Summermusic 2026 No. 2 – Dvořák's American Summer and Arthur Foote Steps Out

Since we’re due for another heat wave this week, you should know the second of Market Square Concerts’ three Summermusic 2026 Concerts this Wednesday evening takes place in the air-conditioned comfort of Market Square Presbyterian Church at 7:30. The program features two American works – well, one by an American composer and the other, a work written here by a visiting European professor while on summer vacation. The program opens with a string quintet by Antonín Dvořák and concludes with the Piano Quintet by Boston-based composer Arthur Foote written just a few years later.

Our performers for this program include violinists Peter Sirotin, co-director of Market Square Concerts, and Claudia Chudacoff, former concertmaster of the Marine Band, violists Elias Goldstein and Hannah Rose Nicholas, and cellist Julian Schwarz (a frequent guest with the “Stuart & Friends” series, he will be appearing as soloist with the Harrisburg Symphony in January, 2027, with the new cello concerto Jennifer Higdon recently wrote for him). Stuart Malina, music director of the Harrisburg Symphony and frequent guest pianist with Market Square Concerts, will join the group for the second half of the concert for Foote’s Piano Quintet.

General Panorama of Spillville, Iowa (1895)

Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák's name – and more importantly his music – is well known to American audiences. He is also something of an Honorary American Composer because of three works he composed while he was in America: his Symphony in E Minor, “From the New World;” his String Quartet in F Major, “American;” and, perhaps a little less frequently played, his String Quintet in E-flat Major, also known as “American.” There's also a Sonatina for Violin & Piano known as the “American,” a Suite in A Major (originally for piano which he also orchestrated while living here) known as the “American;” the Cello Concerto, which was mostly written while he was in New York City, escaped being known as the “American” Cello Concerto.

Having taken Jeanette Thurber up on a paycheck he couldn't refuse, Dvořák became the Director of her National Conservatory in New York City, and sailed across the ocean blue to arrive on Manhattan on September 27th, 1892, just in time for the 400th Anniversary of Columbus' “discovery.” In August, he'd already begun a 20-minute cantata based on a belatedly submitted text, The American Flag, but since it couldn't be ready in time for the planned Columbus Day celebrations, it ended up not being premiered until May, 1895, by which time Mrs. Thurber's money had run out and Dvořák had already returned to his native Bohemia.

Dvořák & Family posing on the steps of their New York home, 1893

But within days of finishing his “Columbus Cantata” (as he called it) one cold January day, he began a new symphony, the one he called From the New World, which he completed on May 24th, 1893. A week later, the rest of his family arrived from Bohemia for the summer, posed for a group photo on the steps of the Dvořáks' home at 327 E.17th Street (see above), and then in a few days left for Spillville, Iowa. While you might think Spillville, IA, is not high on the list of Vacation Destinations, even in the 1890s, there is a more personal explanation.

It was his secretary and translator, Josef Kovarík, an American-born Czech who'd suggested the holiday: it was his home town and Kovarík's father was still a prominent businessman there. Given its large Czech population, it seemed a good way to assuage Dvořák's homesickness and his interest in seeing more of America than just noisy and crowded New York City.

Shortly after they arrived, he began sketching a new string quartet, completed in eight days. Three days later, he began a string quintet, adding another viola to the standard quartet (perhaps in Kovarík's honor: he was a violist), and then finished that on August 1st, a little over a month later. Obviously, the town of Spillville agreed with him.

The quartet incorporated the song of the scarlet tanager Dvořák heard on his walks in the town's Riverside Park – he was delighted to have heard birds singing for the first time in eight months – and in the fourth movement one could detect echoes of the organ from the local church which he would play every morning before walking along the Turkey River. In the quintet, listeners claim to hear the sound of the Native American drums accompanying the ritual song of the Iroquois Indians – from the Kickapoo tribe – who visited Spillville that summer to sell their herbal remedies. “Dvořák was enchanted by the performances they gave to promote their wares and, for the duration of their stay in the village, he apparently attended every one.”

Aside from an unexpected disruption to attend the Chicago “World's Fair” in mid-August to celebrate “Czech Day” where he conducted a hastily organized concert of his works, he had only two more weeks of his holiday before Dvořák reluctantly left to return to New York on September 16th.

