are evidence of Fry's knowledge of, and interest in, European avant-garde music.

In New York City, Zukunftsmusik (the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz) was well represented at orchestral concerts.

Summary

When Edward MacDowell was born in New York City, on December 18, 1860, the city's population exceeded 800,000. By April 1876, when he, encouraged by his teacher, Cuban-born pianist Pablo Desvernine (1823–1910), moved to France, expecting to be admitted at the Paris Conservatoire, the population—old-time city residents as well as new immigrants, mostly from Britain, Ireland (like MacDowell's ancestors), Germany, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia— had soared well above 1.5 million. In the course of those fifteen years, the spectrum of New York's musical life became as culturally diversified as its residents. No matter how “secluded” in the comfort of bourgeois surroundings the young MacDowell might have grown up, he could not have remained unaware of the bustling variety of musical stimuli the city offered: indirectly but unquestionably, that multi-cultural environment molded him as an individual and as a composer.

In the 1860s, orchestral music in New York City was mainly provided by the Philharmonic Society and the orchestra led by Theodore Thomas (founded in 1842 and 1862, respectively). Opera reigned supreme, with various companies offering, often simultaneously, Italian, German, and French opera throughout the musical season and beyond. Chamber music also thrived, propelled by the formation of the Mason and Thomas Chamber Music Soirées in 1855. The “historical concert,” a type of musical event closely related to another novel format—the piano recital—which aimed to unite entertainment and enlightenment, emerged in New York around the time MacDowell was born; by the time he left, it had become an established format.

By mid-century, a historical concert (or recital, for both terms were interchangeable) was a type of musical event in which a number of works from the past, usually presented in a reasoned, chronological fashion, were performed by a solo pianist, or by a pianist and a singer or, more rarely, by a pianist and another instrumentalist. By contrast, the purpose of the dominant type of concert at the time, the so-called “miscellaneous concert,” was to entertain; typically, programs featured a variety of genres and timbres, including arias and ensembles from operas, art and popular songs, and instrumental ensembles and solos. A sacred piece and—depending on the budget—an orchestral work or two might also be included.

Summary

That MacDowell knew Richard Wagner's compositions intimately and admired his achievement is shown by references made to specific works in his Critical and Historical Essays and in the musical material he incorporated into his own compositions. In his essay “Declamation in Music,” he offered a concise analysis of Wagner's accomplishment:

The vital principle of Wagner's art was that he not only made startlingly vivid pictures in his music, but that he made the people in these pictures actually walk out of the frame and directly address the audience…. his orchestra forms a kind of pictorial and psychological background from which his characters detach themselves and actually speak. If they speak falsely, the ever present orchestra … unmercifully tears away the mask …

Reading MacDowell's words some time ago awakened me to the possibility of connections and sent me in search of evidence. This article identifies for the first time passages in which there are actual musical quotations and points to other areas where Wagner's music is suggested. In the compositions with recognizable motives, Mac- Dowell usually treats the first statements as quotations or paraphrases, subsequently using the small idea as the basis for a passage whose origins are submerged in the total musical fabric.

In addition to the direct quotations, MacDowell seems to have absorbed some general features of Wagner's style:

Summary

Since, beginning in 1960, I was co-chair of the Dallas Chamber Music Society with Dorothea Kelley, I had easy contact with some of the groups we engaged to perform each year and also with the agent who provided many of these groups. Her name was Mariedi Anders. Mariedi was born in Austria, the daughter of a prominent judge in Vienna and had to leave after the Anschluss in 1938. Her husband was a businessman. When they came to the United States they lived in New York and had a difficult time financially. She was a hostess in a restaurant while he was a boiler-stoker in a large apartment house. Their luck changed when they settled in San Francisco and she started an artists’ bureau representing mostly European groups and prominent European musicians. Both Mariedi and her husband became very successful in their occupations, and because she had artists in whom we were interested, the Dallas Chamber Music Society very often turned to her to help us in bringing them to Dallas. She came to Texas frequently and we became friends. She commissioned me to write a solo harp piece for the great Nicanor Zabaleta, one of her artists, and a piano trio for the Alma Trio.

