Program Notes & Selected Video
This fall, we embarked on an adventure together, Journeys: Near and Far, via great works such as Farandole and Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. Our journey then took us through the bastions of high European, Old World, late Romantic works on A Night of Wintry Grandeur. Europe had seen several cultural and political golden ages past, but around the turn of the century, crested beyond the peak of magnificence. In the decadence and excesses of the time, Russian and Hungarian composers wove the genuine, anguished, folksongs of Eastern European poor into the wealthy, aristocratic, stagnant art halls of Vienna and Paris through songs such as Hungarian Dance No. 4 and Russian Sailors Dance.
Colonized centuries before by the great crowns of France, Spain, and England, the New World percolated with cultural youth and awkwardness. North America struggled to find its way politically and culturally; it was and still is a new social experiment on democracy, a realization of manifestos of great philosophers, a country built on the revolutionary ideas of self-actualization. While Europe deteriorated from the 19th to 20th centuries, its progeny was rising from its tumultuous past into a golden age: America.
At the turn of the century and decades thereafter, driven by war, the best minds of Europe emigrated across the Atlantic, infusing their knowledge into the masses via the great universities and burgeoning industrial powerhouses. This, combined with centuries of a simmering hodge-podge of rough, steadfast peoples, languages, and traditions, catapulted American artists and thinkers into its first great age. This mixture, transformation, and innovation of social, political, and artistic ideas is where we embark on our final journey – Americana: Transformation in the New World.
Off of the hard frontier, 6th Grade & Symphonic Strings open with Western Dawn gazing outward into the future from the cozy intimacy of a small western town.
Winding down empty roads on a Sunday morning, Old Hundredth, a shapely example of chorale harmony and melody of the Reformation that brought community and individual empowerment in faith to the masses, floats on the wind carrying pious pioneers through hardship.
Simmering for generations, the spice of slave song and rhythm marinated and infused with chorale harmony birthing a new musical genre: Blues. Cathartic and a bit irreverent, blues airs human suffering and joy. Shufflin’ the Strings, 6th Grade and Symphonic Strings strut to a close.
Next, Phoenix Strings skips to the boisterous, rebellious energy of the hills of Appalachia with Gaelic Overture. “…a beautifully scored old hymn tune called St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” The opening is invocation and preparation for battle, trial, and conflict of mind, body and spirit, pleading for blessing and success in tribulation, bounding forward into a spirited jig.
Following is the Shaker tune Simple Gifts celebrating simplicity, quiet, peace, hard work and humility.
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free.
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
Finally, Phoenix Strings closes with Leroy Anderson’s Jazz Pizzicato. This light, playful work for strings displays the youthful America on the cusp of coming into its own adolescent cultural identity. The child of centuries of enslaved African and Caribbean peoples rhythmic and tonal traditions melded with the hymnsong of their white slave-owners blossomed in New Orleans, quickly infecting the rest of America and Europe with an insatiable appetite for jazz.
From the early American concert hall, we turn a corner onto the town square, filled with the raucous melody of street musicians, comforting, wool-thick hymns, and the clang of an old church piano blending “The Alcotts” from Ives’ The Concord Sonata into the earnest, dissonant tapestry.
Moving south to our colonial brethren, Concert Orchestra introduces Tico-tico, a Brazilian Choro (“little lament”) from Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 19th century. Despite it being music of sadness, it is typically fast and happy sounding, a catharsis of suffering, in the same vein as American blues.
Back north, Fantasia on an Original Theme paints a scene of early 20th-century America, a place rife with blood, disease, death, and loss but also laced with the promise of abundance, self-sufficiency, and liberty.
From the foothills to the bowels of New York, “America” from West Side Story, one of the great American musicals, addresses so many quintessentially American issues and themes. Musically, its complex poly-rhythms and harmonies grow directly out of the Latin American artistic traditions, tri-tone based melody expressing the cultural strife and conflict not only in the romance of the primary characters, a Polish-American boy and Puerto Rican girl, but of America as a whole. How do we make a culture, traditions, and identity of all the peoples and ideas of the world, living, working, loving, and fighting together? Racism, sexism, socio-economic classism, imperfect, unequal treatment by power institutions of police, government, schools and fellow citizens, longing for but repulsed by home, bi-racial/cultural people – having pride and identifying with both cultures, but also feeling like something different entirely, something perhaps distinctly American – a blend, a mixture of many…The harmonic, rhythmic and melodic conflict is thick, coarse and abrasive, but a resilient, tidal force, much like American culture.
As we near the end of our travels together, Phoenix Orchestra opens with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, an icon of the opulence of the Roaring 20s. Invigorated by the infusion of great academics and artists fleeing ravaged WWI Europe, America grew bold in its new cultural vigor. “The work daringly incorporated all of Gershwin’s musical influences – Scott Joplin’s tuneful ragtime piano, rhythmic improvisational jazz from Harlem’s best clubs, the folk music of Yiddish theater, and the lush experimental harmonies of post-Romantic classical composers such as Ravel, Schoenberg and Stravinsky…” A wondrous expression of the dandy-handsome visage of 1920s America. (quotes from Orange County Symphony Program Notes, “Blue Notes”, June 19, 2015.)
The Roaring 20s were decadent, salacious and unsustainable, finally collapsing, financially fetid, in 1929. From the Chicago Composers Orchestra: “Millions of American listeners immediately identified with the piece–the United States was striving to recover from the Great Depression, and the threat of Nazi power was forcing Europe into another worldwide conflict. Many considered the premier of the Adagio to be the most crucial moment in American orchestral history because its fitting somberness realistically illustrated the outlook of an economically injured country facing the threat of another gruesome war.”
Finally, our journey closes with Aaron Copland’s Hoe Down, from the ashes of the Great Depression and WWII, resurrecting American perseverance, joy in the face of suffering, grit in spite of pain, and ascension over tribulation.
Looking forward and outward from the rehearsal hall, this year, reflect on one’s unique, influential position in humanity’s cultural and intellectual dance, a permutation in the migration and transformation of great ideas across Earth and history. Through mass emigration of teachers, thinkers, and foreign peoples, infusion of diverse ideas has always been the precursors of great, world cultures.
This year’s musical journey manifests the culmination of intellectual and cultural influences of individuals past. Through discipline, responsibility, humility and ambition to permutate, and create ideas anew, within the walls of KIS, we transform ourselves, writing the music and stories of the future in the minds, values and actions of each us.
Audrey Duncan, Orchestra Director