July was a bit of a slow month in some respects but managed to allow some catching up time with great music.  I'd like to just point out 5 new releases that arrived last month that are worth your attention.

Two of the recommendations will be reviewed in the next couple of weeks.  The first of these is a new Naxos CD of Borodin's three symphonies.  Borodin's second symphony is a really good work.  My first exposure to it was on one of those old Ernst Ansermet LPs and was a personal favorite.  The first symphony has a few great melodies as well and will be interesting to fans of the 19th century symphony.  The performances are with Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony who have been making a real impressive return to CDs after the dissapearance of Delos and their amazing American music series.  The review is forthcoming.

Having returned to the Midwest, it has been a reminder of the superior quality of wind band music.  There are many concert wind ensembles around with high schools and community colleges filling in even more with great music making in this tradition.  I will be highlighting next week a new release from the Altissimo label (received in July) called The Golden Age of the Concert Band.  This is a must have release for anyone who ever played in a wind ensemble.  The performances are from the Langley USAF Heritage of America band and features a classic repertoire of classical transcriptions, marches, and solo works in the closest you can get to recreating a band concert.  There are European and American marches, the most familiar being "Americans We" by Henry Fillmore.  Regular readers will recall the three-day American music overview last month, and this disc will give you a window on early 20th Century band music.  My bet is that most people will have played about a third of these selections at least.  Our military performance groups are simply some of the best ensembles you will likely hear and this one is fantastic.

In a completely different vein, there were two score releases of 1970s music to appreciate last month as well.  The first of these is from 1971 featuring a score by Lalo Schifrin, Pretty Maids All in a Row.  The Film Score Monthly Release is another of their fine remasterings with great booklet commentary.  The music is like discovering a lost Schifrin pop album similar to the ones he worked on in the 1960s due to the amount of source music in the score.  There is also a relatively awful song, "Chilly Winds," that some may remember from a recording made by The Osmonds!  The film was the first film feature written and produced by Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek) and the result is a film that seems way out of its time with its sexual thrust helmed by Roger Vadim (Barbarella).  The music though will likely be a guilty pleasure to Schifrin fans.  This is a limited edition of 1500 copies (available through www.intrada.com or www.screenarchives.com).

The other score is from 1976.  The Moneychangers was an Alex Hailey novel that the author hoped to sell as a feature film.  Instead, after the success of other mini-series on TV, it was turned into a multi-episode movie.  The score is by Henry Mancini and the music was essentially thought lost until Intrada, the producer of the release, connected inadvertently with one of the session musicians who had recordings of the sessions.  The result is an amazing two-disc set of mid-1970s Mancini which allows for some of that carryover instrumental pop and more serious dramatic cues.  It may not quite be The Thorn Birds in terms of the catchiness of its melodic content, but its plays quite well on its own here.  Mancini fans may recall that the theme for the series appeared on one of Mancini's 1970s albums of TV/Film music.   The Intrada release is also a limited edition worth tracking down.

Finally, I don't get many Kritzerland releases, a label devoted to classic Broadway and sometimes more esoteric film music.  For a while, they were releasing MGM discs as single re-issues that had earlier appeared in sold out limited FSM box set.  But there are always plenty of fascinating surprises.  One of these is a recent limited edition of two 1950s scores:  The Pride and the Passion and Kings Go Forth.  The former is by George Antheil and is worth the price of the disc alone.  Antheil grabbed the attention of the American musical public in the 1920s with his avant-garde musical style that incorporated everyday sounds (like police sirens) into non-traditional sounding music with jazz-like syncopations.  His film music comes from much later in his life and is woefully underrepresented (as is his other symphonic music in a more Neo-Romantic style).  The Pride and the Passion appeared as a Capitol records release at the time of the film.  The score has great themes, and plenty of interesting writing that recalls Antheil's personal harmonic style within the context of 1950s Hollywood dramatic writing.  The music has a Spanish flavor (recalling scores like Captain from Castile) especially in a wonderful "Bolero." It overshadows another fine score by Elmer Bernstein, Kings Go Forth.  Bernstein's score comes at a particularly productive time for him and this score for a military drama still has the 1950s dramatic style of Newman about it coupled with a few jazz sequences that make it a rather unusual score.  Both scores appeared in the UK as separate releases.  Kritzerland recordings are available at the above links.  Honestly, this is the one CD that spent most of the month in my CD player when it arrived.  It's a limited edition so with luck you can still pick up a copy.

