CONCERT PROGRAM

from MSO Live: Fanfare and Melodies | 18 June 2020

by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Fanfare and Melodies

Broadcast live from Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre on 18 June 2020

Program Notes

AARON COPLAND

(1900–1990)

Fanfare for the Common Man

In many ways, it was Aaron Copland who invented the American sound. His plucky rhythms and angular melodies are emblematic of the Wild West – though he himself was an urbane New Yorker – and his bold melodies, underscored by sparse chords, typify the ‘American heroic’ expression.

This Fanfare is his most popular work. It was used at the Atlanta Olympic Games and President Clinton’s inauguration. Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and The Rolling Stones have made versions. It originated in a commission in August 1942 from Eugene Goossens, then conductor of the Cincinatti Symphony Orchestra (later of the Sydney Symphony).

America was at war. Goossens invited a dozen composers to write short patriotic fanfares as ‘stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.’ Most of the other composers dedicated fanfares to branches of the armed services, like the signal corps. Copland decided on the Common Man: ‘it was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army...’

During the 1930s Copland, sensing a danger that new music might end up alienating the public, felt it was ‘worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.’ Fanfare for the Common Man is written in such a simple and universal language. Timpani and brass are juxtaposed ritualistically. The open harmonic texture stems from an emphasis on fourths. The initial solo call of the trumpet is gradually harmonised by the staggered entries of the brass which round out and strengthen the resolve of the original trumpet. Copland later incorporated some of the material from Fanfare for the Common Man in the finale of his Third Symphony.

PETER SCULTHORPE

(1929–2014)

Djilile for chamber orchestra

The composer writes: This work is based upon an Indigenous chant from Arnhem Land, in northern Australia. Its title, Djilile, translates as ‘whistling-duck on a billabong.’ The composer Andrew Ford once wrote that the presence of the chant is ‘ubiquitous’ in my oeuvre. This is certainly true: I have made many arrangements of it from solo instrument to full orchestra. The present arrangement consists of four statements of the chant separated by interludes and followed by a brief coda.

LISA ILLEAN

(born 1983)

Januaries

The composer writes: Natural elements, acts of remembering and subtle experiences of perceptual phenomena shape the way I put sounds together.

While completing Januaries my mind kept returning to memories of summers spent as a child with my grandparents in Queensland. Like the sketches of music on my desk, these memories settled in pieces and with some distortions, assembled in a logic closer to that of dreams than waking life. Yet, underpinning these was the precise sensation of elements that seem to share two states at once: of air swollen with water and steaming rain one sweats in. It is this sensation that I worked towards in the final version of the piece.

In a world that seems to prioritise the visual, I’m very interested in the relationship between sounds and sensations (and how much of one’s interior life can be communicated through sound). In considering sensations that elude the eye, I am reminded of a description by Simon Leys (sent to me recently by a friend):

Australian scenery is of inexpressible beauty, it is true, but it is also utterly inconspicuous and non-spectacular—and impossible to capture with a camera: this worn-down immensity, with its half-erased profiles constitutes a magic space entirely devoid of focal point; like ghosts, mirages, and supernatural visions, it escapes the photographer, it does not leave any impression on film.

Januaries is dedicated to my grandmother in her 100 th year.

PETER SCULTHORPE

New Norcia for brass and percussion

‘My Country Childhood’ is the title of the first chapter of Peter Sculthorpe’s autobiographical book, Sun Music: Journeys and Reflections from a Composer’s Life, published in 1999 to coincide with his 70 th birthday. Perhaps not surprisingly, recollections of his mostly happy Tasmanian childhood also flavour some of the musical works he composed around that time. In the same year as the book, there was even a new piece for string orchestra actually called My Country Childhood. He struck a somewhat darker note in a piece called Quamby (2000) for small orchestra. It was based on another story from the book, one that his father had told him way back in the 1930s, the legend of Quamby Bluff, in the Western Tiers of Northern Tasmania. There, in the previous century, Indigenous inhabitants of the place were said to have been hunted down and herded over a precipice by colonial troopers. According to his father, their death cries, ‘Quamby’, or ‘Save me’, gave the place its name.