Several years later, I had the pleasure of visiting with her and her husband in their beautiful home in San Francisco and found out that Mariedi's husband was a collector of canes and chess sets. He had hundreds of canes from all over the world made of the most exotic woods, and chess sets from all over the world that were most fascinating. Incidentally, the Anderses were also neigh¬bors of Herbert Fromm's twin brother, Alfred, and we all had a fantastic time together during my visit. At my visit to the Anders house Mariedi told me that she was a niece of Eugene Ormandy, the famous conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She told me that the last time she had visited Dallas she heard the Dallas Symphony Orchestra perform my Elegy for string orchestra and liked it so much that she sent it to Ormandy. He must have been favorably impressed: soon after this conversation I found out that my work was the only American work he took to China on the Philadelphians’ first trip to that country.

Summary

The German city of Mannheim lies at the juncture of two rivers: the Rhine and the Neckar. It was a small and rather insignificant town until the middle of the seventeenth century when Kurfürst (Elector) Karl Ludwig returned from exile in the Netherlands and built his castle there to make it his seat of power. He had been banished during the struggles of the Thirty Years War, but his sojourn in the Netherlands and his contact with England had given him a much broader outlook on the world and made him ambitious to turn his capital into a center of commerce and art. His models in building Mannheim were inspired by look¬ing west toward France. He built himself a huge Versailles-style castle at the edge of the inner city while constructing this interior city very much on a design that, more than a century later, inspired city planners in Vienna—with a broad “ring street” surrounding numbered and lettered squares filled with apartment buildings and shops. The “factories” and harbor facilities that provided the op¬portunities for the affluence of the citizens of the city were constructed outside the “residential” town.

During his exile Karl Ludwig had another experience and that was the contact with Jewish men of commerce. These meetings convinced him that only a city that provided equal rights for all its citizens can truly prosper. There¬fore, upon his return to Mannheim in 1648, he invited Jews from the Palati-nate, especially from such famous Jewish communities as Worms and Speyer, to settle in Mannheim as free citizens exempt from paying any special taxes. This Jewish community rapidly increased in numbers and in prominence, swelled by several Sephardic families (in this case Portuguese Jews who had migrated to Holland) as well as Austrian and Polish Jews, in addition to the influx of congregants from the surrounding area, especially Mainz and Frankfurt. The German Princess Lisa who visited Mannheim in 1720 wrote “The Jews seem to outnumber the Christians in this city.” While that is a gross exaggeration it was true that, because of the freedom they enjoyed without ever being segregated into a ghetto, the Jews were much more in evidence in court circles than in other parts of Europe.

Summary

Worcester in 1939 was a lovely city with a multitude of beautiful parks, excel¬lent schools, an effective and extensive public transportation system, and ethnic neighborhoods with great shopping opportunities. We moved into an apart¬ment at 84 Elm Street. The house was about thirty years old and we lived on the ground floor. The place was not large, but we managed well with the four rooms plus a kitchen, a bathroom, and two porches, one in front and one off the kitchen. The latter we shared with drying racks for the laundry since there was neither a washing machine nor a dryer. Temple Emanuel, where my father was to be the cantor for the next sixteen years until his death, was located at 111 Elm Street only a block and a half away from the house, and our school was always within walking distance. This was true of the elementary and middle schools as well as the high school.

