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Jacob Avshalomov, (b. 1919, Tsingtao, China) Curriculum Vitae,
STUDIED with Aaron Avshalomov, Ernst Toch, Bernard Rogers, Aaron Copland and at Reed College and Eastman School of Music.
TAUGHT at Columbia University 1946-54; summers at Reed College, Tanglewood, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Aspen School of Music
COMMISSIONS: Symphony: The Oregon; The Thirteen Clocks; Phases of the Great Land; Up at Timberline; Glorious th'Assembled Fires; Symphony of Songs
SERVICES: Ford Foundation Composers Project; Avshalomov Lecture Series 1958-1971; National Humanities Council, 1968-74; National Arts Endowment, Music Planning Section 1977-79; Pro Musicis Foundation
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES: Who's Who in America; Who's Who in Music; Bakers' Dictionary of Music and Musicians; International Encyclopedia of Music; Mussiken Hvem, Hvad, Hvor, Copenhagen
City Upon A Hill and Inscriptions At The City Of Brass are two of my major works for chorus and orchestra that got off to a disastrous start, but were then redeemed by a successful second performance. Both involved Boston and Portland, Oregon (which, but for a flip of a coin would also have been named Boston). The first was commissioned by the Boston Winterfest of 1965, where it received a wretched performance on a program of all new choral works, with a set of three speeches during intermission. A press report confirming all this ended by declaring that `the crowning folly of the evening was City Upon a Hill by Avshalomov.'
A decade later I conducted the Portland Youth Philharmonic and choruses from Oregon campuses during the Bicentennial celebrations — with Gov. Tom McCall as the Speaker — recorded on this compact disc. The Portland Oregonian reviewer called it “a work of moving beauty…”
Inscriptions At The City Of Brass was premiered by the Schola Cantorum of New York under Hugh Ross, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1957, with Vera Zorina as Sheherezad. In his New York Herald-Tribune review, Paul Henry Lang (my former colleague at Columbia University) said he “expected Fu Manchu to appear any minute.” He himself was seen to disappear after the first five minutes of my half-hour piece.
In 1960 I conducted a performance of Inscriptions at the New England Conservatory of Music, after which it was greeted in the Boston Globe as “a truly superb oriental fantasy…wrought with a fabulously skilled technique and sense of choral and instrumental colors altogether rare.” Damned in Boston, redeemed in Boston!
On a flight to New York I happened to be sitting beside Leonard Bernstein. As he looked over my new score he promptly noted, “you're always writing pieces about cities” (but he didn't perform any of them).
Those two works, along with my choral symphony, “Glorious th'Assembled Fires,” came from an abiding love of literature and of singing. Running on a parallel track were my euphoric decades as conductor of the Portland Youth Philharmonic. With the stream of devoted young musicians who passed through it I presented to Portland many of the masterpieces of this genre: from the Gabrieli In Ecclesis, the Haydn Mass in Time of War through Rachmaninov The Bells, Walton Belshazzar's Feast, Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, Tippett A Child of Our Time, not to forget the Requiems of Mozart, Berlioz and Verdi. Experiencing these treasures brought me some of my most exalted hours of music-making. It was very natural for me to follow their lead. Although I share the media of voices and instruments with my incomparable contemporaries, I conceive my palette as differing from theirs in that I use a differently constructed musical scale. Instead of the usual steps of the major scale: 1-1- -1-1-1- , mine goes: -1--1--1--1, which, while it looks simple-minded, evokes an indefinable oriental flavor, especially as one builds up chords of several notes from it. To the layman this may seem like just so much jargon; but the fact is that a rather personal sound-palette emerges. It is perceptible to the listener, even if he doesn't know it — like Moliere's man who never knew he was speaking prose.
Many of my works are based on this scale; not only the two cantata-like pieces on this disc, but also the Glistening City.
The assignment from Winterfest was to use John F. Kennedy's speech, nicknamed City Upon A Hill, as my text. But considering the dryness of most speeches, I decided to illuminate its main points with poems and comments from earlier American writers, and cap them with St. Matthew's passage about the “city upon a hill” (V 14-16).
For musical associations with Boston I used a church-bell, a choir of bell-ringers, an old Irish reel, and finally, the 18th century Huguenot hymn, Confess Jehovah — which I fitted out with Lowell's Ode.
It all might have ended at the climax brought by this complex overlay, but with Kennedy's fate then still burning in the mind, the music passes through the exultation of the Hymn/Ode — into the realm of eternal peace.
Inscriptions At The City Of Brass begins in Damascus and ventures to a Fabled City beyond the horizon. This is the 339th Tale of the 1001 Nights, told by Sheherezad to keep the Emir awake and herself alive.
