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William Schuman
The recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, the first New York Critics' Circle Award and two Guggenheim fellowships, William Howard Schuman was born in 1910 in Manhattan, where he lived and worked most of his life. He came from, in his own words, a “completely bourgeois atmosphere and background” — his family's range of musical appreciation rarely strayed from a player-piano rendition of the William Tell Overture and Sunday-evening singalongs. He endured violin lessons in grade school, but baseball was his true boyhood passion.
By the time he was a teenager, however, a fascination and facility with music more and more asserted itself. He organized a dance band — Billy Schuman and His Alamo Society Orchestra — in which he sang and played (badly, he would later confess) the violin and banjo. Barely able to notate a melody properly, he nonetheless provided arrangements for the group and also started writing reams of pop songs. But with practicality the byword of his upbringing, he eventually enrolled in New York University's School of Commerce.
A life-altering event occurred when one evening, less than willingly, he went with his sister to a Carnegie Hall performance. At 19, he had never been to a classical concert before. The sheer sonic power of the experience transformed him, apparently overnight, from a fulltime business student and occasional Tin Pan Alley tunesmith into an aspiring composer of serious music.
By the time of his death in 1992, the 81-year-old Schuman had composed — beyond the 150 or so pop songs of his dance-band days — ten symphonies and other large-scale orchestral works, choral and vocal pieces, band pieces and fanfares, four string quartets and assorted chamber works, as well as five ballets and The Mighty Casey, his only opera, a whimsical one but well-befitting a man who had once been so in love with baseball.
His status as one of America's top composers — in a league with Aaron Copland and Roy Harris — endured throughout his long career. Yet within that creative expanse, the period from 1941 to 1956 stands out as especially productive, bookended by his breakout Symphony No. 3 and the popular New England Triptych. It is from that period that the three works on this disc are drawn.
Together they offer a trove of distinctive Schuman trademarks: vigorous rhythmic statements; the alternation or overlapping of powerful blocks of sound (each block usually representing a separate orchestral family, such as the strings or brass); long melodic lines (his emblematic “chorales”) that unfold slowly while shorter motifs skitter above or through them; and fierce climactic points where the energy is transferred to a timpani solo. The passages typically lack a key or tonal center; Schuman relies on the weight of the scoring itself or on the dramatic content, rather than on hoary harmonic tradition, to bring them to rest — or leave them cut off.
Credendum
The most recent and massively orchestrated of the three works (including four flutes, six horns, four trumpets, two tubas, four percussionists plus timpani, and piano), Credendum takes its name from the Latin for “that which must be believed”; its subtitle is “Article of Faith.” It was commissioned through the Department of State (the first time a government agency had ever commissioned a piece of music) to honor UNESCO, the United Nations organization in charge of coordinating arts, science and education programs worldwide.
Schuman was not one to make public statements, musical or otherwise, about his private beliefs. But he was clearly devoted to education and arts administration. He spent ten years teaching music at Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York; 17 years as president of Manhattan's famed Juilliard School of Music, revising its tradition-bond curriculum and bringing onto the faculty a bevy of young, working composers like Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin (several of Mennin's stormy orchestral works, performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, David Alan Miller, conductor, make up Albany Records CD TROY260.); and seven years as president of Lincoln Center, until a heart attack forced his early retirement All this while he never stopped composing. He certainly endorsed UNESCO's mission.
Credendum's three movements, played without pause, open with “Declaration,” an emphatic oration for woodwinds, brass and percussion with no strings but the double basses. Big and brassy, it features rapid-fire single-note repetitions as urgent as telegraph messages, and jarring chimes and steel plates that clang like swords being beaten into plowshares. (It is difficult to resist making metaphors of such vivid musical gestures.)
Full strings launch the second movement, the soft, bittersweet “Chorale,” which gradually swells, intensifies and then subsides. The “Finale” breaks in with a recurring scherzo-like motif, a succession of contrasting musical ideas and, at last, a reworking of the “Declaration” material and its urgent rhythms.
Credendum was premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Thor Johnson conducting, on 4 November 1955, in a special concert honoring the Fifth National Conference of the United States National Commission for UNESCO.
