Program Notes

Overture to Girl Crazy                                   George Gershwin (1899—1937)
Instrumentation: Full orchestra

After the phenomenal success of his Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, Gershwin would embark on even larger projects within the realm of classical music, including his Piano Concerto in F and the opera Porgy and Bess. Yet he did not abandon his previous career as a composer of hit songs and Broadway shows. The start-studded cast of the October 1930 premiere of Girl Crazy included both Ethel Merman (her debut) and Ginger Rogers on stage and, in the pit, jazz legends Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, and Jimmy Dorsey. The plot concerns the efforts of young Danny Churchill’s efforts to turn his family’s Arizona land into a dude ranch, complete with imported showgirls from the coasts, which gave the Gershwin brothers plenty of opportunities to write song and dance numbers.

The high-spirited overture opens with the hit song “I Got Rhythm,” followed by glimpses of other incomparable Gershwin tunes, including “But Not for Me,” “Bidin’ My Time” and “Embraceable You.” A majestic version of “I Got Rhythm” returns to conclude the work.

Afro-American Symphony                       William Grant Still (1895—1978)
Instrumentation: Full orchestra

William Grant Still, the son of two schoolteachers, was born in Woodville, Miss. There was much music in the home as his father was a bandleader and his grandmother put him to sleep singing spirituals. Upon the untimely death of Still’s father, his mother moved to Little Rock and married an attorney, who frequently took William to concerts, to operettas, and shared with him his prized collection of RCA Victor recordings. Still’s progress as an adolescent musician was meteoric, resulting in opportunities to study music at Wilberforce College and the Oberlin Conservatory.

After experimenting with various popular and modernist classical styles in the 1920s, Still envisioned a new work that would fuse together blues and European classical traditions on a grand symphonic scale. By the late 1930s, his Afro-American Symphony became the first symphony composed by an African American to be performed by a major US orchestra. For a time it was the most popular American symphony overall.

In each of the four movements there are multiple linkages to the blues, to other African-American traditions, and to the structure of a traditional four-movement symphony of the European tradition. To highlight the wide emotional range that is possible in the blues, he assigned a vivid emotional title to each movement. In the opening theme of the first movement (“Longing”), Still tackled an essential challenge: how to transform highly inflected vocal blues into an orchestral timbre. His solution was to assign this important melody to the alto range of the English horn. New blues-based melodies follow, two of which are used as the contrasting themes necessary to create the first-movement (sonata) form expected of a European symphony. The variety of orchestral timbres is astonishing as is the array of sounds and gestures taken from the popular music of the day.

Movement Two (“Longing”) contains echoes of African-American spiritual traditions and of the first movement’s opening theme. Woodwinds and solo violin atop strings sing out the blues-inflected melodies. The avoidance of traditional cadences expresses well the unifying mood of longing. True to a tradition extending back to Franz Josef Haydn, Movement Three is a scherzo, appropriately entitled “Humor”. Still suggested that its jovial and even raucous mood could be connected to an antebellum slave’s imagination of the public celebration of a future emancipation. An unmistakable resemblance between one of its melodies and the hook of “I Got Rhythm” has led to a still unresolved debate on who penned it first: George Gershwin or his orchestration teacher (William Grant Still!). Other highlights include an unprecedented use of banjo and the intricate dovetailing of syncopated rhythms.

The symphony’s finale, entitled “Sincerity,” begins with a hymnlike melody played by violins at a slow majestic tempo, followed by an episode and a repeat of the melody played in lower strings. A sudden shift to a fast tempo brings in complex syncopations and a grand development of old and new material, which is followed by a return to a slow tempo and a grand final counterpoint of two previously heard themes.

Frostiana: Seven Country Songs            Randall Thompson (1899—1984)
Instrumentation: Full orchestra and mixed chorus

It is ironic that a composer who achieved so much in American choral music failed his first audition to join Harvard’s glee club. Undeterred, he persisted with music, receiving two degrees from Harvard and a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music. Renowned as a teacher of notable composers, including Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, and others, at Harvard, the Curtis Institute, and elsewhere, Thompson attained most of his compositional fame for a series of choral works that have now become repertoire staples.

Frostiana was a commission from Amherst, Mass., to honor both the town’s bicentennial and its famous resident poet Robert Frost (1874—1963). For the premiere, two separate choral groups were brought together, resulting in a mixed choir of male and female voices that gave the composer the opportunity to score for separate and combined ensembles.

Nature is the unifying theme in the seven poems chosen by Thompson. The opening movement is a setting of “The Road Not Taken” for male and female voices. It is largely scored for low strings and maintains a walking pace as the strolling poet contemplates the consequences of making one choice and not another.

“The Pasture” is the shortest poem in the set: a mere eight lines. A clarinet playing a lilting pastoral melody opens the work. Thompson’s plain syllabic setting for male voices captures the speaker’s request that his wife be at his side as he finishes two of an ordinary day’s chores on the farm. “Come In” opens with the call of a wood thrush, played by the flute. Women’s voices and string drones set the scene of a woods at dusk. Dissonant chords build tension as the words explore a conflict between the choice of remaining outside or heeding a call to come in, even though the call never comes.

“The Telephone” is set as a dialogue between male and female voices that is anything but smooth. In the poem, Frost makes no mention of a telephone, but only of a flower on a window sill, leading some to speculate that it is a conversation between the living and the dead. “A Girl’s Garden” is a breathless account remembered by a farmer’s daughter, grown up now, about all that she was given in order to have a garden of her own and about what she did and didn’t do to make her garden grow.

The sixth song is a setting of Frost’s most famous poem. Thompson’s slow atmospheric music with hints of falling snow perfectly captures the snowy evening of the poem. The poem’s shifts in mood inspired Thompson to ornament the gentle main melody with subtle shifts in harmony, orchestration, and finally, a stark change of tempo. Like the sixth, the last song urges contemplation. Both groups of voices participate along with a fuller-sounding orchestra. In this case the object of contemplation is a bright star that is both lofty and steadfast. By contemplating on such a star, one can part company from the mob, which can be swayed all too easily into praise or blame.