As we arrived in Worcester towards the end of August, my father became immediately absorbed with the preparations for the High Holy Days, and Mari¬anne and I started school a week before Labor Day. Naturally we knew very few people, but the members of the congregation were exceptionally friendly and generous with gifts as well as invitations to come to their homes. My mother's English skills were quite wanting (to say the least). When she “confronted” someone in person, she was able to communicate quite well with a mixture of pidgin English, German, and gesticulation (with an emphasis on the latter). However, when the phone rang, she refused to answer since this would usually eliminate the chance for her to use her hands, feet, or any other portions of her body to make herself understood. So we compromised. She would try to speak as well as she could to anyone she met personally, but Marianne and I would take care of the phone. My father's English was a bit better since he took some classes during the months we lived in New York; his daily reading of the news¬paper from cover to cover also helped him with his English language skills, and, not being afraid to make mistakes, he used the newly acquired tongue without reticence in his conversations.

Summary

We flew back to Rochester from Europe in August 1975. After Robert Freeman returned from his vacation, I made an appointment with him to dis¬cuss the next season. I felt that the first item of business should be the upcom¬ing seventy-fifth birthday of Aaron Copland and the possibility of granting him an honorary doctorate from the Eastman School of Music on that occasion. We were one of the few music schools in the country that had not done so, because of a fact of which I was unaware. It seems that Copland wrote a long article in the New York Times about all the New Music festivals and in particular about those festivals featuring American music. In the article he praised How¬ard Hanson for the largest and longest-lasting of such festivals, but he also complained that Hanson neglected many composers who were stylistically not to his liking. Hanson did not take criticism lightly and wrote an op-ed letter the following week, stating that Copland had been wrong in his assessment of the Festivals of American Music in Rochester, and he added a barb to the effect that one could never satisfy the cultural elite establishment of New York. And im¬plied in the term “elite establishment” may have been (and Copland perceived it that way, as he admitted to me later) that the New York group of artists was largely Jewish and consisted, to some extent, of gay men. The exchange created a schism between these two men, and they ceased to communicate from that time on. This was in the late 1920s. As a matter of fact, I must say that Copland was mistaken in his assessment of the Festivals of American Music at Eastman, since Hanson performed many composers he did not like personally or whose style he abhorred, including Copland's “far-out” ballet Grohg as well as Roy Har¬ris, with whom he was not particularly close despite some stylistic affinity. But the perception, justified or not, of Hanson's skewed preferences was the reason why Copland never had come to Eastman in any capacity during the many years Hanson was the director of the school.

I had heard that story many times and proposed to Bob Freeman that, at the time of Copland's seventy-fifth, we might be able to finally put an end to this situation.

Summary

On Sundays there was the music in church. And a grander thing than a churchly cadence the boy's imagination could not grasp. Solemn musical debauches were the family reunions at Thanksgiving or Christmas, when uncles, aunts and cousins—some of whom were the possessors of excellent voices—sang praises to the Lord in rich and vibrant harmony. These early experiences left their mark on the boy. His bent for music would not tolerate ignoring.

Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, wrote these words in 1924, in an article on the 70-year-old Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1931). Engel's biographical essay is not only an appraisal of the composer whom the author regarded as mainly a “symphonic composer.” It is simultaneously a reflection of New England's music history when the biographical data of the composer is integrated into its regional context. And even more: it appreciates Chadwick as part of a trio with Edward Mac- Dowell (1860–1908), and Horatio Parker (1853–1919), as he was often seen, usually combined with the question of who was the most American, the most prolific, or the most artistic of the three. It appreciates Chadwick, the least star-like, as the one who probably had the strongest ties to his cultural surrounding—ties which at times bound him down.

Chadwick was born in Lowell, MA, in 1854. His father, who had advanced from a millwright to an insurance agent, was a selfmade man. His youngest son George would start as an assistant organist and assistant music professor and end as a conservatory director and one of the most important symphonic composers of his generation. About his childhood musical experiences Chadwick noted in his “Memoirs” that they consisted of “running after hand organs or funerals with a band,” thus the “Dead March” from Handel's Saul became the first piece of classical music he knew. In 1859 the family moved from Lowell to Lawrence, MA. The elder brother Fitts Henry, who himself played the organ at church, noticed Chadwick's vigorous interest in music and began to give him his first piano lessons.

