PROGRAM NOTES for the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra

Fanfare for the Common Man/Down a Country Lane by Aaron Copland

In 1942, Vice President Henry Wallace spoke of the “Century of the Common Man.” Aaron Copland was commissioned by the Cincinnati Orchestra to compose a fanfare, and that speech by Wallace inspired his title. The U.S. had entered WWII and Copland intended his piece to rouse passion for the war effort. There is a funny anecdote about its scheduled premiere. The conductor Eugene Goossens loved the title and told Copland he wanted to schedule it on the day income taxes were due. Copland replied, “I [am] all for honoring the common man at income tax time.”

For its 1962 issue, Life Magazine commissioned Copland to compose a piano piece that could be played by young piano students across the country. His piece takes a simple melody and expands it with deep expression, all in his beloved Americana style. It was so successful that Copland later orchestrated it and I think you’ll agree it makes a beautiful personal companion to his more public fanfare.

Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip Sousa

Europe had their Johann Strauss, the Waltz King. We in America had John Philip Sousa, the March King! Sousa’s most popular march—and arguably the most popular march ever written—Stars and Stripes Forever was composed in 1896 while Sousa was on a vacation cruise from Europe to the U.S. He wrote it in his head and only notated it on paper when he arrived. In addition to its unforgettable piccolo solo, its remarkable for its imaginative accompaniments. Now it is the official National March of the United States of America, but in the early 20th century, circuses and theaters called it the “disaster march.” That’s because they only played it as a signal for when there was an emergency and they had to ask audiences to exit!

American Salute by Morton Gould

Like Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, American Salute was composed in 1942 when the U.S. just entered WWII after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A government radio producer asked Gould to compose a “salute to America” and out came this inventive fantasy and variations on the Civil War tune “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” To Gould’s astonishment, this became his most successful work. Gould said he wrote just the day before the broadcast, in between many other writing projects. 

Country Band March by Charles Ives

This march still sounds modern. It’s hard to believe Ives composed it in 1903. It stayed as a pencil sketch and didn’t have a live performance until the 1970s. But Ives used its material in several other pieces, especially in “Putnam’s Camp” from Three Places in New England, where he imagined the sound of two country bands playing different pieces and colliding into each other. Country Band March is a humoresque. It recreates the effect of amateurs playing out of rhythm and out of tune. It also sounds in many places as if several bands are playing at the same time! You hear dozens of tunes. Some you’ll know. Others were popular in 1900. And it’s main theme is probably an original tune composed by Ives. He was passionate about music that portrayed the actual world we live in, rough, dissonant, unmanicured, imprecise, and above all, brimming with vitality. Country Band March uses the syncopation of ragtime and employs techniques quite modern for the 1900s. Ives combines different meters and keys as he overlays different American tunes simultaneously. The initial effect is cacophony, but then you suddenly notice a few bits of Yankee Doodle, or Semper Fidelis, or London Bridge is Falling Down. Somehow it all fits together. It is America itself, all these different cultures and characters coexisting in our salad bowl!

Third Symphony by Roy Harris

This one movement symphony was instantly declared “the First Great American Symphony” after its premiere with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitsky in 1939. Listeners heard the vast American landscape in its opening string hymn, jazz-influenced harmonies in its pastoral section, a distinctly American rhythmic vigor in its fugue, and even our dark underside in the tragic drum that incessantly beats throughout the coda. This symphony brought Harris considerable fame, especially because Leonard Bernstein recorded it twice. With the passing of time, the music of Copland, Barber, and other American composers has obscured Harris’s music. You’ll hear that this symphony equals the expression, artistry, and majesty in our finest American music.

Roy Harris came from a “dirt poor” Oklahoma family that moved in 1905 to California. He grew up as a farmer, but also studied piano and clarinet. His musical talent brought him to France in the 1920s where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, the same remarkable teacher of American composers Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson. He composed more than a dozen symphonies as well as many chamber and vocal works. His fourth wife was pianist and Juilliard teacher Beula Duffy. He renamed her Johana after Johann Sebastian Bach. Johana championed his music and later taught at UCLA, where she taught many of my colleagues and even judged my first piano examination when I was an undergraduate! After Roy Harris’s death, she later married one of her own piano students, Jake Heggie, who has become an internationally recognized opera composer.