Sculthorpe’s father’s family were practical, ‘can-do’ people, little given to metaphysical speculation. His mother’s Moorhouse kin were another matter. Though not conventionally religious, from them he inherited a sense of the numinous, a questing after ‘spirits’, and a belief in the power of uncanny coincidence. At Launceston Anglican Grammar School in the early 1940s, he sang in the chapel choir, and recalled singing psalms, sometimes in Latin, to simple Gregorian plainsong. So when he was commissioned to compose a work for his old school’s sesquicentenary in 1996, he produced a setting for children’s voices of Psalm 150 Laudate Dominum (Praise the Lord) based loosely on the Gregorian eighth psalm-tone. New Norcia for brass and percussion, completed in 2000, is an arrangement of that 1996 choral setting, and was in turn inspired by one of those uncanny coincidences that so often attract Sculthorpe’s attention.

When Sculthorpe was a university student at the Melbourne Conservatorium in the late 1940s, he bought the score of a Mass by Dom Stephen Moreno (1889–1953), the musicdirector of the Spanish Benedictine abbey at New Norcia, northeast of Perth, Western Australia. Recently, he had found out more about Moreno’s life, and was struck by the fact that at the same time as he himself had been singing in his Anglican school choir in Launceston, Moreno had trained local Indigenous boys at New Norcia both to sing for the Catholic Mass and play in a brass band there. Long before Moreno, the abbey’s founder, Dom Rosendo Salvado, had directed the music, and a letter (in Spanish) dating from 1878 mentions that ‘our boys and girls sang in two parts the Laudate Dominum, as they do every time they come to Mass’. All these facts came together to persuade Sculthorpe to reset his vocal Laudate for brass, as New Norcia. The work consists of five soloistic chant-like sections, each of which is followed by a refrain for the full ensemble in which the percussion joins in regular drumming patterns to represent the traditional tribal music of New Norcia’s Indigenous children.

AARON COPLAND

Appalachian Spring: Suite (version for chamber orchestra)

Very slowly

Fast

Moderate

Fast

Still faster

Very slowly (as at first)

Calm and flowing

Moderate

Aaron Copland met the choreographer Martha Graham in 1931. She wanted to do a ballet on his Piano Variations. Copland threw back his head and laughed – until he saw Dithyramb. A collaboration was born.

In 1942 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned Graham to stage three ballets – Copland was one of three composers asked for a score. Appalachian Spring was the result. It premiered in Washington in October 1944. The score eventually won a Pulitzer Prize and a Music Critics’ Circle Award. Springtime was not in the creators’ heads at the time of writing. A poem by Hart Crane actually contains the words:

I took the portage climb, then chose A further valley-shed; I could not stop. Feet nozzled wat’ry webs of upper flows; One white veil gusted from the very top. O Appalachian Spring!…

The reference is actually to a spring of water on a trail through the Appalachian Mountains.

Appalachian Spring is one of those works which defines the American spirit in music. Graham’s original scenario included Bible quotations, a central character who resembled Pocahontas, and several references to the Civil War. Eventually the story revolved around a pioneer farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hill country in the early 1800s – a stark symbol of American values.

Graham’s unique choreographic style was spare and restrained. The values of simplicity and directness led to the use of the Shaker hymn The Gift to be Simple, a song ‘previously… unknown to the general public,’ recalled Copland. With the benefit of hindsight, we can tell that much of Graham’s aesthetic was in accord with Copland’s own compositional inclinations. ‘Plain, plain, plain!…,’ said Leonard Bernstein in admiration, ‘one of those Puritan values like being fair – you’re thrifty.’

In the spring of 1945, Copland arranged the ballet as an orchestral suite and trimmed 15 minutes of primarily choreographic material. Even in the suite it is possible to discern the broader features of the ballet. Slow music: the characters are introduced one by one. After a fast section introduced by unison strings, the bride and her intended dance to a moderate tempo, a scene of tenderness. Next a folksy feeling – suggestions of square dancers and country fiddlers suggesting the Revivalist and his flock. The music speeds up as the Bride experiences presentiments of motherhood, joy, fear and wonder. A slow transition leads to scenes of activity for the Bride and her farmer-husband, and the appearance of The Gift to be Simple. In a coda the bride takes her place among her neighbours; the couple left ‘quiet and strong in their new house’.

‘Appalachian Spring had a great deal to do with bringing my name before a larger public,’ recalled Copland in later years, and Copland’s orchestration of Simple Gifts has become a secondary American anthem. The storyline of the original ballet implies good Yankee values – sobriety, industriousness, community spirit – but even in the suite Copland’s wide-open folksy breeziness, stoically heroic melodies and simple colours have come to represent these qualities.