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Derived from an unperformed version Schuman fashioned in 1938-39, and following the classic three-movement, fast-slow-fast concerto format, this work was originally called Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra. Scored for solo piano and a chamber-like ensemble of one flute, one oboe, one clarinet, two horns, two trumpets, one trombone, plus strings, it is spartan beside the imposing violin concerto of 1947 and the 1973 Concerto on Old English Rounds for viola, orchestra and female chorus. Yet as lean as it is, it pulsates with drive and vibrancy.
Its biting energy is most evident in the outer movements. The first builds on a terse, syncopated idea announced at the top by the piano in cut time; the third begins with a nimble piano ostinato or repetitive figure, leading to a four-voice fugal cadenza (Schuman had a fondness for counterpoint) and ending with a brief running motif in the solo, pierced by slashing chords from the rest of the ensemble.
But it is the introspective middle movement that is especially persuasive. There is a decidedly urban feel to the long, languorous melody carried by the flute and violins, an aching metropolitan plaintiveness. (One also catches that same big-city ache in the “Lonely Town” pas de deux from the musical On the Town, written a year later by Schuman's friend and champion, Leonard Bernstein.) It is as unmistakably American as the echo of wide-open prairies associated with Harris and Copland. Technically, the movement may not be jazz or the blues, but these lie at its heart and at the heart of the entire little work. It exists in an altogether other universe from the sweeping concertos of Brahms, Grieg and Tchaikovsky.
Which may clarify why one disgruntled listener, in Manhattan's Town Hall on 13 January 1943, demanded that Daniel Saidenberg — who had just led the Saidenberg Little Symphony and pianist Rosalyn Tureck in the premiere performance — explain himself. “You conduct modern music,” the young woman said. “Why?” At this remove it is hard for us to appreciate the bitter resistance many American concertgoers — and critics — had to the new homegrown language in which this concerto so unapologetically, so articulately spoke.
Symphony No. 4
Schuman considered himself first and foremost a symphonist, and his Fourth Symphony dates from his period of greatest industry in that form, during and shortly after World War Two. (To his regret, physical disabilities disqualified him from military service.) The Third arrived in late 1941, the Fourth a few months later, the Symphony for Strings (no. 5) in late 1942 and the masterful Sixth in 1948. A dozen years would go by before he took the symphonic form up again.
Still another work in three movements, Symphony No. 4 has, like Credendum, a greater-than-average instrumentation. It possesses heft, toughness, intelligence. Some have perceived, in its intensities, in the dark sardonic sound and moodiness of several of its sections, a certain kinship to Shostakovich. More obvious, though, are the characteristic Schuman touches: line layered atop line, one instrumental family countering another, a restless passing from one musical thought to the next, those prominent kettledrums.
The symphony begins with an English horn over a somber, insistent solo double bass; they pull the rest of the orchestra in little by little and carry us to the bustling material that comprises most of the opening movement. The second movement — which excludes the lower brass and percussion — begins with a gentle muted-string episode and yields to a constant evolution of different rhythms and orchestral hues.
The full instrumental complement returns for the finale. This peaks in an involved string fugue, underneath which the movement's opening motif (which itself recalls the bass ostinato from the very beginning) is eventually intoned in two deep-register voices set against each other. It is a wonderfully complex and bravura effect, which propels the symphony to a triumphant closing C major chord, essentially duplicating the end of its first movement.
Aaron Copland heard a performance of this symphony in the early 1980s at Tanglewood and phoned Schuman to rave about the piece, calling it “wonderful” and claiming to have been wholly unfamiliar with it. On the contrary — Schuman reminded him — not only had Copland already read through the score but Schuman had even revised the end of the second movement based on the senior composer's comments.
But then, that had been four decades prior: the symphony was premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra under Artur Rodzinski (to whom it was dedicated) on 22 January 1942 — a few scant weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In light of that shattering occurrence and the many other events that would fill the lives of both men over the years, such forgetfulness on Copland's part was understandable.
