Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák was born in 1841, the son of a butcher and innkeeper in the village of Nelahozeves, near Kralupy, in Bohemia, and some forty miles north of Prague. It was natural that he should at first have been expected to follow the family trade, as the eldest son. His musical abilities, however, soon became apparent and were encouraged by his father, who in later years abandoned his original trade, to earn something of a living as a zither player. After primary schooling he was sent to lodge with an uncle in Zlonice and was there able to acquire the necessary knowledge of German and improve his abilities as a musician, hitherto acquired at home in the village band and in church. Further study of German and of music at Kamenice, a town in northern Bohemia, led to his admission in 1857 to the Prague Organ School, where he studied for the following two years.

On leaving the Organ School, Dvořák earned his living as a viola player in a band under the direction of Karel Komzak, an ensemble that was to form the nucleus of the Czech Provisional Theatre Orchestra, established in 1862. Four years later Smetana was appointed conductor at the theatre, where his operas The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride had already been performed. It was not until 1871 that Dvořák resigned from the orchestra, devoting himself more fully to composition, as his music began to attract favourable local attention. In 1873 he married a singer from the chorus of the theatre and in 1874 became organist of the church of St Adalbert. During this period he continued to support himself by private teaching, while busy on a series of compositions that gradually became known to a wider circle.

Further recognition came to Dvořák in 1874, when his application for an Austrian government award brought his music to the attention of Brahms and the critic Eduard Hanslick in Vienna. The granting of this award for five consecutive years was of material assistance. It was through this contact that, impressed by Dvořák’s Moravian Duets entered for the award of 1877, Brahms was able to arrange for their publication by Simrock, who commissioned a further work, Slavonic Dances, for piano duet. The success of these publications introduced Dvořák’s music to a much wider public, for which it held some exotic appeal. As his reputation grew, there were visits to Germany and to England, where he was always received with greater enthusiasm than might initially have been accorded a Czech composer in Vienna.

In 1883 Dvořák had rejected a tempting proposal that he should write a German opera for Vienna. At home he continued to contribute to Czech operatic repertoire, an important element in re-establishing national musical identity. The invitation to take up a position in New York was another matter. In 1891 he had become professor of composition at Prague Conservatory and in the summer of the same year he was invited to become director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. With the backing of Jeanette Thurber and her husband, this institution was intended to foster American music, hitherto dominated by musicians from Europe or largely trained there. Whatever the ultimate success or failure of the venture, Dvořák’s contribution was seen as that of providing a blue-print for American national music, following the example of Czech national music, which owed so much to him. The musical results of Dvořák’s time in America must lie chiefly in his own music, notably in his Symphony “From the New World”, his American Quartet and American Quintet and his Violin Sonatina, works that rely strongly on the European tradition that he had inherited, while making use of melodies and rhythms that might be associated in one way or another with America. By 1895 Dvořák was home for good, resuming work at the Prague Conservatory, of which he became director in 1901. His final works included a series of symphonic poems and two more operas, to add to the nine he had already composed. He died in Prague in 1904.

Dvořák wrote his Sonatina in G major, Opus 100, during the last two weeks of November 1893, completing it on 3 December, a fortnight before the first performance of the Symphony “From the New World” in New York. The sonatina is equally characteristic of this period in which the composer satisfied feelings of nostalgia by staying with Czech friends in Spillville, Iowa, while drawing on new influences, whether drawn from Longfellow’s Hiawatha or from the spirituals he heard. It was intended for his own children, Ottilie and Antonín, and presents no great challenge to performers, while continuing to enjoy a high degree of popularity. The first movement announces its origin in a theme of predominantly pentatonic outline, after a suggestion of the song ‘Clementine’, while the G minor second movement, known to many as Indian Lament and so published in an edition by Fritz Kreisler, uses a theme that had come to the composer as he visited the Minnehaha Falls. There is a shift to G major, before this melody returns. The Scherzo again suggests both Bohemia and America in its first melody, contrasted with a C major Trio, and there are continuing echoes of the New World Symphony and the American Quartet in the last movement. (Source: Keith Anderson -Naxos)

Here are some of the hymns and tunes contained within the movements of Ives’ sonata. We encourage you to listen to them before the concert to sharpen your ears for all of the bits and pieces you might hear in the performance!

