The complete idiot's guide to classical music (44 page)

Aram Khatchaturian was born in Tbilisi (1903–1978), and proudly displayed his Armenian heritage in many works, most notably the ballet
Gayne
, home of the wildly popular “Sabre Dance.” He didn’t often quote actual folk melodies, but dance rhythms were fair game, and his scores gain color and character from modes and scales used in traditional Armenian songs.

On the musical enemies list of the Central Committee in that fateful year of 1948, Khatchaturian made a formal apology like all the others who wanted to stay among the living (“How could I have come to formalism in my art?” he said, “What can be nobler than writing music understandable to our people?”). Then, just in case the commissars were even more stupid than he thought, he wrote an
Ode in Memory of Lenin
and music for the film
The Battle of Stalingrad.

Rehabilitated and returned to the okay list, Khatchaturian resumed his high status among Russian composers, and eventually was even allowed to travel outside of the Soviet Union, conducting his own works in England, Japan, and in 1968, the US.

With his flamboyant use of folk-derived rhythms his frequent quotations of oriental-sounding tunes in the style of music from Armenia, Uzbekistan and other republics of the former Soviet Union, his imitations of exotic folk instruments, and his essentially romantic spirit, Khatchaturian is an easy composer to get close to. His Piano and Violin Concertos are in the grand style; his incidental music to
Masquerade
is light and appealing; there’s lots more to
Gayne
than the “Sabre Dance”; and for further balletics, lend an ear to
Spartacus.

Musicians from every part of the world have made America their adopted home, and just as immigrants have done in every line of work, these men and women of artistic bent added enormously to the vitality and diversity of our national heritage. Until well into the 20th century American composers suffered from something of an inferiority complex. They rushed to study in Europe, they emulated old-world styles and musical mannerisms, they tried to out-Wagner Wagner and to go Liszt and Tchaikovsky one better. It took the Czech master Antonin Dvorak to lecture American composers on the need to establish their own national identity and to use native themes and rhythms in their classical writings (meanwhile giving them an orchestral case in point with his
New World
Symphony). The lessons must have sunk in, since gradually a new breed of composers arose who became proud exemplars of the American character.

Biographers of George Gershwin (1898–1937) and his lyricist-brother Ira (1896–1983) love to dwell on their humble beginnings in immigrant Brooklyn, and on the lads having to plug their music to cold-hearted, cynical Tin Pan Alley songbrokers. Gershwin himself said that he developed his improvisational skills to keep from going bonkers as he played the same song over and over in front of Remick’s publishing house. By his late teens, though, George Gershwin’s fortunes were already improving. Al Jolson got down on one knee to sing “Swanee,” and Gershwin got up from his song-plugging chair to write such bigtime musicals as
Lady Be Good
,
Strike Up the Band
, and
Of Thee I Sing,
a political satire that won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize. Subsequently, he wrote hit songs for Hollywood films, the blazingly original folk opera
Porgy and Bess,
and concert pieces that remain among the most frequently performed of all American works.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Having had minimal formal training, Gershwin approached “classical” music with a great deal of trepidation, obsessed with the notion that his work was full of technical flaws. He sounded out Stravinsky about taking some composition lessons (the Russian master, upon determining Gershwin’s annual salary, suggested that he take lessons from Gershwin instead), and when the American approached Ravel on a similar mission, the composer of
Bolero
supposedly responded “Why do you want to be a secondhand Ravel when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

Gershwin sprang into the concert arena at the age of 25, when his “Rhapsody in Blue” sparked one of the first successful fusions of jazz and classical music. The next year, he undertook the far more ambitious Piano Concerto in F, and at the premiere, conductor Walter Damrosch made a little speech about it. “Until George Gershwin accomplished this miracle,” he said, “Lady Jazz had encountered no knight who could lift her to a level that would enable her to be received as a respectable member in musical circles. He has done it boldly, by dressing this extremely independent and up-to-date young lady in the classic garb of a concerto, without detracting one whit from her fascinating personality.”

A visit to France inspired “An American in Paris,” complete with three types of saxophones and a genuine French taxi-horn. Several years later, Gershwin then spent the summer of 1934 in a little cottage on Folly Island, not far from Charleston, South Carolina, listening to fishermen’s songs and street vendors’ cries and attending revival meetings. The ideas and atmosphere he soaked up there would soon arrive on stage in his operatic masterpiece
Porgy and Bess
.

Who knows what other works of genius might have poured from his pen had not Gershwin succumbed to a brain tumor at the age of 38. The novelist John O’Hara spoke for all Americans when he wrote “George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”

We’ll leave the endless delights of Gershwin’s film and Broadway show tunes to other listings, but a number of overtures have attracted major symphonic attention, and you can enjoy a further fusion in the virtuoso “Variations on ‘I Got Rhythm’ ” for piano and orchestra. Everybody loves the “Rhapsody in Blue,” but you might sample the Second Rhapsody as well (an urban portrait in sound, it was originally titled “Rhapsody in Rivets”); and after enjoying “An American in Paris,” with or without Gene Kelly, continue your tonal travels with the
Cuban
Overture. There are endless ways to experience
Porgy and Bess,
the best, of course, being in attendance at the complete opera. Otherwise, take home the great songs on a variety of excerpt albums, or just sing along with the instrumental suites available in piano solo, two-piano, and several competing orchestral versions.