John McCabe, pianist
Born in Liverpool, England, and having studied at Manchester University, the Royal Manchester College of Music and Munich's Hochschule für Musik, John McCabe distinguishes himself not only as one of England's finest keyboard artists but as a composer in his own right. As a soloist, he is esteemed as a connoisseur of classical sensibilities (his 12-CD recording of the complete Haydn piano sonatas was hailed as “one of the great recorded monuments of the keyboard repertoire”); he has also championed the contemporary, soloing in works by composers as diverse as Elliot Carter, Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, among others.
In his own eclectic compositions he has wielded such modern idioms as serialism and minimalism, evoked the medieval world in his ballet Edward II and summoned up the enchanting realms of C.S. Lewis in his children's opera The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His output consists additionally of symphonies, various other orchestral pieces and abundant chamber, vocal and keyboard music, highly regarded around the world.
Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1983 for his services to British music, John McCabe has written monographs on Rachmaninov, Bartók and Haydn, and his biography of the British composer Alan Rawsthorne was published in 1999. His own music is published by Novello and Company.
David Alan Miller, conductor
David Alan Miller has established a reputation as one of the leading American conductors of his generation. Frequently in demand as a guest conductor, he has worked with many of America's major orchestras, developing especially close relationships with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Chicago and Detroit symphonies. He has also conducted the orchestras of Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Indianapolis, as well as the New World Symphony and the New York City Ballet.
A creative and compelling orchestra builder, Mr. Miller has been music director of the Albany Symphony Orchestra since 1992. Through exploration of unusual repertoire, educational programming, community outreach and recording initiatives, he has reaffirmed the Albany Symphony Orchestra's standing as the nation's leading proponent of American music and one of its most innovative orchestras.
Internationally, Mr. Miller has conducted throughout Europe and in Asia and Australia. In addition to his many recordings for Albany Records, he has recorded for the Deutsche Grammophon, Harmonia Mundi, Argo and London/Decca labels.
The Albany Symphony Orchestra
The Albany Symphony Orchestra has held a unique position in the orchestra world for more than 30 years as champion of the American symphonic repertoire. Through commissions, recordings, educational and outreach programs and its countless performances, the ASO has been fulfilling its commitment to create a living orchestral repertoire and to assure that living composers have their works heard. In addition to its regular programming, the orchestra also hosts a month-long annual American Music Festival and has a new-music ensemble, the Dogs of Desire.
Founded in 1931 by the composer-conductor John Carabella, the ASO has also been led by music directors Rudolf Thomas, Ole Windingstad, Edgar Curtis, Julius Hegyi and Geoffrey Simon. With more than 20 ASCAP awards for adventuresome programming, it received the prestigious 2001 ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming, as well as the first ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award for Educational Programming in 1999. It has an extensive discography, and its recordings appear on the Albany, New World, CRI, Argo and London/Decca labels.
More information about the Albany Symphony Orchestra can be found on its website: www.albanysymphony.com.
—Ray Bono
(Acknowledgements: Christopher Rouse, Teri McKibben of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Carol S. Jacobs of the Cleveland Orchestra Archives)
This recording is dedicated to the memory of Audrey Kaufmann, long-time officer and Board member of the Albany Symphony Orchestra. The ASO's historic mission of performing music by living American composers did not happen easily. From her position of leadership on the Board, Audrey gently coaxed those lovers of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven into realizing the value of performing music by Americans; especially in a place like Albany, with its small unknown orchestra. William Schuman; educator, administrator, visionary, creator, was a composer whose music Audrey especially admired. To the life of this remarkable woman, who was so important to classical music in Albany and beyond, we dedicate this recording.
This recording is made possible, in part, by the generous support of the family of Audrey Kaufmann, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, NYSCA Music Program Technical Assistance Fund, ASCAP, BMI Foundation, Inc./Carlos Surinach Fund, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Paul Underwood, and Vanguard, the volunteer organization of the Albany Symphony Orchestra.
Publishers: Credendum — Merion Music, Inc.; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Symphony No. 4 — G. Schirmer, Inc.
Credendum was recorded March 16, 2002; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was recorded November 18, 2001; and Symphony No. 4 was recorded March 20, 2000. All recordings were made in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, New York.
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