by Christopher Wilkins
There are as many sides to American music as there are to the American people—our great, varied, many-sided democracy… We’ve taken it all in… and learned it from one another, borrowed it, stolen it, cooked it all up in a melting pot.
Leonard Bernstein, What is American Music?
CBS Television, February 1958
This year, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary by reaffirming our mission: performing great orchestral music for all Bostonians, free of charge. We celebrate the symphonic canon alongside music that reflects the “many-sidedness” of American culture, to use Bernstein’s term. And we make it a priority to collaborate with artists who are making vital contributions to Boston’s musical life.
Boston’s music schools have played a remarkable role in shaping American music. The Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory in particular offered opportunities more than a century ago that were uncommon elsewhere. Their comparatively open culture helped nurture composers and performers whose work broadened the American classical tradition.
Born in Hartford and trained largely in Europe, Dudley Buck joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory while serving as organist and choirmaster at Boston’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (now St. Paul’s Cathedral). His first major success as a composer came in 1872 with the Festival Hymn: Peace and Music, commissioned by the legendary bandmaster Patrick Gilmore for the World’s Peace Jubilee in Boston. Four years later, Gilmore commissioned another patriotic work for the nation’s centennial: Buck’s Festival Overture on the American National Air. Expanding an earlier organ composition into an orchestral showpiece, Buck wove The Star-Spangled Banner into the score decades before the song became the national anthem in 1931.
While completing his Master of Music Degree at the New England Conservatory, Omar Thomas was appointed Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music at the remarkably young age of 23. In 2012, he was named the Boston Music Award’s “Jazz Artist of the Year.” A Yamaha Master Educator, he is currently Associate Professor of Composition and Jazz Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. The composer writes:
Of Our New Day Begun was written to honor nine beautiful souls who lost their lives to a callous act of hatred and domestic terrorism on the evening of June 17, 2015, while worshipping in their beloved sanctuary, the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. My greatest challenge in creating this work was walking the line between reverence for the victims and their families, and honoring my strong, bitter feelings towards both the perpetrator and the segments of our society that continue to create people like him. I realized that the most powerful musical expression I could offer incorporated elements from both sides of that line—embracing my pain and anger while being moved by the displays of grace and forgiveness demonstrated by the victims’ families…
The piece is anchored by James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson’s time-honored song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (known endearingly as the “Negro National Anthem”), and peppered with blues harmonies and melodies. Singing, stomping, and clapping are also prominent features of this work, as they have always been a mainstay of Black music traditions, and the inclusion of the tambourine in these sections is a direct nod to Black worship services.
In 2019, Omar Thomas received the National Bandmasters Association/Revelli Award for his composition Come Sunday—performed by this orchestra in 2021—becoming the first Black composer so honored in the contest’s 42-year history. His inscription in the score could just as well apply to tonight’s work: “To all the Black musicians… who were given opportunity after opportunity to celebrate everyone else’s music but our own—I see you and I am you. This one’s for you!”
We are thrilled to present the Reverence Gospel Ensemble of Berklee, in our performance of Of Our New Day Begun. They are led by musician, vocal arranger, writer, and storyteller Keeme Tajudeen (Berklee College of Music ’26).
“West Side Story is the best score ever written for musical theatre,” Stephen Schwartz, composer of Wicked, declared in 2008, “and still sounds ahead of its time.” There have been over fifty thousand productions of West Side Story worldwide since it opened in 1957. Seven decades later, its retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story remains a powerful commentary on ethnic conflict, gang violence, and the pulls and pressures of growing up and falling in love anywhere.
The Symphonic Dances from West Side Story were scored in 1960 by the orchestrators of the original Broadway show, Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. With its fusion of mambo, cha-cha, waltzes, Broadway ballads… even a bebop fugue, the score bursts forth in a stylistic amalgam that captures the swagger, danger, drive, and romance of urban America. Bernstein portrays New York culture as “many-sided,” a notion echoed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton, in a memorable lyric from In the Heights:
My Mom is Dominican-Cuban,
My Dad is from Chile and P.R., which means
I’m Chile-Domini-Curican,
But I always say I’m from Queens.
That many-sided view of American music has always guided the Boston Landmarks Orchestra’s mission and programming. As conductor Leon Botstein put it recently, “The proper way to honor Bernstein’s memory and achievement is to do more than perform his music. We in the world of classical music must pick up where he left off and make orchestras and concert life crucial to our communities.”
For twenty-five years, the Landmarks Orchestra has performed with Bostonians of many heritages, featuring in recent seasons musicians from Haiti, Puerto Rico, Korea, Syria, Armenia, and Arabic countries. Tonight, a favorite group returns: Grooversity, the drumming ensemble led by Brazilian percussionist Marcus Santos. Composer David Kempers has arranged two iconic Brazilian tunes for the occasion, both composed by Chiquinha Gonzaga, Brazil’s first professional female conductor. Atraente, a polka in the instrumental style known as choro leads directly into a fast-paced march, Ó Abre Alas, the first Brazilian song composed expressly for Carnival.
William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 4, Autochthonous, is a highly listenable, toe-tapping work by one of America’s essential, yet still undercelebrated, composers. The title—meaning “native” or “indigenous”—signals music that is quintessentially American. “American music is a composite of all the idioms of all the people comprising this nation,” Still wrote in his original program note. With a career spanning opera, symphonic works, Broadway, Hollywood film, jazz, and theater, he was uniquely positioned to create such a portrait of America. The work is dedicated “To my Friend, Maurice Kessler,” a violinist in the Boston Symphony, and a revered teacher of Still’s at Oberlin.