Unfortunately, he never had a chance to return to Spillville: ten years later, a year before his death, he told a friend he'd thought Spillville “was an ideal spot; that’s when I felt happy, and I should have stayed there.”

The Quintet is in the standard four movements with the scherzo in second place – (1.) Allegro non tanto; (2) Allegro vivo; (3) Larghetto (4.) Finale: Allegro giusto. This performance was recorded by the Emerson Quartet with violist Paul Neubauer.
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This is, above all, relaxed and pastoral music, the kind of souvenir one might expect following a Big City Adventure, a chance to return a bit to his roots, however transplanted to the New World. Dvořák claimed he wanted to write “something really melodious and simple” that summer. Dvořák was known for his melodies – his effortlessness with a tune was one of the things that attracted Brahms' attention in the first place almost twenty years earlier – and there is certainly nothing remotely academic-sounding about the structure or harmony, flowing with an unbuttoned ease from one tune to another, despite its own formal integrity. It's easy for a listener to imagine “an Indian drumbeat” in the second movement's scherzo or in the second theme of the finale, perhaps evidence of the Kickapoo “medicine show” Dvořák had witnessed.

Many of these tunes are built on “exotic-sounding” pentatonic scales – just as there are in the “New World” Symphony – but they're no more primitive Americana than they are when you find them in Czech, East-European, or even Scottish folk music, much less the stereotypical sound of Asian music when played just on the black keys of the piano.

In the third movement, after the somber introduction, you'll hear a hymn-like theme, the basis for a set of variations, that might well be Dvořák's attempt to set a new tune to the words of “My Country 'Tis of Thee” (it had been suggested he try to write a new “American anthem” to those famous words). And while there can be nothing simpler than the childlike joy of the humoresque that opens the finale – you remember Dvořák's Humoresque, the famous one? – it's more likely you'll hear a new “open-hearted,” untroubled, straightforward, and certainly less rigorous style. This was the America Dvořák found in the rolling countryside of northeast Iowa, a sensibility he embraced wholeheartedly.

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Arthur Foote

Most American concert-goers would be hard-pressed to say they’re “familiar” with music by any American composer before 1900 – or at least, one way or another, before Charles Ives, that innovator of American music better known than heard.

Yet you’d think, considering our history technically goes back before 1776, there’d at least be something comparable to what was going on in Europe: Mozart and Haydn during the early years of the Republic, Beethoven around the time of our War of 1812, or Brahms and Wagner in the decade or so after the Civil War.

The truth is, there was very little market for classical music in the New World. The popular mood was for dance music and hymns – feeding the secular and spiritual needs of a hard-working population – while the wealthier Americans imported what they needed from their distant ancestral homelands and would have considered anything by American artists too plebian to decorate their cultural lives with.

European Art was considered edifying and appreciating it (and certainly owning it) was a sign of intelligence as well as wealth. American culture, such as it was, couldn't compete on an intellectual or even an aesthetic level with European culture's long and brilliant history. This attitude can be found in many American literary works but especially in the novels of Henry James with their constant friction between established European culture and the rough-around-the-edges newly minted Americans looking for acceptance in the world, especially in novels like A Portrait of a Lady and his last major novel, The Golden Bowl.

Besides, painters may have painted American scenes but they did so in English or German fashion; poets may have written about American subjects but – with one glaring exception – they wrote in English or German styles (the exception was and always will be Walt Whitman).

The same could be said for literature at least on the surface but here there were more distinct and distinctly American voices despite their cultural roots. The written word, at least, had deeper roots in American society.

America was viewed as an economic possibility for touring musicians and we, in our early centuries, would no doubt have benefited from visiting figures had transatlantic travel been easier. It was the amount of time cooped up on a ship that deterred Robert and Clara Schumann from following through on plans for an American tour. But, like Anton Rubinstein or Camille Saint-Saëns afterward, these visits were primarily to make as much money as quickly as possible and then return to the comforts and familiarity of home.

Much of the basis of what became our musical life here was founded or assisted by those fleeing history: the French Revolution or the decades of Napoleonic wars that followed; the series of mostly failed revolutions of 1848-1849 across much of Europe.