The Latter 20^th Century (1951-2000)

While Leroy Anderson might be the continuance of the Paul Whiteman hybrid of jazz and classical musics, the 1950s would shift into often more austere works that continued to explore absolute music, Baroque forms (especially fugue) in the often open intervallic Americana sounds of the previous decade.  None did this better than Norman Dello Joio, Paul Creston or Walter Piston.  On the other extreme was the exploration of sound itself and what it meant as illustrated in the work of John Cage’s performance art pieces often incorporating chance and last-minute musical choices by the performers themselves.  Serialism also grows in interest as American music tries to become more sophisticated and “cerebral” as we see in works like Elliot Carter’s Variations for Orchestra.  It even appears for the first time in a film score by Leonard Rosenman, The Cobweb.  There are many threads again weaving the musical tapestry during the 1950s.  Other important works of the period include Carlisle Floyd’s opera Susannah; and Bernstein’s uneven hybrid Candide perhaps redeemed by his masterpiece of musical theater, West Side Story.  In Hollywood, the Post-Romantics were seeing their style being challenged by the likes of Alex North whose score for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) would introduce a new way of using jazz as dramatic narrative scoring.  Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Magnificent Seven (1960) would cement the indelible image of Western landscapes and Americana style for a generation even more than Copland’s own ballet music would do (though Rodeo is very much the template for Bernstein’s score).

1.       Floyd: Susannah

2.       Carter: Variations for Orchestra

3.       Creston: Symphony No. 4

4.       Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story

5.       North: A Streetcar Named Desire

6.       Elmer Bernstein: The Magnificent Seven

The 1960s find American concert music to be in equal flux.  Experimentation was the rewarded music of the period.  Even a film score from Copland (Something Wild) owed more to North than to the composer’s own style and he would try his hand at serialism, albeit in his unique style during the decade as well.  Popular music flourishes even in Hollywood as composers like Henry Mancini gain prominence and the use of popular music through this and the subsequent decade, coupled with the dissolution of studio orchestras, would have a great impact into the 1970s.  In his score for To Kill A Mockingbird though, Elmer Bernstein brought the sort of American style that was a gentler, more innocent sound balancing that in the Westerns of the time.  Jerry Goldsmith would begin lifting up atonal music in his scores for Freud, and more noticeably in Planet of the Apes (1968).  From the atonal experiments of the 1950s (culminating in Crumb’s classic Ancient Voices of Children from 1970), we begin to see another interesting development where tonal music and rhythm, coupled with chance structures begin to appear.  Terry Riley’s In C (1964) arguably the first important minimalist work, used small musical ideas that were played as long as performers would like with shifts to the next idea made at the whim of the individual.  This musical approach would slowly appear with much acclaim in the works of Steve Reich and later John Adams.  The music of Charles Ives becomes vital to establishing that American composers had the guts to write dissonant music.  Ives was sort of “discovered” in the 1950s and great effort was made to turn him into the Godfather of American modernism.  William Schuman’s orchestration of Ive’s Variations on ‘America’ is one of the results of the now decade lifting up of Ives as America’s first true symphonist.  It is a rather absurd claim that diminishes the uniqueness of his work as a whole—most of it which he never heard performed.

7.       E. Bernstein: To Kill a Mockingbird

8.       Riley: In C

9.       Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children

10.   Goldsmith: Planet of the Apes

The most difficult part of discussing music from the last quarter of the 20^th century is that there is a great deal of it still working its way to the top of the list.  What happened, especially in the early 1970s, was a surge of interest in American film music through the work of Charles Gerhardt primarily, and aided with the success of Star Wars in 1977.  Perhaps it was a backlash to the increasingly complex music and overly intellectual serial experiments of the 1960s.  The Post-romantic, or Neo-Romantic, symphonists would still be in the background musically.  Some of them would flirt with serial technique while some of the serialists would begin flirting with more traditional harmonic structures again.  Though not yet a repertoire staple, John Williams’ own Violin Concerto (composed between 1974-1976) is fascinating because its premiere recording seemed to point out its stark contrast to his romantic film style.  His revision in 1998 and subsequent recordings seem to place it even further towards a semi-romantic interpretation.  Important especially during this period is the appearance and recognition of women composers, of which one of the finest is Ellen Taafe Zwilich.  Composers like William Bolcolm and even John Corrigliano would continue to explore more accessible art music as well.  William Schuman’s tenth symphony, subtitled American Muse, perhaps illustrates how the “old school” of American symphonists were maintaining their style into the decade.  Compare this to the mix of minimalism and traditional symphonic writing in John Adams’ Shaker Loops.  Steve Reich was exploring this use of small motivic cells in repetition as well and one hears these explorations in pieces like his Music for 18 Musicians  or Music for a Large Ensemble.

