MUSIC: Americana at Newport
Thibodeau, Ralph
MUSIC This year's Newport Music, Festival was dedicated, in the Bicentennial spirit, to a reexamination and revival of American music, both old and new. The first four days, during which some 35...
...Griffes' By a Lonely Forest Pathway and the Bedouin Love Song by George Chadwick were good songs, well sung by, respectively, tenor John Aler and baritone Harlan Foss...
...It was given an impressive performance by Raymond Gniewiek, concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera...
...It concerns a legendary visit of Washington to a Tory farmhouse near Valley Forge, the attempt of the owner to assassinate him in his bed, and the Rigoletto-like twist when the farmer's daughter sacrifices herself by moving Washington and occupying the bed...
...It should be revived and kept alive as part of the chamber repertoire...
...36, was impressive in a scintillating performance by Peter Basquin...
...Yet after all the laughter and tomfoolery, we realized that it is salutary to know our humble beginnings, if only to appreciate the better our vastly improved circumstances...
...Since World War I we have witnessed a procession of nobles in American music who need make obeisance to no one, whose litany reads: Barber, Bernstein, Copland, Cowell, Creston, Dello Joio, Hanson, Harris, Menotti (Can we claim him finally...
...also for the harpsichord, James Hewitt's Battle of Trenton an old characteristic suite a la Couperin which lasted slightly longer than the actual battle...
...hristi Caller-Times...
...ralph thdodbau (Ralph Thibodeau is a teacher at Del Mar College in Texas, and music critic of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times...
...In the end, it is fatiguing: I had forgotten how long Longfellow can go on...
...The first four days, during which some 35 American and Canadian critics were in residence for the annual meeting of the Music Critics Association, the emphasis was on early music...
...Blair Fairchild's Concert de Chambre is a good piece of creative writing, a little violin concerto with five strings and piano...
...But I think Thomson may have been too self-deprecating: I believe the real Renaissance in American music began when Thomson and Copland left for Paris in 1921 to study with Nadia Boulanger, leading the pilgrimage to the Boulangerie which continues to this day...
...We found out what we have been, musically, from the earliest days of the republic, and before, and in our self-analysis was discovered something about what we are...
...Beach and Charles Wakefield Cadman, were influenced so much by the New England hymn-style that most are literally secular hymn in strophic form-or one damn verse after another, as the musicologists say...
...Virgil Thomson, one of our most respected American musicians, addressing the critics, made a hypothetical division of American music at about 1890, before which we were heavily influenced by German pedants, and after which the influence swung to French teachers and composers...
...We had to conclude that the empress, Maximilian's Carlotta, seems to have remembered altogether too much...
...and Cadman's A Mad Empress Remembers for cello and harpsichord, a lugubrious tone poem with so many deceptive endings that we finally started to bet on the time of the real ending...
...However we read musical history, it is evident that thete is a vital continuum, that the old yeast constantly leavens the mass...
...In 10 concerts we heard 22 major works, both instrumental and choral, and some 40 songs...
...The Patriot, a little one-act opera, was altogether better music...
...25, was a respectable piece, as was Arthur Bird's Variations on an American Folksong (Swanee River), op...
...the list is endless...
...The most interesting songs were Les Silhouettes and Her Voice by John Alden Carpenter to texts of Oscar Wilde...
...There were instrumental clunkers, too: a string quartet to be played on specially tuned open strings only, inconsequential except for the composer, Ben Franklin...
...the Federal Overture for harpsichord by Benjamin Carr, a pot-pourri of old tunes like Yankee Doodle, with the adhesive material between quotations being Ur-Mickey Mouse...
...And if we could see Hopkinson and Billings and Ben Franklin and the rest peeking over the parapet of the musician's Paradiso, we might witness them laughing at their own material-and waving the flag for the unique work of Newport...
...We were a bit luckier in the instrumental department...
...Two dramatic works were presented side by side, Dudley Buck's The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, and The Patriot by Julian Edwards...
...In spite of some textual and musical corn, like Marion's singing a few bars of America while dying in her father's arms, and a chauvinistic "moral" sung by the company at the end, there were three pretty decent arias...
...Carpenter's setting of Lord Douglas' The Green River was less convincing...
...I wondered what would have resulted if Schubert had tried this with Der Erlkonig...
...And even where songs depart from the hymn-style, what makes most of them less than works of art was a tendency of the composers to try to remain faithful, in musical terms, to the meters of the poems, which in most cases were none too good to begin with...
...Cecil Burleigh's Violin Concerto, op...
...The result...
...First of all, we are hymn singers...
...Macdowell's Etude de Concert, op...
...Despite a few bars of good choral writing, it is like nothing so much as a bad barbershop quartet...
...The early songs, from Hopkinson and Billings to Mrs...
...Moore, Piston, Schuman, Thomson . . . only the archangels in the hierarchy...
...Having worried most of my life about our poor Cecilian Catholic Church music of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, I understood, after these excursions, how it came to be so bad: even the art composers had to follow poor German models, or go to Europe and study with pedantic, unimaginative German teachers...
...The experience was both traumatic and salutary-like a grand examen or a general confession...
...The Ride is based faithfully on Longfellow, for male quartet and a chamber ensemble...
...It was a valid division, in some ways...
...It uses the Star Spangled Banner- or, as it was known before 1812, the English drinking song, To Anacreon in Heav'n-as a sort of cantus firmus...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 13
