With winter's thaw and new buds appearing on the trees, DRAM offers a selection of works dedicated to the spring season. The works here are drawn from a wide array of composers, time periods and styles, from the ancient Bean Song of the Natchez Indians to Kitty Brazelton's eclectic composition Come Spring! composed in 1996.
Click on a link below to listen to a selection or read the associated liner notes.
Dominic Argento - Songs About Spring
This song cycle for soprano and piano is a setting of five poems by E.E. Cummings on the theme of spring, full of vivid, brilliant, joyful, childlike imagery. The third poem of the group "in Just-spring," was a favorite of Cummings himself, who often selected it for public reading. Although the language is modern, these poems in feeling and spirit are often very like Blake's Songs of Innocence. If we substitute the word poet for composer, what one critic has written about Argento could well apply also to Cummings: "What a pleasure to encounter a real composer, one who has studied and learned from his predecessors, loves the form, understands its conventions, has mastered them, and then lets his imagination take wing.
Kitty Brazelton – Come Spring!
Brazelton composed “Come Spring!” for the Manhattan Brass Quintet in 1996 after MBQ hornist Greg Evans… asked her what her “serious” music was like. In response she created a work that somehow blends ingredients from Morton Feldman, James Brown, Howard Hanson, Miles Davis, Janis Joplin and even Elliott Carter into a sound world entirely her own.
Godfrey Schroth – Spring in Bucks County
Spring in Bucks County is a challenge to both the pianist and flutist, who must play three instruments. The Suite was premiered at the Philadelphia Art Museum in 1974. The opening section has three contrasting dance episodes titled Equinoctial Dances. River Willows employs the alto flute and evokes youthful nocturnal rambles along the Delaware River. The last movement, the Fields of May, begins at dawn and has many changing moods, with a central, fantastic, syncopated march, which uses the piccolo.
Bun-Ching Lam – Mountain Clear Water Remote
Featured on this CD are three works from Lam's "Spring" cycle, an ongoing series that highlights the piano in various ensemble settings; each piece contrasts specific sonic characteristics of the piano to those of the accompanying group. Lam also plays with and incorporates symbolically the many different meanings of the word "spring" in this cycle; in Chinese poetry, "spring" carries strong associations (the season, a spring of water, spring up/spring down) and is used for veiled references (including sex).
Mary Howe – Spring Pastoral
Spring Pastoral is a setting of a published poem by Elinor Wylie. This piece was originally composed in 1936 as a chorus for three part women's voices with piano accompaniment…. It has been variously described as "a wistful tone poem, adroitly scored with a keen sense of instrumental color which embodies the timelessness and the bittersweet poignancy of a drowsy reverie over a memory of long ago;" "...a delicate and sensitive, yet intensely felt composition full of the mood its title invokes;" "...a soaring ecstatic melody, the 'ur' stamp of the authentic composer." This short piece arranged for strings, flutes, oboes, bassoons and horns sings with Howe's lyric power contained in a gossamer veil of sound.
Music of the Allegany and Seneca Indians: Songs and Dances of the Eastern Indians from Medicine Spring and Allegany – Bean Dance
Many of the Eastern tribes have songs and ceremonies that deal with growing or harvesting crops. The Bean Dance, led here by Archie Sam, is both a survival and a revival of those traditions. Mr. Sam pieced together this version from memory and from archival recordings, made by Mary Haas, of his uncle Watt Sam. The first part is a set of four songs, each introduced by the leader and followed in unison by the chorus. A set of shorter responses follows, and ideally, according to Mr. Sam, the whole should end with a Stomp Dance.
Leo Kraft – Spring in the Harbor
I wrote SPRING IN THE HARBOR with Catherine Rowe's voice in mind, and she gave the first performance at the Composers Theatre in New York City, April 25, 1970.
The six songs that comprise Spring In The Harbor are contrasted in mood and general character, but also in scoring and in the use of the piano. The keyboard instrument is not only played in the customary way but its strings are plucked, strummed, and struck with xylophone mallets. In the fifth song, the piano case is locked, and the pianist strikes the case and body of the piano to produce an array of percussive sounds.
William Doppmann – Spring Songs
The cycle Spring Songs, written in 1981 and premiered in Portland the following summer, suggests through the symbolism of succeeding seasons the passage and renewal of the life cycle seen from a woman’s point of view.
Margaret Bonds – Young Love in Spring
Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was a concert pianist and composer of considerable repute. Bonds' song cycle, Songs of the Season, (Langston Hughes) is a compendium of styles embracing the whole of the African American tradition in music. In Young Love in Spring and Winter Moon, Bonds' cultural heritage is subtly evident. The former has sweeping vocal lines and a power that is rhapsodic while the latter song is rather short with static vocal lines.
Just Spring – Art Songs of John Duke
Duke often claimed…to have developed his art song style somewhat self consciously after having studied in great detail the historical contexts of three previous genres exhibiting a marriage of music and poetry: the Elizabethan song, the nineteenth-century Lied and the French mélodie.
Andrew Imbrie - Spring Fever
Andrew Imbrie has enriched the American contemporary music scene for over five decades. This recording pays tribute to his legacy with performances of three compositions from the late 1990s. Of Spring Fever, the composer writes: "This work was begun in Berkeley but completed in Chicago on November 26, 1996. Its title reflects, perhaps, my sense of the onset of winter in that city, and my yearning for spring, with its varying excitements and instabilities.