Even though he may have had little impact on the musical life of his adopted country, Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, the collaborator on such masterpieces as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, fled creditors more than history and opened the first academic course in Italian literature in this country, introducing us to the likes of Dante. In addition, he also would run a country store in Sunbury PA, of all places, driving his supply wagons through Harrisburg on his way to and from Philadelphia. If nothing else, his conversations with a young man who worked for him named Simon Cameron helped instill in the boy an interest in cultural things unknown in this land. As a cabinet member during the Civil War, did Cameron ever have discussions with Abraham Lincoln about the finer points of Mozart operas? It may have only been one more reason Lincoln referred to his erstwhile Secretary of War (and former Ambassador to Russia) as “The Tsar of Pennsylvania.”

Anyone who wanted to become a composer in this country went to Europe to study. There were no conservatories here, not even university music departments. In fact, when John Knowles Paine offered lectures in music at Harvard where he was chapel organist and choirmaster, the faculty wondered why. In the early-1860s, he was allowed to give lectures but there were no credits available toward a degree – consequently, there were few students.

It was only later in 1870 that his lectures were given official recognition: a course in harmony was successful enough to warrant setting up a course in counterpoint and with it, eventually, course credit.

In 1875, Paine – a composer already recognized in Europe, most likely the first American (after Louis Moreau Gottschalk) to achieve international fame – finally became the first official Professor of Music in America. His plan for Harvard became the accepted model for music departments across the United States.

I mention all this because Arthur Foote was 21 when he graduated from Harvard in 1873, having taken Paine’s music classes, even though his plan was to go into the practice of law. It wasn’t until he started taking organ lessons to pass that first summer he decided music should be his career. In two years, he began a career as a music teacher in Boston, a profession he enjoyed for over sixty years. In addition to being organist at Boston’s First Unitarian Church until 1910, he also helped found the American Guild of Organists.

Technically, he is the first of that generation of composers who did not go to Europe to study. He is an entirely home-grown American composer. His style, for the most part, bears all the hallmarks of European standards, conservative and Victorian which itself was largely Germanic and often derivative of Brahms.

But like many of his generation, he has been forgotten, largely overshadowed by the innovative composers who came with the New Century, particularly Charles Ives (Yale, Class of 1898) and later Aaron Copland (who, ironically, went to Paris to become the first American pupil of the French teacher, Nadia Boulanger in 1921).

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Here is a recording of Foote’s Piano Quintet with pianist Mary Louise Boehm, violinists Kees Kooper and Alvin Rogers, violist Richard Maximoff, and cellist Fred Sherry, a recording currently available on the Albany label but which I’d owned years ago on the Vox label. It’s in four movements which was posted on YouTube in three clips:
1st Mvmt

2nd Mvmt

3rd & 4th Mvmts

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So, where does this Piano Quintet fit into the world of Arthur Foote?

It’s tempting to compare it to Brahms’ Piano Quintet especially when there are so few well-known works in the genre to begin with (imagine if there were only four string quartets that got any regular performance-time?). It certainly sounds like Brahms, at least on the surface, but Foote is more interested in the harmonic world of Brahms’ romanticism, not its underlying structure and counterpoint.

In Boston in the 1890s, Brahms was certainly not a “conservative” force. Today, we tend to lump Brahms and Wagner together as “two leading German Romanticists,” unaware how vibrantly (and often violently) different they were from each other to their contemporaries: if Wagner had started by creating “Music of the Future,” a term borrowed from his future father-in-law Franz Liszt, Brahms was looking back at the legacy of Beethoven and Bach (the conductor Hans von Bülow coined the idea of the Three B’s more as a marketing gimmick than a reflection of Brahms’ perceived placement in the musical firmament). But Brahms’ love of contrapuntal writing turned most of his American listeners off (the famous comment “Exit in case of Brahms” originated in Boston).

Dvořák, on the other hand, was a kind of “Poor Man’s Brahms” – the best elements of Brahms with his tunefulness and ability to switch between drama and lyricism combined with a populist folk-like style and lively dance rhythms that animated so much of Dvořák’s music whether it was written in Bohemia, Vienna or New York City (or, like his American chamber music, Spillville, IA).