Mvmt. 1
Autumn
My Shepherd Will Supply My Need

Mvmt. 2
Battle Cry of Freedom
Sailor’s Hornpipe
Turkey in the Straw
The White Cockade
O Suzanna (Ethan Uslan!)
Ives Ragtime Dance No. 1

Mvmt. 3
Nettleton (Also known as Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing)

After he met Ives in the 1940s, poet Louis Untermeyer recalled, “His presence impressed me. There are a few people who have presence per se…a kind of self-assurance. He knew what he had done. He knew what he was.”

Ives’ Violin Sonata No. 2 consists of the following movements:

• i. Autumn
• ii. In the Barn
• iii. The Revival

Commentary
Ives commented in his Memos that the Second Violin Sonata was “based, to a large extent, on the old ragtime stuff.” As with the other violin sonatas, he was somewhat ambivalent about the work in his latter years. In any case, the vivid and nostalgic Second Violin Sonata has been one of Ives’ most frequently recorded chamber works. It’s not hard to understand why: It’s a lovely piece.

Composition History
Ives assembled and re-composed the Violin Sonata No. 2 circa 1914, based on works that he had originally composed in 1901, 1903, and 1907-10. He also made revisions to the work in 1919.

Ives used portions of the “Pre-First Violin Sonata” in the first movement, while also incorporating passages from the song “His Exaltation.” The second movement also uses material from the “Pre-First.” The third movement is based on a rejected fourth movement of the Violin Sonata No. 4.

Premiere Performance
Jerome Goldstein (violin) and Rex Tillson (piano) premiered the Second Violin Sonata on March 18, 1924 in a recital at Aeolian Hall, New York City. [Look on page 73 in Vivian Perlis’ oral history, Charles Ives Remembered, for a reproduction of the original concert program/poster. Interesting.]

Premiere Recording
The first recording of the complete work was by Patricia Travers (violin) and Otto Herz (piano). It was issued on Columbia Records in 1951. (Source: Scott Mortensen)

FIDDLING “IN THE BARN” WITH CHARLES IVES
Monday, August 3, 2020
DR. JACOB A. COHEN, Visiting Assistant Professor in Musicology, Oberlin Conservatory

—
Charles Ives loved a good, old-fashioned, rural barn dance. At least, he thought he did. Ives readily admits that his musical representations of the barn dance—as heard in pieces like “Washington’s Birthday” from the New England Holidays Symphony, or the finale of his Second Symphony where Ives refers to old fiddle tunes as “barn-dance fiddles”—comes from a combination of his own remembrances “of these dances as a boy, and also from father’s description of some of the old dancing and fiddle playing.”  Rather than memorializing a specific memory, Ives’s barn dance likely signifies an idealized event, one that he constructed from a combination of family anecdotes, childhood memories, and fabrications based on his conception of a mythological “Old Danbury.”

“In the Barn,” the second movement of the Second Violin Sonata, delivers this idealized country dance primarily through its quotation of tunes that would have been part of the repertoire of a country dance band in late-nineteenth-century New England. These include old time contra dance fiddle tunes, as well as more modern, popular melodies like the minstrel song “Turkey in the Straw” or the Civil War era hit “Battle Cry of Freedom.” However, even more important than the tunes that Ives quotes is the attitude with which the violinist and pianist play them.

