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Douglas Moore and
Marion Bauer had very different backgrounds and though
their music is not, on the surface, very much alike, in
fact, they had a lot in common. Born in the last decades
of the century of romantic music, they both had
distinguished careers as composers, writers and
educators. They were trained in France and helped to
shift the focus of American musical culture away from the
heavy German influence that had been dominant for so
long. And both represented moderate, eclectic views about
music and musical expression in a scene often dominated
by the sometimes shrill, opposing voices of
experimentalism, neo-classicism, and expressionism.
Douglas Stuart Moore,
the more popular and the more populist of the two, came
by his penchant for Americana very naturally. He was
born, on August 10, 1893, in the colonial hamlet of
Cutchogue in Southold Town, on the North Fork of Long
Island, New York. Cutchogue's seventeenth-century
heritage can still be seen in some of the oldest
remaining domestic architecture in the United States and
the settlement is still surrounded, as it was in 1893, by
farms (the major difference is that wine grapes have
replaced potatoes as the major crop). On his father's
side, the composer was in the direct line of Thomas Moore
who sailed from Connecticut in 1640 to found Southold
Township; on his mother's side, he was descended from
both Miles Standish and John Alden. All his life, he
maintained, as his permanent residence, the house in
which he was born. He died in neighboring Greenport on
July 25, 1969.
Although it was not
unusual for a well-brought up young man in 19th century
New England and New York to play the piano and dabble in
music, a full-fledged musical career was usually
considered out of the question. But Moore was
consistently encouraged by his teachers and, after long
hesitation, took the plunge. He studied at the Hotchkiss
School, Yale (with Horatio Parker, who was also Charles
Ives' teacher) and, after a World War I stint in the
navy, with Vincent d'Indy and Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
In 1921, he was appointed director of musical activities
at the Art Museum in Cleveland where he continued his
composition studies with Ernst Bloch. Four years later he
returned to New York, started writing music for the
American Laboratory Theater, and began his long
association with Columbia University where he headed the
music department for many years before his retirement in
1962. He was the author of two widely known music
appreciation books and served as president of both the
National Institute and the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
It was in the autumn of
1954 that he co-founded Composers Recordings, with the
composer Otto Luening also of Columbia University and the
arts administrator Oliver Daniel.
Moore's musical style -
simple and direct, often to the point of homespun - is
almost entirely organized around his gift for melody. Not
surprisingly, he is best known for his twelve operas,
notably The Devil and Daniel Webster (1938) which he
wrote with Steven Vincent Benet, Giants in the Earth
(1949) with E. R. lvag and which earned the 1951 Pulitzer
Prize, and The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) with John
Latouche, perhaps the most performed American opera after
Porgy and Bess and the work which launched Beverly Sills'
career, and his final opera Carry Nation (1966). But the
orchestra - chamber and symphonic - was also an important
medium for him and his catalogue includes two symphonies
and a number of suites and tone poems, many of them
evoking American themes: P. T. Barnum, Moby Dick, Babbitt
(later retitled Overture on an American Tune), Village
Music, Down East.
FARM JOURNAL, for
chamber orchestra, was the result of a 1947 commission
from the Little Orchestra Society, which performed it on
January 19, 1948, with its music director, Thomas
Scherman, on the podium. The work contains the oldest
music on this disc as it derives from a score for a 1940
documentary film, Power and Land. This suggests that
Moore's interest in folk music and Americana, like
Copland's, was connected with the political and
ideological movements of the time. It also suggests many
parallels with Virgil Thomson's Plow That Broke the
Plains, another Americana score for a film dealing with
the impact of the depression on farm life. The contrast
between these two is notable. Thomson's music always has
an undertone, a subtext that suggests we are on the
outside looking in. Moore's music is more clearly the
thing itself: hearty, straight-forward, sincerely felt.
The four movements are entitled "Up Early,"
"Sunday Clothes," "Lamplight," and
"Harvest Song." Peggy Glanville-Hicks, the
composer/critic who wrote the liner notes to the LP
release of this work on CRI, described it as "in a
sense nature music, but a peopled landscape, landscape
with human figures. It is perhaps this capacity to create
vivid moods that is the composer's most outstanding
asset..."