The composition, begun at Pownal, Vermont was completed in Portland in 1956. Between its first redemption in 1960 and its flourishing in 1968 — at the opening of Portland's remodeled Civic Auditorium — there was a misfire at Tanglewood, that musical Garden of Allah. I taught there in the summer of 1959. As visiting faculty I was to have my moment on-stage. I remember, after a rehearsal in the Shed, meeting Copland on the grassy grounds, and him asking, “was that you making that great din?” My orchestration was rather audible: augmented woodwind, brass and percussion sections, string bass, spiced by banjo and guitar; no other strings.
That din never was heard by the Festival public. First, the dress-rehearsal was bounced from the stage in the Shed, because its ceiling panels needed adjustment; second, in the crowded Barn to which we had been banished, I had only gotten halfway through the work when the monitor told me my allotted time was up. I closed my score and, controlling my fury, told the assembled 80 choristers and 65 instrumentalists that in my own student days there Maestro Koussevitzky had said to a shaky student orchestra (in his Russian-English) “do noht vuorry, eef vee ahr noht rready, vee shuall noht perrform.” Said I, “we are not ready and we shall not perform.” Surrounded by dozens of auditors, the stunned silence was broken by general applause that lasted four minutes. It was a depressing triumph for artistic integrity.
Following that abrupt cancellation a number of the students who had come from the New England Conservatory asked me whether I would come to conduct a performance on their campus if it could be arranged. I said I would, and did; and that resulted in the Boston Globe's rave.
Hear now “and learn the story of the Rulers!”
Inscriptions At The City Of Brass
Sheherezad: There was once in Damascus…
……………………………………………
…………and translated to the Emir Musa:
Symphony: The Oregon
Settling in Oregon is for most people a westward trek; but for me it was the terminus of three generations' eastward wanderings — from the mountains of Caucasia through Siberia and North China to the mountains of western Oregon. I did not aspire to be a memorialist for the State, but in the course of my decades of joyous work with our youth orchestra several occasions presented themselves to be celebrated.
One was the State Centennial. I was commissioned to write an orchestral work to honor the event, and wishing to focus on some aspects of this territory which perennially affect the residents, I consulted with a native and fervent Oregonian, my wife, Doris. We settled on: the Columbia River; Mount Hood; the Rose; and our fabled City itself. With this range of features, a symphony seemed indicated
The work was begun in 1960 in Portland and was completed here in 1962. Between these dates much of the music was written in Munich while on sabbatical. I led the premiere as guest conductor of the Portland Symphony and had the bonus of working with Isaac Stern in the Brahms Violin Concerto.
At the beginning of each movement of my score I inscribed a few lines, a verbal reflection of my musical feeling. Some years ago I withdrew the first two movements — as not fully realized; perhaps one day they will rise again, phoenix-like. For the present disc we have the third and fourth movements — as they were recorded by my Youth Philharmonic, live, for a world-wide broadcast by the BBC from London in 1970. The inscriptions read:
The Rose —
warm intimate emblem of beauty,
lasting, fragrant, convolute; its
tenderness protected by its thorns.
All told, a blessed place to have settled.
Up At Timberline
Up At Timberline was commissioned by the Friends of Timberline to note the Lodge's 50th anniversary. Situated on the slopes of glorious Mt. Hood, the Lodge is one of the most enduring projects of the WPA - Works Progress Administration. It was dedicated in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt at a program replete with music and several types of dances — Indian, Negro, industrial, and a “Dance of the Sophisticates.” A Federal Music Project Band played — mostly music from the 19th century.
Recalling those festivities, the present-day Friends asked me to write a piece to be performed at the Lodge during a weekend of events in 1987. I used an ensemble of 16 winds and brass, with a string bass and three percussion. After it was given there it was repeated during the following season at a benefit concert in the Swann Auditorium of the Portland Art Museum. That is the performance on this disc.
The Action is the third movement of my Suite. It portrays the social activity of those days which followed the exhilarations on the slopes. Hence the cavortings and nostalgia of dance-tunes from the '30s as they intertwine in the haze of near-beer. The title implies “up” in mood as well as being Up at Timberline.
— The Performers —
City Upon A Hill - Choruses from the University of Oregon. Gov. Tom Lawson McCall, Speaker
Inscriptions at the City of Brass- Choruses from Lewis & Clark College, Portland State College, Oregon State University. Mara Stahl as Sheherezad.
Portland Youth Philharmonic - conducted by the composer.
All live concert recordings.
Cover Photo: © George H.H. Huey Photography, Inc., Prescott, AZ
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