Scratch that…the fiddler and the pianist. Ives’s goal with his barn dance music was to reflect the “backwoods fun and comedy and conviviality” that was “gradually being forgotten.”  To do this, he wanted his players to sound like amateurs, like the fiddlers who might have been “seated too near the hard cider barrel.” A prime example of this is the original fiddle tune melody that begins “In The Barn.” Ives writes a quadrille-style melody but adds in an extra beat, so that the piano and violin go out of sync. The effect is not only modern (foreshadowing Stravinsky’s later neoclassicism), but also wonderfully evocative of what happens when the “backwoods fun” gets a little too convivial. These rhythmic irregularities, melodic interruptions, and dissonant “mistakes” permeate all of Ives’s barn dance music.

Beyond this, Ives wanted to be sure that his barn dance violins sounded like fiddles, and not violins. Speaking about the violins during the barn dance section of “Washington’s Birthday,” Ives told conductor Nicolas Slonimsky to “let em ‘git it going’—no pretty tones and long bowing.” For a recording of that piece, Ives advised the session manager that “it’s a rough dance and the strings should fiddle it and not ‘play it too nice’ on the accents.”  And for a performance of the Second Violin Sonata in the 1940s, pianist John Kirkpatrick wrote to Ives with enthusiasm about collaborating with a country fiddler named Louise Rood, who “knows a lot about country fiddling.”  It’s fun to imagine the violinist playing this sonata, a genre that carries immense cultural capital, with her fiddle against her chest, rather than under the chin, scooping into notes in a way that would make most conservatory violinists cringe.

For Ives, the purpose of these musical evocations of the barn dance was to construct, and even fetishize, an imagined, antebellum “Old Danbury.” But country dance movements like “In The Barn” also allowed writers and critics, and ultimately audiences, to frame Ives within an emergent New England identity, one that erased racial and ethnic difference in favor of white, rural, Protestant homogeneity. Since the late nineteenth century, representations of New England in art and literature were increasingly located in this white, rural, small-town village identity: think Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven, or populist Depression-era works such as the illustrations of Norman Rockwell or Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Even Ives’s evocation of ragtime, which he does in the piano part of “In The Barn,” could by midcentury be heard as “American” rather than “Black.” Thus, the barn dance helped to cement Ives’s music, and his “Old Danbury,” as belonging to that imagined rural New England.

[1] Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 52, 97.
[2] Ibid., 97.
[3] Letter from Ives to Nicolas Slonimsky, August 1931, and letter from Ives to Wallingford Riegger, 13 May 1934, both contained in the Charles Ives Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.
[4] Letter from John Kirkpatrick to Ives, 31 August 1944, contained in the Charles Ives Papers.

Why Ives? Abbreviated Program Notes from Pianist Jeremy Denk

Because Ives is one of the original American originals. Because he’s a Founding Father of American “classical music”—whatever that strange term means. But most importantly, I love to play Ives because he’s after things that most composers don’t dare to attempt, and so he gets to emotional places and states that other composers can’t find.

Why the singing?

I hate to say it, but here goes: Ives is the first postmodern composer. So much of his work is in quotation marks, even the original stuff. The violinist will be playing along, and you will think, yes, that’s a gospel singer improvising on a hymn, or the pianist will be banging away, and you’ll think, that’s a barroom pianist playing at a ragtime in a dive somewhere—everything has the sense of referring to other music, other musicians, music about music, music about the joys and emotional possibilities of music.

Luckily, we still recognize many of the tunes Ives uses. But many of them are no longer popular: the musical world has changed in the last hundred and twenty years. So some of the “footnotes” in Ives have gone missing. I hope you find something emotionally satisfying about hearing the basic tunes, and then launching off in to Ives’ crazy, dissonant musical world— entirely based (paradoxically) on these simplistic materials. I find it very moving to travel from the devotional hymns (the neighborhood choir, a barbershop quartet) into Ives’ music, which is also devotional in its way, devoted to the highest, usually unattainable ideals. the sense of travel and transformation is important—rehearing, shifting perspectives. Plus, at the simplest level, it’s always worthwhile to hear the human voice, and then aspire to that.