Even so, we think Dvořák’s idea about building an American Voice out of the use of American Folk-Songs – especially the spirituals of the American Negro – was a huge influence on the national scene. In fact, though he says he never quoted folk songs himself but only “wrote in the spirit” of these tunes, it wasn’t until later that composers took him literally, still arguing about exactly what an “American folk song” was.

Rubin Goldmark, a student of Dvořák’s who would go on to teach Aaron Copland as a teen-ager, and advise George Gerswhin on his Concerto in F, composed a Hiawatha Overture as well as a Negro Rhapsody. There were the “Indianists” who found inspiration in the songs and rhythms of the Native Americans like Preston Ware Orem whose “Indian Rhapsody” for piano sounds more like one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies superimposed on a few meager Native American ideas ("meager" because, being limited and intended mostly for repetition, they do not lend themselves to being developed in the way European composers would expand their structures).

But most of America’s already established composers in the 1890s – especially those in Boston, the conservative antipode to America’s futuristic New York City – rejected Dvořák’s idea. Amy Beach (then known as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) went so far as to write a symphony based on actual themes and folk songs from her British heritage which in 1896 became her Gaelic Symphony.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t “American elements” in Arthur Foote’s quintet aside from the homage to Brahms. He was, after all, a thoroughly American composer, born and trained here, but his Americanisms are no less American than Dvořák’s were – the essence of the idea rather than the substance of it – and I think unless he wrote specifically somewhere that he was in fact incorporating American themes into his music, we might probably be making assumptions of what it sounds like to us today rather than how it might have been perceived by his contemporaries over a century ago as well as by the composer himself.

Does that lessen the quality of the piece? No, not at all.

The Quintet as well as his most frequently performed piece (if the term is applicable at all), the Suite in E for Strings, and other works like his tone poems In the Mountains and Francesca da Rimini deserve to be heard if only in the context of a culture trying to find its voice.

There is, for instance, a Cello Concerto that was performed in 1894 by the recently formed Chicago Symphony: consider that Victor Herbert’s 2nd Cello Concerto was premiered in March 1894 and Dvořák began composing his that November, what could Foote’s Cello Concerto add to the fairly limited cello repertoire? (If you're curious, here's an article about Julian Schwarz uncovering Foote's Cello Concerto!)

Will Arthur Foote’s Piano Quintet replace the Brahms Quintet on chamber music programs throughout America? Not very likely. It’s not sufficiently “substantial” (given our preference for the Masterpiece Quotient) to be the main "draw" for your typical chamber music program, nor is its composer recognizable enough to attract big crowds (in as much as chamber music ever does).

Could it stand being heard once in a while instead of one of the Big Four Quintets – those masterpieces by Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák and Shostakovich?

Yes, please.

- Dick Strawser

Start Summermusic 2026 with Music for Brass

“Chamber Music” can be defined as “any small ensemble of one or more instruments” usually playing music designed to be performed in a smaller space than a large concert hall. Brass Quintets don’t often figure on many chamber music series – perhaps, in the Old Days, the idea of a group of brass players was better suited for ceremonial music maybe in the theater or opera house or, better yet, outdoors, the volume perhaps a bit much for the royal eardrums when confined to a small room in the palace – but certainly the sound and dynamic range of a brass ensemble would fit well in a church like Market Square Presbyterian. So you’re in for a treat with the first of the three concerts for Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic 2026 this weekend. 

The third concert, on July 19th at 4pm, will feature music for voice and piano with tenor Curt Bannister and pianist Mark Markham ranging from Strauss and Ravel to Bernstein and Ellington. The second concert will feature violinist (and MSC Co-Director) Peter Sirotin joined by pianist (and Harrisburg Symphony Music Director) Stuart Malina with several friends to perform two works written four years apart, Dvořák’s “American” String Quintet (a companion to the more famous "American" String Quartet written the same summer) and American composer Arthur Foote’s rarely heard Piano Quintet from 1897. That’s on Wednesday, July 15th at 7:30. All concerts will take place in the air-conditioned Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg.

The first concert on Sunday, July 12th, at 4pm, will feature the principal trumpet player of the Harrisburg Symphony, Kevin Gebo, and some friends of his who are also members of the United States Army Band’s Brass Quintet, trumpeter Andrew Boylan, hornist Rick Lee, trombonist Gregory Hammond, and tubist Andrew Dougherty. And their program is the one I’m going to be telling you about in this post of the Market Square Concerts Blog.