Summary

Though I have written many articles for a variety of magazines, for many years I resisted writing a book. But my attitude changed over the years. In 1970, I was asked to be the keynote speaker for the national convention of the Ameri¬can Choral Directors Association in Texas. For many in that state, I was still considered a “Texan” because of my long presence in Dallas, and I was happy to be considered that way. Therefore I became a natural as a guest for several conventions and other musical activities in Texas. At the ACDA convention I maligned the fact that too many choral conductors, at the time, were unable to handle most complicated music—not only scores written in our time but even music from all creative periods. I blamed our colleges who are training these conductors for their lack of skills, and I focused on the instruction books that did not emphasize music but rather focused on conducting techniques. If I were to write a book for choral conductors’ training, I ventured to say, it would be an anthology of music throughout the ages organized so that at the end of the instruction there would be no conducting problem that the student could not solve. I gave all kinds of examples to illustrate the point, and everyone I encountered after my speech praised it and said that it was about time someone spoke up about this lingering problem. One of the people who came up to me after the session was the editor of music books for Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He asked me for an appointment that afternoon, and we arranged to meet in the coffee shop. After a lengthy discussion and many excuses on my part for not writing such a book, I finally agreed to try it.

It took about a year to gather all the examples and the first edition of the Anthology for the Teaching of Choral Conducting was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1971. At first, it sold very well, but multiple copies of it were mostly bought by music schools and kept in the choral departments to be used over and over again each year. We had thought that new students would buy it yearly expecting excellent sales.

Summary

My second year in Dallas was so busy that I hardly had time to write the pieces that were commissioned, so I decided to apply to the MacDowell Colony for a month in the summer so that I could write what was expected of me. Happily I was accepted the first time I applied and opted to go for the month of July. When I arrived in Peterborough, New Hampshire, after a short visit with the family in Worcester, I found a strange atmosphere pervading my fellow composers who were in residence. The question asked was “does he or doesn't he.” Now, this did not mean does he or does he not color his hair—the question on the famous Clairol commercial—but rather does he serialize or not. In those days the com¬positional establishment in the United States was starting to be divided between those composers who followed the Second Viennese School of twelve-tone and serial music and those who still wrote tonal or at least neo-tonal music. I was of the latter school and therefore was looked on with suspicion by some of my col¬leagues. Nevertheless, all the composers and certainly all the writers and visual artists got along quite well, and I had the most productive and informative sum¬mer possible. Some of my fellow composers in residence were: Gordon Binkerd, who became a lifelong friend; Nicolai Lopatnikoff, who was there with his wife the poet Sally Henderson Hays; Louise Talma; George Perle; Lee Hoiby; and Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, who were doing their first electronic music experiments with a Wollensak variable-speed tape recorder. Many other artists were in residence including the famous poet Louise Bogan and the painter Van Wycht who created a large painting about my First Symphony.

In those days Mrs. MacDowell, at that time in her nineties, was very much a presence. She did not trust the morals of the colonists and therefore prevented the installation of any kind of lighting in the cabins to make sure that the studios were only used during daylight. Furthermore, there was to be no one visiting anyone unless invited. She was very strict about the regulations: everyone had breakfast together in the morning, lunch and mail were brought to the colonists at noon, and everyone assembled once more in the main house for supper.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

MacDowell, Liszt, and the Symphonic Tone Poem

Summary

Historical Concerts in New York City, 1860-1876: An Approximation

Summary

Index

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

List of Abbreviations

Wagnerian Influence and Motives in the Works of Edward MacDowell

Summary

Chapter 10 - Last Years in Texas

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Chapter 1 - Childhood in Mannheim

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Chapter 3 - Growing Up in Worcester, Massachusetts

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Chapter 16 - Years of Expansion, Challenge, and Change

Summary

“On Sundays there was the music …” George Whitefield Chadwick between symphony and organ

Summary

Index of Works

Chapter 15 - Three Books

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Chapter 7 - Between Temple, Theatre, and Colony

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Frontmatter

Frontmatter

Dedication

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