What makes these Violin Sonatas so hard?

Ives, to a fault, hated to do things the “normal” way. He loved to turn everything on its head, backwards or upside down. A “normal” composer would start with some tune and then begin to do developments or variations, letting you as listener perceive “something is happening to the tune (which I recognize).” But Ives loves to start with variations and improvisations, gradually giving way to the tune at the end, so that you only understand the piece in retrospect. That poses unique challenges for the performer and the listener, obviously. One thing you have to do when you play Ives is try to untangle what is an improvisation on what: that is, to get in Ives’ head a little bit. Pretend you’re a madman genius riffing on a hymn or a ragtime—then, hopefully, maybe, you as the audience can understand the whole thing too, the way the hymns are constantly being changed, made funnier or more solemn, shifted into various personalities and styles—all setting up a final epiphany. The pacing to these climaxes is crucial. When Ives finally lets the hymn loose, it has to feel like a discovery.

William Grant Still

Black History Month: William Grant Still
By Megan Reich, 1/31/2018

Since 1976, the United States has officially recognized February as Black History Month, an annual time to recognize the central roles blacks have played in U.S. history and a celebration of the achievements of African Americans in our culture and society. All Classical Portland will be joining the celebration of Black History Month, featuring some of the best recordings of composers of African origin (American, and around the world).

One of the critical values of classical music (and of art in general) is that it allows listeners to hear the world through different lenses. Through their unique set of backgrounds, experiences, and values, composers create works that expose their audiences to humanity’s rich variety of perspectives and cultural traditions. However, as an art that draws from a primarily western European tradition, celebrating diversity is also one of classical music’s greatest challenges to overcome. Even today, black composers remain on the outskirts of the classical music establishment. Social prejudices, as well as other factors, have excluded them from entering the classical canon, which continues to be largely dominated by white, male composers. However, African-Americans have deeply influenced the orchestral tradition in the United States and beyond.

One of the most prominent African American contributors to the history of classical music was William Grant Still (1895-1978), a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance and known to his colleagues as the “Dean of Afro-American composers.” Born in Mississippi and raised in Arkansas, Still took formal violin lessons and taught himself clarinet, saxophone, oboe, viola, cello and double bass. He was interested in pursuing a college music education, but his mother pushed him to study medicine at Wilberforce University in Ohio, concerned that societal limitations would prevent a successful career as a black composer. Nevertheless, Still later dropped out of Wilberforce and entered Oberlin University to study music.

Still had a diverse musical training. He wrote jazz arrangements for blues masters and bandleaders such as Artie Shaw, Paul Whiteman and W.C. Handy, but also received formal instruction from composers including George Chadwick of the first New England school, and the French modernist composer Edgard Varèse. Over his career, Still wrote over 150 compositions, including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works, choral pieces, and solo vocal works.

Still broke racial barriers and earned many “firsts” in the realm of classical music. He was the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States, as well as first to have an opera produced by a major company in the United States. Additionally, Still composed the first symphonic work by a black composer to be performed by a major U.S. orchestra, the Afro-American Symphony, premiered by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in 1931 under the direction of Howard Hanson.