Kevin Gebo, Gregory Hammond, Andrew Dougherty, Rick Lee, & Andrew Boylan

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Despite the fact brass instruments have been around since before ancient times, the idea of putting five different brass players in an ensemble to perform chamber music is a fairly recent innovation, since the “first brass quintet” was supposedly written by Viktor Ewald in 1890. Trumpets, according to the Bible, played a significant role at Jericho (perhaps not the best image for concert performances but then ask any player in a modern orchestra who sits in front of the brass section). Trumpets and horns played a key ceremonial role in Ancient Rome, especially in the military world of the empire, though it was always confusing to me growing up, that the Latin word for “trumpet” was tuba; then, when I first heard the Tuba mirum, the “trumpet of wonder” heralding the Last Judgment, from Mozart’s Requiem with its striking trombone solo, I was thoroughly confused.

Stringed instruments evolved over the centuries until the present day “violin family” was more or less finalized between the 1500s and early-1700s, especially with famous makers like Stradivari. Almost immediately, someone got the idea to put four of these together – two violins, a viola, and a cello – to form a String Quartet (Haydn is often called the Father of the String Quartet as well as of the Symphony). So, if brass instruments had been around so long, why did it take so long for someone to do the same thing for a Brass Quintet?

It would take too long to go into the history of brass instruments in general, especially the acoustical and technical details behind their development, to cover the centuries that led from those ancient Roman instruments to the modern instruments we know – and hear – today. Like most of the woodwind family which went through the additions of keys and various other modifications since the early-19th Century, similar changes impacted trumpets and horns with valves or keys to make “pitch production” more consistent. The trombone, however, evolved from a larger version of the trumpet (in Italian, tromba: trombone, with a pronounced ‘e,’ literally meant “big trumpet”) sometime during the 1400s and had a movable slide to change pitches rather than keys or valves, showing all the essentials of the present-day instrument. As one trombonist friend of mine put it, when being accused of playing “a primitive instrument,” his trombone had “achieved an early state of perfection.”

One thing about chamber music ensembles, the idea of a String Quartet was to blend instruments of similar sound to cover a wider range than you would get from, say, a single violin. But the Brass Quintet combines four different instruments – like the String Quartet with its two violins, the Brass Quintet has its two trumpets for the same reasons, however you care to justify it – each of which have considerably different sounds. The problem for composers becomes one of making these instruments blend and balance each other, again while covering the full range equivalent to the soprano and bass voices with inner voices filling in the harmony. It is more a question of handling the multiple voices of these instruments – literally polyphony, “many voices” – aaand here I go down the rabbit-hole of explaining counterpoint versus straight chord-by-chord harmonic writing like you’d find in a hymn. Yes, brass quintets do play hymns (and Christmas carols; man, do they play Christmas carols in due season) but it’s always a balance problem, especially for the “inner voices.” Technically, it’s more natural (no pun intended) for each instrument to play their own melodic line to help define the texture. So, if you’re listening with this in mind, notice how different pieces on the program will use a chordal “blended” sound as opposed to a more linear “independent” role for each instrument.

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Given the concept of a Brass Quintet evolved too late for Mozart or Beethoven to write for the ensemble like they did for the String Quartet, most of the repertoire for the brass quintet is fairly modern. And rather than long extended works – who would fade first from dealing with a 45-minute brass quintet, the audience or the players? – many are fairly short pieces and, in order to incorporate more variety in the musical styles we’ll be listening to, arrangements. So we can have some Mozart, some Handel – well, truthfully, the orchestra for his “Music for the Royal Fireworks” included 24 oboes, 12 bassoons (and a contrabassoon), along with 9 “natural” trumpets and 9 “natural” horns (natural, here, meaning without keys or valves) along with 3 sets of timpani and various side drums for a military flare (the King, for this occasion, wanting “no fiddles”) – even a Rachmaninoff piano piece, his G Minor Prelude, Op. 23 No. 5, the slow movement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar (though it has a lovely melody for the English Horn which is not a horn per se… (yes, it’s actually a French instrument unlike the French Horn which is really German) – and a choral work by Eric Whitacre.