The Harris Third Symphony is essentially four movements and a coda that connect seamlessly as one large symphonic movement. The opening features strings. Just cellos and violas begin an expressive melody in unison. Like a hymn both American folk song and Gregorian chant! In fact, the entire symphony fuses American and European musical identities and perhaps that is the heart of Harris’s originality. As the hymn develops, it seems to quickly trace musical history, moving from the unison of thousand year old plain chant to the open intervals of old Medieval organum, and then to Renaissance style counterpoint (albeit with modern chromatic harmonies) as the entire string section plays together. The music enters a second lyric “movement” with woodwinds and horns, which in turn folds into the longest section of the symphony, a third “movement” that Harris calls a Pastoral. Throughout this section, strings weave a gossamer web of muted arpeggios in jazz-influenced harmonies, while woodwind solos waft in and out like different fragrances. It’s quite an original effect. The harmonic rhythm (the changing of the chords) doubles. Then quadruples. The gentle fragrances become energetic bursts as the symphony evolves to the fourth “movement,” its famous fugue. 

Brass and timpani sound the infectious fugue subject, that alternates between measures of 3 beats and 2. Horns, trumpets and trombones echo each other, building to an exciting climactic section where unpredictable rapid bursts from the brass and timpani contrast with the woodwinds and strings as they slowly unfurl the theme from the first movement in slow imitation, a technique borrowed from Renaissance and Medieval music.

The music quickens pace until the timpani announces the coda with a repeated note D beat more than a 100 times! It sounds like a Native American drum sounding a great lament, all beneath expressive melodies in woodwinds, brass, and strings that dramatically conclude the symphony. 

Bayou Home by William Grant Still

When I attended a recital by our bassoon coach Leah Kohn and heard her perform Bayou Home, I immediately imagined it would make a beautiful orchestra piece. Tonight you’ll hear the premiere of my transcription of this beautiful song from Still’s composed opera A Bayou Legend. It was the first opera by a Black composer to be broadcast on national television. 

America has always been a mobile society. I think a degree of homesickness is intrinsic to our character and it is a frequent theme in much American music as well. William Grant Still deeply expresses this in a song that borrows from spirituals and popular music from the 1930s and 1940s. Not only a fine concert composer, Still was an accomplished jazz and film music arranger. You can hear that craftmanship in this song as well.

Still’s wife Verna Arvey wrote the lyrics to Bayou Home:
A haunting tune dwells in my heart,
Song of the marsh, a world apart.
My memory holds this melody,
It takes the place of reality.
When I embark for distant shores,
It stays my tears; my soul restores.
This song alone lives with me yet,
It’s in my veins; I can’t forget.

Self-Evident (World Premiere) by Russell Steinberg

I envisioned Self-Evident as a response to our current perilous political climate, inspired by the searing phrases of our Declaration of Independence, all as we approach its 250th anniversary. I imagined the orchestra not only playing the rhythms and accents in those phrases, but literally speaking them and swirling them around in three part spoken chorus.

The piece is in 7 short movements.

Movement 1 – Declaration Fanfare begins with the trumpet sounding a fanfare motto that is the source for the entire work. The motto wavers between the two notes D and D sharp. They represent for me the conflict implicit in the Declaration, of whether or not we can attain its bold and original ideals. Whether we the many can agree as one on equality for all, and a government that serves rather than rules us. 

Movement 2 – Declaration Fugue divides the orchestra into a 3 part spoken chorus to perform a 3 part fugue on the Declaration’s introduction. (I was inspired by Ernst Toch’s marvelous 4 part spoken Geographical Fugue). Hearing these familiar words spoken contrapuntally revitalizes their profound energy and daring. 

Movement 3 – E Pluribus Unum (from the many, one) is quite literal. A large sound mass compresses to a single tone (the note E, a “solution” to the conflict of D and D sharp?) that then dissolves in a tug-of-war that dissolves into a musical collage alla Charles Ives that combines 7 different American tunes. Let me know if you can hear them all! 

Movement 4 – Happy Memorial Day will not be performed by our youth orchestra. It is a tragic-comic collision of this essential American conflict that alternates spoken excerpts from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Trump’s Happy Memorial Day Truth Social post.

Movement 5 – Rage will not be performed by our youth orchestra. It is an aggressive war piece based on an ostinato (repeated pattern) in the cellos and basses. It collapses in an aleatoric section near the end where different sections of the orchestra partially improvise and play out of time with each other.

Movement 6 – Remains will not be performed by our youth orchestra. It follows Rage as a short expressive lament with muted strings and woodwinds. You may be able to hear the harmonies of its theme melt both the D and D sharp notes together.

Movement 7 We Hold These Truths  The finale alternates music with spoken chorus no longer in fugue, but mostly in unison articulating the heart of the Declaration of Independence—That we are created equal with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That if government does not exercise power from our consent, it is our right to alter or abolish it. You’ll hear material reappear from the previous movements. You’ll also hear that Self-Evident doesn’t resolve the conflict. D and D sharp continue to wrestle with each other to the very end.