ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Good afternoon and thanks for tuning in to Little Rock Public Radio and Classical KLRE-FM, 90.5. I'm Eric Harrison, I write about arts and culture at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and I’ll be your host for the next two hours.
You're listening to ‘Major and Minor Masterpieces,’ where we will focus each week on a broad range of classical music, from chamber music to choral works to full symphonies and maybe even a touch or two of opera.
We’re focusing this week on mid-20th century symphonies by American composers Howard Hanson, Florence Price and Aaron Copland.
Boston Symphony Orchestra and conductor Serge Koussevitzky put out an unprecedented number of commissions to American and European composers to mark the orchestra’s 50th anniversary in 1931. That resulted in works by Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Ottorino Respighi, Albert Roussel, Sergei Prokofiev. And also Howard Hanson — his three-movement Symphony No. 2, to which the composer gave the title “Romantic.” Koussevitsky and the orchestra gave it its premiere on Nov. 28, 1930, exactly one month after the composer’s 34th birthday, and it became Hanson’s most popular work.
The title is apt — Hanson described it in his program notes for the premiere as “young in spirit, Romantic [with a capital R] in temperament, and simple and direct in expression.” Unusual, perhaps, for a work composed at this point in musical history, when most composers were exploring complex, strident and dissonant tonalities. Hanson indulged in lush, expansive and easily accessible melodies and harmonies.
Leonard Slatkin conducts the St. Louis Symphony in this 1987 EMI-Angel recording.
(HOWARD HANSON’S “SYMPHONY NO. 2 ‘ROMANTIC’” )
That was the St. Louis Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin performing Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, “Romantic.”
We hear, pretty much all the time, stories of lost or hidden works by great composers surfacing in some archive, years, sometimes centuries, later.
The story of composer Florence Price transcends even the most remarkable of those incidents. Price, born in Little Rock in 1887; she and composer William Grant Still, who was two years younger, attended the same elementary school. She studied piano, organ and composition at the prestigious New England Conservatory in Boston, then returned to the South, teaching at small Black colleges in Arkansas and Georgia. Foiled by racial prejudice in her hometown, she moved to Chicago in 1927 and became part of a community of musicians and intellectuals that was known as the Black Chicago Renaissance.
Her 1931 Symphony No. 1 won the $500 first prize in a 1932 musical competition and was the first work by a Black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony and conductor Frederick Stock premiered it in 1933. Marian Anderson sang Price’s arrangement of “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord” to end her famous 1939 concert before 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Price’s total output comes to more than 300 pieces, 40 of them large-scale works, plus 100 or so songs, chamber works and settings of spirituals for piano and voice. But long before her death in 1953, she had faded from the nation’s musical scene, and remained comparatively unknown — until …
In the summer of 2009, the new owners of the run-down house she had lived in for many years in St. Anne, Illinois, discovered an incredible number of musical scores in the house’s attic, which was stuffed with unpublished and, in many cases, previously unknown, works by Florence Price. They providently donated the score to the Price archive at the University of Arkansas, and Price has been experiencing, 70 years after her passing, an extraordinary renaissance.
That treasure trove included her 1945 Symphony No. 4, which the Fort Smith Symphony and conductor John Jeter [pronounced Jetter] gave its belated world premiere in 2018.
Let’s hear the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin in this 2023, Deutsche Grammophone recording.
(FLORENCE PRICE’S “NO. 4” )
The Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin performed Florence Price's Symphony No. 4 on Major and Minor Masterpieces, here on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5. I’m your host, Eric Harrison.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
—PROGRAM BREAK—
[EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
SARAH BUFORD, PRODUCER:
Hey listeners, welcome back to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I’m your producer, Sarah Buford, and it's time for our show’s little educational session, in which we break down some of the terminology we use when describing classical music and its history.
Eric, I heard you use the term “Romantic” as the title of the symphony we just heard. I don’t think the music sounded particularly “romantic,” so I have a feeling you are referencing the historical Romantic period? The time period when culture was inspired by the French Revolution and there was greater emphasis on emotions and imagination as opposed to logic and order ( ya know, traits of the previous era)? If I’m correct, how do those more emotional and imaginative shifts in society tell us about music during that time?
ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
You’re right, Sarah, and of course, the term “Romantic” in this context has very little direct relation to “romance.” More or less coinciding with the Romantic era in art and literature, the era in music spanned most of the 19th century, reaching into the early 20th century, with composers focusing more on the expression of emotion than on formal symmetry, even when they used traditional forms. The era also represents an expansion of harmonic language and instrumental resources — including, the use of larger and larger orchestral forces.
And those are some of the qualities that Howard Hanson infused into his second symphony, which you heard earlier — an appeal to emotion rather than mathematical precision, lush harmonies and expanded orchestral forces.
The exact beginning of the Romantic Era in music is a matter of some dispute, but I’d set it at about 1803, when that musical revolutionary, Ludwig van Beethoven, premiered his Third Symphony, which radically broke away from the formal restrictions placed on such works in the 18th century. Other Romantic composers include Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Frederick Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann.
Some musical historians place the end of the Romantic period about 1850; what followed was the “Late Romantic” period, the realm of Johannes Brahms, Peter Tchaikovsky and Richard Wagner and their musical heirs, Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss. They carried musical Romanticism well into the early 20th century; it persisted even into the 1930s and ’40s, in the highly Romantic works of Sergei Rachmaninoff and, yes, Howard Hanson.
SARAH: Interesting, okay! It sounds like a great time period of music to really just focus on, like maybe don’t multitask while you’re listening to it because it could be quite distracting or heavy on the heart without even realizing. Could be interesting to pair with the newly finished art museum though and explore the romantic art period while listening to some Romantic music. Hm honestly sounds like a lovely day in my opinion. Alright, thank you Eric. Now let’s get back to more Major and Minor Masterpieces.
[END OF EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
ERIC: Aaron Copland was possibly 20th century American music’s biggest giant; in fact, especially in his later years, he was frequently described as the “Dean of American Composers.” In addition to being a prolific composer of ballets, symphonies and chamber music, he was a teacher and conductor and was a major influence on the works of other composers across the century.
Copland, born in 1900, studied in the studio of Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1920s. Though he went through a period of composing atonal music — mostly chamber works — as late as 1930, he returned to composing works intensely melodic and with great popular appeal, including his most famous works: his ballets “Appalachian Spring,” “Rodeo” and “Billy the Kid.”
During World War II, he produced several works specifically and obviously related to “the war effort.” In 1942, Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, commissioned 18 composers to write inspiring fanfares for brass and percussion. Most of the pieces explicitly celebrated a single ally nation or military unit, and have been pretty much forgotten. Copland, however, settled on a more general topic, explaining that “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the Army. He deserved a fanfare.”
Copland thus named his contribution “Fanfare for the Common Man," and Goossens led its premiere in Cincinnati on March 12, 1942.
Let’s hear Copland conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in a classic CBS Masterworks recording.
(AARON COPLAND’S “FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN” )
That was Aaron Copland conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in his “Fanfare for the Common Man.”
In 1944, when Copland started composing a symphony, his third, he decided to incorporate the “Fanfare for the Common Man” into its finale. He finished the piece Sept. 29, 1946, and with the ink on the parts barely dry, the players of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and conductor Serge Koussevitzky premiered it on Oct. 18.
Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the San Francisco Symphony in Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony in this 2018 recording.
(AARON COPLAND’S “THIRD SYMPHONY” )
You’ve just heard Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the San Francisco Symphony in Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, concluding our program on 20th century American symphonies.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
Thanks for tuning in this week to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I've been your host, Eric Harrison, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Our producer is Sarah Buford of Little Rock Public Radio. And a big thank you to our friend Wojciech Chiselinski for our transition and credit music.
Tune in again next week for Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5.
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Howard Hanson: Symphony No. 2, “Romantic,” St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin, conducting, 1987, EMI-Angel CDC-7 47850 2
Florence Price: Symphony No. 4, Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting, 2023, Deutsche Grammophone 4865137
Copland Conducts Copland, The London Symphony Orchestra, “Fanfare For The Common Man,” CBS Masterworks 30649
Aaron Copland: Symphony No. 3, San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, 2018, SFS Media