The Mozart is his overture to The Marriage of Figaro, complete with its bustling flurry of notes at the opening which must strike terror in the lip of many a brass player. Both it and the opening of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks are arranged by Chuck Seipp.

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Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque (“Light and Gold”) is a Christmas piece written in 2000; a few years later he arranged it for wind ensemble. “Light, warm and heavy as pure gold, and the angels sing softly to the new born baby.” Given Whitacre’s preference for dense harmonies and long sustained chords requiring “staggered breathing” from its singers, I’ll be curious to see how this translates to five individual players who need to breath.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century, wrote his G Minor Prelude from his set of ten preludes, Op. 10, in 1901 but only published the complete set a few years later. It may not be as famous as his ever-present Prelude in C-sharp Minor, written when he was 18, but of the remaining piano pieces he would compose during the rest of his life, the G Minor has always remained popular. This recording on the Telarc label, “A Window in Time,” was remastered from piano rolls Rachmaninoff recorded between 1919 and 1929.

Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo, about love on a dude ranch (really!), was composed in 1942 for Agnes de Mille who’d already blocked out her entire choreography before Copland had composed a note of music! She also specified a number of folk tunes she wanted him to use, like two that we hear in “Buckaroo Holiday” – “Sis Joe,” a railroad work song, and, for obvious reasons, “If He’d Be a Buckaroo.” How many of you have heard this music over the years and never realized Copland did not write these tunes? Here’s a performance of the original orchestral version, conducted by the composer (well, the composer of the ballet score, even if he arranged some folk songs along the way).

Speaking of folk-song arrangements, here’s a famous tune that most people would swear was by Copland. He used it in another ballet, this one called Appalachian Spring written for Martha Graham in the mid-1940s. He arranged a tune called “Simple Gifts” which was a song originally composed by Elder Joseph Brackett for a Shaker community in Maine in 1848, though it’s often referred to as a folk song and the composer listed in programs as “trad”. While there are many arrangements of the tune, here’s one not by Copland, performed by Alison Krause and Yo-Yo Ma. The quintet's program uses an arrangement by Jari Villaneuva.

While marches often form the basic fare for many a summer concert, here’s one from one of John Williams’ film scores, written for Stephen Spielberg's “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” from 2015. Here, the composer conducts no less a band than the Vienna Philharmonic in “The March of the Resistance.” To explain the music in the plot’s context would take longer than it would to listen to it: suffice it to say if you’ve familiar with the Star Wars films, you know the plot; if you haven’t seen it, no matter of explanation on my part will make it any more intelligible than Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen. For this concert, they're playing arrangement by the tuba player, Andrew Dougherty.

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Two works on the program are “original” compositions written for brass ensembles. The first of these is the Sonatine by Eugene Bozza, a French composer best known for what is often referred to as “lighter fare” though the same could be said of much of Francis Poulenc’s music as well, so it shouldn’t be taken too dismissively. Written in 1951, this Sonatine (a “little sonata”) is in four short movements – an opening Allegro vivo, appropriately French and saucy; a more serious and somewhat lugubrious Andante ma non troppo, before returning to a saucy scherzo, also Allegro vivo; the finale begins with a somber slow introduction before switching to yet another Allegro vivo full of swirling fanfares. It is, the composer says, “humbly dedicated to the musicians of the Republican Guard,” a prestigious unit of the National Gendarmerie responsible for ceremonial duties, security of key state institutions, and public order in Paris.

Kerry Turner is a prolific American composer best known for his works featuring brass instruments. Born in 1960 and winning first prize in a composition contest in San Antonio when he was 11, he attended Baylor University at 17 before transferring to the Manhattan School of Music. A horn player as well, he’s played in many orchestras including those in Luxembourg and in Köln, Germany. His work on the program, “The Casbah of Tetouan,” is described as a “symphonic poem for brass” but not originally for brass quintet. Written for a horn quintet in the late-1980s, it has become popular with brass quintets as well.