Aaron Copland (1900–1990), the first generation offspring of Russian emigre parents, grew up in Brooklyn, where he attended Boys High School and his compositional stirrings began. His first published piece, a little piano scherzo called “Cat and Mouse,” suggested a talent worth nurturing. At the age of 20, Copland went to France, enrolling as a student of Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. An incredible group of composers came together at the Boulanger shrine: Naming only the Americans, the list includes Walter Piston, Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson (see the following section), David Diamond, Elie Siegmeister, and Roy Harris. It is high tribute to Boulanger’s wisdom and pedagogical skills that her proteges all emerged with strong compositional discipline, yet with totally distinctive musical personalities.

Copland returned to the U.S. in 1924 (the same year Gershwin unveiled his “Rhapsody in Blue”), and began developing what he called “plain music,” infiltrating elements of jazz, folk tunes, and dance rhythms into his classical scores. Happy to champion the music of other American composers as well as his own, Copland joined with Roger Sessions to produce a series of new music concerts in the late 1920s. In 1937, Copland was one of the founders of the American Composers Alliance, an organization designed to publish, promote, and encourage performances of music by our national composers. He wrote books, lectured, and traveled the world as an artistic ambassador of goodwill.

Not that the critics returned that goodwill. One Boston paper called Copland’s Piano Concerto “a harrowing horror from beginning to end,” while fellow composer Lazare Saminsky, who presumably should have known better, dismissed the gorgeous
Appalachian Spring
as “a feeble score, anemic and insignificant.”

It was Copland’s brilliantly imaginative use of American folk themes that gave his career new impetus and brought him international acclaim. Using infectious cowboy tunes and hoedown rhythms, this Brooklyn boy was able to encapsulate the high spirits of the American west in
Billy the Kid
(1938) and
Rodeo
(1942). He used a traditional Shaker hymn (“Simple Gifts”) as a primary theme in another milestone ballet,
Appalachian Spring
; and brought a homey Americana flavor to his film scores for
Of Mice and Men
(1939),
Our Town
(1940), and
The Red Pony
(1949). He even won an Oscar for
The Heiress
in 1950.

Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” was so successful that he later incorporated it, almost note for note, into his Third Symphony; and “A Lincoln Portrait,” like the Fanfare, dating from the war year of 1942, remains a brilliant fusion of patriotic text and music.

Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg was the first narrator, but through the years, the inspiring words of our 16th president have become the province of everyone from Katherine Hepburn to General Norman Schwarzkopf.

Not that Copland’s music ever got into a stylistic rut. He experimented with 12-tone writing, and his warm-hearted, folksy scores butt up against other works of dissonant and astringent nature. But always, there is the mark of an original thinker, a man not afraid to try new paths in his neverending search for musical truths. “Copland’s work,” said his friend and colleague William Schuman, “is recognized as part of our heritage.” That special Copland sound has enriched us all. It is a sound that was not in music before, and so personal an expression that not one of his many imitators has been able to make it convincingly his own. We glory in his achievements and count our good fortune in his presence.”

Just as Stravinsky came into his own with the mighty ballet trilogy of
Firebird
,
Petrouchka
and
The Rite of Spring
, you’ll find a splendid introduction to Copland’s Americana in his three great danceworks,
Rodeo
,
Billy the Kid,
and

Appalachian Spring
. Don’t miss
A Lincoln Portrait
, and continue around the country with his settings of
Old American Songs, An Outdoor Overture
, and
The Tender Land
(either in its operatic original or the composer’s own orchestral suite). Next go south of the border to
El Salon Mexico and Danzon Cubano
, and come back home with the jazzy Clarinet Concerto, originally written for Benny Goodman.

Born in Kansas City (1896–1989) and trained at Harvard, Virgil Thomson, like Copland, went to study in France with Nadia Boulanger. Unlike Copland, Thomson was so captivated by the artistic life of Paris that he returned there after completing his college studies and made the French capital his headquarters until the war clouds brought him home again in 1940. In Paris, he was an integral member of Gertrude Stein’s literary salon, and indeed his two most famous operas,
Four Saints in Three Acts
and
The Mother of Us All
, the latter based on the life of the famed suffragette Susan B. Anthony, both have Stein librettos.

 
Music Word
Gertrude Stein was quite a character. Like Thomson, she was an American who put down strong roots in Paris, putting aside her training in psychology and medicine (she specialized in brain anatomy), to become a poet, critic, and novelist. She lived openly with her secretary, Alice B. Toklas, and flouting literary conventions as easily as social, often used words for their sound associations rather than for their literal meaning. Among her more famous lines are “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” and “Pigeons on the grass, alas,” the latter finding its way into Thomson’s opera
Four Saints in Three Acts.