11.   Schuman: Symphony No. 10 

12.   Adams: Shaker Loops

By the 1980s, this new “minimalism” was beginning to gain more attention and there are a couple of works that were aided in promoting this new style by the Nonesuch label.  The increased ability of electronic keyboards during this period would also be important to the development of another stream of music referred to as “New Age” that seemed to defy classical and popular musical conventions.  John Adams Harmonium (1981) is one of two important works in the minimalist style.  The other is Steve Reich’s Desert Music that included texts.  These two works feature tremendous pulse and forward motion over essentially static harmony.  Of the two composers, Adams’ music seems to have been able to gain more acceptance and his The Chairman Dances from his opera Nixon in China would prove to be an important accessible concert work in this style. Resurgences in Reich’s work also appear over the last 20 years.  Philip Glass’s chamber work, Glassworks became one of the first mainstream albums in this style, essentially popularizing the concept and receiving an LP/cassette release from Columbia/CBS that was very good at creating marketable crossover albums.  Zwilich will win a Pulitzer for music and gain further recognition.  Her first symphony is a great example of her style during this period.  Composers such as Peter Lieberson and Libby Larsen would also gain attention with some important commissions that were followed by recordings.  Lieberson’s Piano Concerto is perhaps one of the most important works in that genre in some time.  Larsen’s reworking of Handel in her Symphony-Water Music  would also gain recognition of reinventing the symphonic style with quotations from earlier periods.  Joan tower’s fascinating work, Silver Ladders was another way to adapt the brighter textures of minimalism in a neo-romantic style as well and is illustrative of how new composers had to find ways to write more concise works for concert performances as larger-scale pieces were still difficult to find venues for in this time of budget cutting.  At the end of the decade, John Corigliano would seem to inherit the tradition of the American symphony with the appearance of his first symphony which incorporated the raised awareness of the AIDS epidemic.  Though Richard Danielpour’s fascinating Symphony No. 3-Journey Without Distance is an intriguing blend of many contemporary trends.  Many composers exploring this neo-romantic trend, for lack of a better descriptor, write often engagingly lyrical themes with brilliant orchestration.  The best works have extremely dramatic musical thrusts often inspired by literature or art.  There music is helped more by its appearance on mass marketed CDs though than the expectation that it may have long-term staying power.

13.   Adams: Harmonium

14.   Reich: The Desert Music

15.   Glass: Glassworks

16.   Zwilich: Symphony No. 1

17.   Lieberson: Piano Concerto

18.   Tower: Silver Ladders

19.   Corigliano: Symphony No. 1

Among the last decade of composers and works, Michael Daugherty is one name that continues to rise to the top.  His Metropolis Symphony is a wonderful hybrid of Hollywood and contemporary music with descriptive titles, dramatic writing, and very accessible musical language that makes for a great audience pleaser even if each new work seems to fall into similar patterns.  There was an increase in large-scale orchestral writing again with composers trying to adapt minimalist and post-minimalist styles into the forms of concerto and symphony.  The other trend was for shorter 10-20 minute works that could be programmed into more standard orchestral concerts and some of the best of the Composer-in-Residence works would eventually start to trickle out across the continent.  Michael Torke’s music is a great example of some great shorter dramatic pieces (like his Javelin).  Adams and Glass would try their hands at violin concerti.  John Harbison, Richard Danielpour, and Christopher Rouse, whose work in the 1980s is often overlooked, would also explore concerto form more (even film composer John Williams would add a number of concerti to his concert output).  Joseph Schwantner’s Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra may be one of the more interesting highlights of the period however for its dramatic explorations and accessible musical language that at times feels like it takes a page from Hollywood.  John Corigliano’s film score for The Red Violin would mark the composer’s return to that genre and would result in a Chaconne that would be worked into a Violin Concerto as well.  Even Philip Glass would begin to find a second compositional life in a number of film projects through the decade and beyond.  The early works of Jennifer Higdon begin to appear here.  Higdon will be one of the new voices to watch in the following century. 

20.   Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony

21.   Schwantner: Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra

22.   Corigliano: The Red Violin

Though the works mentioned towards the end of this survey may not stand the test of time, I’ve tried to at least choose some that are representative of the period as much as one person can at this time.  Overall, the final decades of the 20^th century seem to continue threads of the traditional, new adaptations of musical language, and an interest in tonal music even if the thematic development tends to be angular at times.  Highly dramatic and descriptive music is always at the forefront of the more successful works, something which perhaps continues the thread from the 1950s where performance music became important. 

At any rate, this overall survey of American Music is not intended to be the final word on “great music” of the latter 20^th century.  It is only the beginning as more and more music becomes available through continued performances.  The rise of fabulous regional orchestras and their continued support means that where you live may shape what you experience as important contemporary composition.  The irony is that this has always been the case throughout history as word of mouth increased interest, and eventually performances of, the music that we have come to inherit over time.