In the golden age of
radio, the networks had full orchestras on staff; new
music - usually of the more popular varieties - was often
performed and regularly commissioned.
COTILLION SUITE,
a collection of dances for string orchestra, was written
in 1952 for the orchestra of the Columbia Broadcasting
System which performed it in the spring of 1953 under the
direction of Alfredo Antonini. Antonini, who also
directed this recording, was one of the orchestra1s
regular conductors and the symphony is dedicated to him.
There are six movements: Grand March for the opening
parade of the dancers, a stylized Polka, a slow Waltz, a
quirky Galop, a classic Cake Walk in the style of Scott
Joplin, and, finally, the Quickstep- almost an Irish jig
in this interpretation - after which, presumably,
everyone is too exhausted to continue.
The SYMPHONY IN A
MAJOR Moore's most ambitious symphonic work, was the
second and last of his essays in that venerable form. It
was written in 1945, and makes a striking contrast to the
dark-hued In Memoriam of the preceding year. This is a
remarkable outburst of positive energy, the very
apotheosis of post-war American optimism. The composer
described it, somewhat cautiously, as a "an attempt
to write in clear, objective, modified classical style,
with emphasis upon rhythmic and melodic momentum rather
than upon sharply contrasted themes or dramatic climaxes.
There is no underlying program, although the mood of the
second movement was suggested by a short poem by James
Joyce which deals with music heard at the coming of
twilight." This barely hints at the expansive mood,
that vast sense of release and high spirits that is the
composer's most endearing (and, perhaps, enduring)
quality. The work follows the classical canons with a
rather wistful slow introduction followed by a smiling
Allegro giusto, the aforementioned slow movement (Andante
quieto simplice), a short, bubbly scherzo marked
Allegretto, and a vigorous, kinet ic finale, Allegro con
spirito.
The Symphony is
dedicated to the memory of Stephen Vincent Benet, Moore's
collaborator on The Devil and Daniel Webster, who had
recently died. The work had a great deal of success in
performance. It was first heard in Paris on May 5, 1946,
directed by Robert Lawrence. Alfred Wallenstein conducted
the American premiere in Los Angeles on January 16, 1947,
as well as the New York and broadcast premiere with the
NBC Symphony on May 17, 1947. Less than a year later,
February 19, 1948, it reached the New York Philharmonic
with Bruno Walter conducting.
It is certainly fitting
that CRI's first release included music by one of the
most important American women composers. Marion
Eugenie Bauer was born in Walla Walla, Washington, on
August 15, 1887. She studied in Portland, Oregon, in New
York and in France where she is thought to have been
Nadia Boulanger1s first American pupil. Beginning in
1919, she became part of a group of composers who
regularly summered at the MacDowell Colony and which
included a number of notable women, among them being Amy
Beach, Mabel Daniels, Miriam Gideon and Ruth Crawford.
Bauer began her long and distinguished teaching career in
1926 at New York University where she remained until her
retirement in 1951; she also taught at Juilliard and
lectured at the Chatauqua Institute in western New York
and elsewhere. She helped to organize the American Music
Guild and the League of Composers, served as music critic
for the Evening Mail and Musical Leader, and was the
author or co-author of a number of important articles and
books, most notably, her Twentieth-Century Music, long a
standard reference. In the 1920s, she was described as
"a radical member of the musical left wing,"
but by the 1940s her music was being described as a
"middle-of-the-road impressionist." Neither
view does justice to the range and accessibility of her
works. She died in South Hadley, Massachusetts, on August
9, 1955.
Marion Bauer's catalogue
is dominated by vocal works, and by solo and chamber
music; the SYMPHONIC SUITE for strings, Op. 43, is
one of her few large compositions. It was written in 1940
and premiered at Chautauqua, New York, on August 21,
1940. There are three movements: a serious, contrapuntal
Prelude, a lamenting Interlude of easy rocking motion and
dramatic turns of events, and a fugue finale which, in
spite of the chromatic subject, remains quite tonal,
following the traditional rules.
PRELUDE AND FUGUE for
Flute and Strings, written in 1951, is one of her last
works. What we hear is mostly prelude: a pleasant and
pastorale-like movement very much dominated by the flute
which leads the meditations and ruminations and then also
introduces the bouncy theme that is the subject of the
short fugue that follows.
- Eric Salzman
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