In this day and age and with an excerpt from John Williams’ music for Star Wars on the program, Tetouan may make us think of the world director Stephen Spielberg created for his intergalactic saga when in fact it’s a real place in northern Morocco whose history goes back 2000 years. Located across the Mediterranean just across from Gibraltar and not far from Tangier, the modern city has become a tourist destination, nestled between mountains and the Strait of Gibraltar, blending Andalusian, Berber, Jewish, and Spanish influences. Since 1997, it’s been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site as well as for its crafts and folk art. It had been a Phoenician outpost when the Pillars of Hercules (the modern Gibraltar) marked the limits of the known world, and in 1286 the Bedouins began building a casbah and a mosque (and if the word casbah brings up exotic but vague impressions from movies past, it usually means, at least in Northwest Africa, a hill-top fort (not necessarily a market place), part of what was called a medina, the walled city surrounding it. It also became a refuge for pirates and, following a war with Castile in the early-15th Century, it was destroyed. When Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Muslims out of Spain in 1492, many of the refugees from Southern Spain, Muslims and Jews alike, fled to Tetouan.

Kerry Turner’s “The Casbah of Tetouan,” originally written for a Horn Quintet, was conceived, as the composer describes it, “during a visit to Morocco in the summer of 1988.”

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     As we crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and first laid eyes on the North African coast, I knew we were in store for an adventure! The city of Tetouan was our destination. We soon stood before its main gates. The many exotic new sights overran our senses as we entered the city, complementing the wild sounds and smells of the bustling ancient city. After proceeding only a few feet past hobbled live chickens, we soon became completely immersed in the endless, tiny alleys of the Casbah.
     The Casbah was a labyrinth of tunnels and passageways, lined with vendors and shops the size of walk-in closets. Anything was for sale, including copperware, sacks of spices and grains, and silk. Street butchers displayed slaughtered lambs, goats and pigs, and a snake charmer with his cobra unnerved the unwary passerby. Things began to swim before my eyes somewhere around the urine-treated leather goods.
     After I informed the guide that I was ill, a young boy escorted me to a quiet place. The boy knew every secret passage and shortcut in the Casbah. He led me through even tinier streets and tunnels, across nomad camps, and even through a kitchen! We sailed through the back door of a mosque, and out the other side. Finally we entered a large, dark and cool house, which seemed to be some sort of palace. The boy led me to a back room and laid me down upon a bed of large pillows. I passed out.
     I awoke thoroughly disoriented. The first things I saw were six elaborately cloaked elderly men, wildly discussing in Arabic what possibly was wrong with me, I heard exotic music and aromatic food assailed my senses. After closer observation I discovered I was in a fancy restaurant, being entertained by a belly dancer. Somehow my wife and brother found me and we resumed our inspection of Tetouan. I still felt lightheaded and rather doped by the "therapeutic" tea; my impressions of the city were somewhat hallucinogenic.

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To many American music lovers, the name of John Philip Sousa is universal, but few might be familiar with other great march composers from the same era, like Henry Filmore who, after Sousa’s death in 1932, became hailed as “The March King.” But there is also Karl King who composed some 188 marches and “screamers” along with numerous galops, rags, and waltzes. When he was 11, he used the money he’d earned from his newspaper route to buy a cornet which he taught himself to play. At 14, he dropped out of school, joined various bands, started conducting some circus bands when he was 19, and joined the Fred Neddermeyer Band in Columbus, OH, conducted by Fred Neddermeyer who became his mentor. During this time, he received his only musical instruction from friends in the band: four piano lessons and one harmony lesson. In 1916, he married the calliope player of the Barnum & Bailey Circus Band of which he then became bandmaster the following year. He said years later the proudest moment of his life had been when he conducted the Barnum & Bailey band at Madison Square Garden.

With World War I now over, he met John Philip Sousa and hoped to join his staff, but Sousa had no openings for him. He soon settled in Fort Dodge, IA, where he became the bandmaster in 1920 and was instrumental in passing the Iowa Band Law in 1921, which allowed cities to levy a local tax for maintenance of a band. He continued to conduct Fort Dodge’s municipal band for the next 51 years.

The “Neddermeyer Triumphal March” was composed in 1910 when King was playing baritone horn in Neddermeyer’s band. And so we end the concert – and this blog post – with that very march, played here by the United States Armed Forces Bicentennial Band.