The Afro-American Symphony fits within the standard framework of a European four-movement symphony but incorporates African American musical idioms throughout the piece. By blending jazz, blues, and spirituals into a traditional classical form and placing them within the context of the concert hall, Still highlights these styles as something to be celebrated, rather than downcast as low class or vulgar music. Let’s explore the ways that Still interweaves these three African American idioms – jazz, blues, and spirituals – into his Afro-American Symphony, with a focus on the first movement. Despite the enormous African-American influence on the history of American music, it was not until 1930 that a symphony by a Black American composer made itself known. It was the Afro-American Symphony by William Grant Still, who died in 1978 at the age of eighty-three but who remains to this day the foremost name among those Black Americans involved in classical music. No other African-Americans have approached the body of work which he left, that includes eight symphonies, seven operas, and more than one hundred concert and chamber pieces of various kinds. Still grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where his music teacher/mother introduced him to the violin. He began writing pieces for his instrument as a child and made his first serious inroad into classical music when he was a student at Wilberforce University. While there, he formed a string quartet and also began conducting. Still was fortunate in 1916 in coming to the attention of W.C. Handy, who assured the young composer that he could always turn to him for funds whenever he needed them. He orchestrated for Handy and other famous Black jazz musicians, which led to writing scores for theatrical productions and eventually a staff position as an arranger for CBS Radio. Despite his facile ability to handle popular music, Still’s interests were always along more “Serious” lines. In the early Twenties, he studied with composer Charles Chadwick, then president of the New England Conservatory, and later with the esteemed Edgar Varese in New York. Neither man would accept payment from Still for their efforts. In 1934 Still received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Shortly thereafter he moved to Los Angeles, which would be his home for the remainder of his life. He devoted himself to composition but supplemented his income by doing arrangements for film scores and musicals. Much of his work in Hollywood was for Columbia Pictures, where he not only wrote parts of scores but also penned some thirty musical sketches that were included in the Columbia stock music catalogue. Still was held in high regard in the Los Angeles music community and never lacked for work. William Grant Still’s musical life was possibly richer and more varied than any other American composer. He learned the value of his ethnic heritage as a child and later became involved in the intricacies of jazz and blues as well as show music. He also explored the frontiers of modern composition with Varese, an astringent musical intellectual, and thoroughly investigated the methods of Schoenberg before deciding that was not the course that he wanted to follow. Still opted to remain within the harmonic tradition, which he believed was far from exhausted.

‘The Blues’ from the ballet Lenox Avenue

The rhythmic structure and overall style of this work is inspired by the traditional blues form. While the roots of this celebrated genre derive from the African-American vocal tradition, the composer masterfully uses the violin (an otherwise unconventional choice) to deliver the expressive ‘singing’ lines. A stately introduction in the piano part in slow 12/8 is followed by an almost haunting entrance from the violin. The color for the latter is created by the indicated use of a mute, marked ‘con sordino a piacere‘. The sonorous harmonies carried out through the double stops are further enhanced by use of harmonics. Throughout the piece, one finds everything from the soulful theme played by the violin on the G string interspersed with use of pizzicato chords outlining the rhythmic base. The music slows itself gradually from the idiomatic repetition of triplets into two harmonies held by both the violin and the piano.

Here’s One

This is a beautiful adaptation of a spiritual executed by Still, whose own heritage gave him the indisputable insight and an enhanced ability to depict certain colors and emotions through use of harmony, melody, and articulation, while closely reflecting those of the original spiritual. “Talk about a child that do love Jesus, here’s one…” After a powerful introduction from the piano, the violin imitates a low voice on the G string, responding in the alto register and settling back on G. The spiritual’s theme continues, this time much more rich and complex, transcending into the higher register using double stops and opening the sound to further imitate the voice. The piece ends with a beautiful remembrance of the original theme in the lower register. (Listen: ‘Here’s One’ sung by Videmus)

Summerland

Here, a feeling of tranquility and ultimate sonority weave together the textures of the violin and piano. A general ABA structure can be observed in this piece, with the second section moving along more dynamically and incorporating faster passages and trills from the violin, perhaps, depicting the singing of birds in summer time. Again, the use of double stops adds to the texture of the A section upon its return. One possible picture suggested by this music is that of the beauty of a quiet country scene in late summer, where nature rests after a lively awakening of the spring and in anticipation of the fall that is soon to arrive. Philosophically, the work was meant by the composer to depict life-after-death or what one might refer to as ‘Heaven’.

(Source: Aaron P. Dworkin, Founder/President of The Sphinx Organization)