A remarkable generation of American composers—including Florence Price, Horatio Parker, Henry Hadley, and Frederick Converse—came to Boston over a thirty-year period to study with George Chadwick, Director of the New England Conservatory from 1897 to 1930. In 1922, William Grant Still joined that lineage. While in Boston performing oboe in the groundbreaking Broadway musical Shuffle Along, he sought out Chadwick, who accepted him as a private composition student without charging tuition. This generous gesture reflected both Chadwick’s recognition of Still’s exceptional gifts and Boston’s welcoming musical culture at a time when such opportunities remained comparatively uncommon in many other American cities.
Still conceived his Fourth Symphony as stylistically pluralistic and inclusive, in contrast to his earlier symphonies, which drew specifically on the African American experience. Even so, the work opens with a pentatonic (five-note) motive characteristic of the African diaspora, affirming roots that run deep in the American musical tradition. Trumpets reassert the idea before the strings spin out the principal theme, joyful and free-spirited. Heard in every movement, it becomes one of the symphony’s principal unifying threads.
The second movement is a blues-tinged lament with a faster middle section of darker power. The next movement is an exuberant dance that reflects Still’s Broadway experience. All third movements of his five symphonies are of this general type. The finale is the longest and most probing of the symphony’s four movements. The main theme—Slowly and reverently—seeks higher ground but comes at first to an anguished climax. With the beginning of a faster middle section, we hear in succession the symphony’s introductory pentatonic motive, the first movement’s principal subject, and a double-time version of the second movement’s main theme. When the finale’s opening music returns, it builds to a final resounding affirmation. “Men look devotedly and hopefully up to God and find solace and a newer life,” Still wrote for the premiere program.
Leroy Anderson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied composition at the New England Conservatory and at Harvard where, as a Masters candidate, he studied with Georges Enesco. While serving as director of the Harvard University Band, he worked toward a PhD in German and Scandinavian languages, eventually becoming fluent in Danish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish, his parents’ native tongue. Although he composed a fine piano concerto and a Broadway musical that earned two Tony Awards, he is universally known as the composer of light orchestral miniatures—including Sleigh Ride—and for the best-selling recordings of these showpieces, many conducted by the composer.
Arthur Feielder and the Boston Pops premiered Serenata in 1947, at the height of the “mambo craze” in the US. Anderson was especially proud that Serenata was recorded by jazz legends Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole. Fiedler later told Anderson it was his favorite. “I began with the flowing melody you hear as the main section,” Anderson recalled. “Then, since this main part was in a major key with a very broad melody, the music seemed to call for something to introduce it in a minor key, so I wrote the first section with fast repeated notes. When the whole thing was put together with a beguine rhythm as a background, it seemed to me to sound like a Latin-American serenade, so I added the Spanish title, Serenata.”
Anderson composed The Syncopated Clock in 1945 while serving in the U.S. Army. Fiedler had invited him to appear as conductor with the Pops during their annual Harvard night. Anderson came up with an idea about a clock that was not always on an even keel. He finished the piece in a few hours and mailed it off to Symphony Hall. It quickly became a Pops favorite, later reaching a wider audience as the theme music for CBS’ The Late Show.
It all began with Jazz Pizzicato. As Anderson recounted, “One spring after a performance of the Hasty Pudding Show, which I had conducted, Mr. George Judd, the manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra… said he had heard my arrangements played by the Harvard Band… and asked me to make a symphonic setting of Harvard songs for the 25th reunion of his class… After the concert I went to the librarian’s office and found Mr. Fiedler examining my score intently. ‘This is very good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to find someone who has ideas and knows how to orchestrate.’ Then he urged me to write more for the Pops concerts… A year or so later, I came back to conduct again… and brought a little piece called Jazz Pizzicato to do as an encore. Fiedler liked it enough to play it for two years—and that’s how I got started. The next thing I knew through Fiedler’s efforts a publisher in New York wanted to see me. And in 1939, Jazz Pizzicato was published, my first piece.”
In 1938, Fiedler and the Pops recorded Jazz Pizzicato, but needed an additional short piece to fill up one side a 78 rpm record. Thus Jazz Pizzicato’s twin was born: Jazz Legato.
Members of the Landmarks Orchestra’s new Music Circle recently had the opportunity to vote on which Leroy Anderson piece they would most like to hear tonight. Several hundred voted and the winner by a narrow margin was The Waltzing Cat, a piece Landmarks musicians often play on our Music & Memory programs in memory care facilities. Orchestration is the key to its humor, which has made The Waltzing Cat an all-time Anderson favorite. The composer said he imagined “something like Puss in Boots at a fancy dress ball.”
Composed in just twelve days and dedicated to Arthur Fiedler, the six-movement Irish Suite was commissioned by the Eire Society of Boston in 1947. The third movement, The Rakes of Mallow “tells of the carousing and rioting of the young bloods of Mallow,” Anderson wrote. His exuberant setting puts both the traditional Irish polka and the orchestra through their paces, accelerating the tempo five times before the exhilarating finish.
And what is that familiar catchy music that we perform tonight as an unannounced encore? If you’ve made it this far in the Podium Note, you have earned a right to know: Leroy Anderson’s Fiddle Faddle. It placed 2nd in our Music Circle vote, falling short of The Waltzing Cat by a whisker.
CHRISTOPHER WILKINS was appointed Music Director of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra in the spring of 2011. Since then, he has expanded the orchestra’s mission of making great music accessible to the whole community. He has also helped develop the orchestra’s Breaking Down Barriers initiative, making accessibility a priority in all aspects of the orchestra’s activities.