– Dick Strawser

Cuarteto Latinoamericano and a "Tribute to the Americas"

Cuarteto Latinoamericano (photo, Sergio Yazbek)

 

It’s the final concert of the season, Thursday night, April 30^th, at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front in uptown Harrisburg (just below Seneca St).

The Cuarteto Latinoamericano will be performing a program of works by American composers – and by that, I mean not only from the United States but composers from South America, too. In addition to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” from its home in his String Quartet Op. 11 and George Gershwin’s “Lullaby,” there the last string quartet of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, “Four for Tango” by Argentine Astor Piazzolla, and, from the busy pen of Czech composer and temporary resident of New York City, Antonín Dvořák, a work written during one pleasant summer spent in Spillville, Iowa, a work forever known as “The American Quartet."

Collectively, they are the Bitrán Brothers and a friend they picked up along the way to play viola: violinists Saúl and Arón, cellist Àlvaro, and violist Javier Montiel who formed the quartet in Mexico City in 1982 when they had to prove to audiences they were not a mariachi band and didn’t (as their official biography puts it) wear ponchos and play guitars (that case is for a cello, not a guitarrón). Since then, they have become internationally renowned, toured world-wide, won two Latin Grammys for Best Classical Recording, and branched out from the traditional Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, the usual core available to string quartets at the time, to premiere over a hundred new works written especially for them, and focused their repertoire on composers from Mexico south to Argentina.

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The program begins in Brazil in 1957 with the last of the seventeen quartets by the most recognizable Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos. It was first performed by the Budapest String Quartet at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. on October 16th, 1959, which turned out to be exactly one month before the composer’s death. Initially, Villa-Lobos had given a copy of the score to a violinist-friend while he was in Paris when he was already ill. He had asked her to arrange a reading of it so he could hear it but circumstances always got in the way, so he returned home to Rio de Janeiro without having heard it and then died without knowing it had already been premiered. His state funeral was the last major civic event held in Rio before the capital was transferred to the new, interior city of Brasília.

Like many nations that evolved from colonial roots to independence – something we should be talking about this year, ourselves – many changes affected what defined this new national character. Just as we still discuss “what makes ‘American Art’ American,” the question at the time Villa Lobos was born was “what will make us Brazilian, not Portuguese?” He was born two years before the overthrow of the Empire of Brazil in 1889, ruled by a grandson of a Portuguese king. The primary focus of music in Brazil then had been imported along with the Portuguese immigrants, many of whom arrived in 1808, long after it had been initially colonized in the early-16th Century, after the Napoleonic Wars drove the Portuguese king and his court out of Lisbon.

The conservatory in Rio offered the traditional Classical courses in harmony and counterpoint that would’ve been found in any European capital, but after a few failed harmony lessons, Villa-Lobos decided to give up on any formal training. He learned to play the cello, clarinet and classical guitar, and listened in on his father – an amateur musician – when he invited friends over for musical evenings. After his father’s early death, the 12-year-old boy played in pit orchestras around Rio for movies and theater.

Still a teenager, the young would-be composer not only “branched out,” he chose to explore this vast country of his to discover the different kinds of music he might find beyond the urban capital, gathering up not only influences from Portuguese immigrants and African slaves (slavery had only been abolished the year after his birth) but also the numerous indigenous tribes deep in the “dark interior,” presumably at one point nearly being captured by cannibals and escaping from them (true or a romanticized tale?). His initial compositions became improvisations based on all this material, written for guitar.

He played with street bands in Rio, played cello in the Rio opera orchestra, married a pianist. In 1917, he met Serge Diaghilev who brought his Ballet russe to Rio, along with Darius Milhaud, a secretary at the French legation there, who introduced him to the works of Debussy and Satie, possibly Stravinsky – and in turn Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud to a wide array of Brazilian folk and “street” music (which would figure prominently in so many of Milhaud’s works). He also met pianist Artur Rubinstein for whom he composed a number of piano works including, in 1922, a suite called A prolo do bebê (The Baby’s Family) which proved to be a bit too modern for Rio’s tastes. The movement about the doll – O polichinelo – became a favorite encore of Rubinstein’s – in fact I heard him play this after an all-Chopin recital in the early-1970s when the pianist was around 88 years old.

To fast forward a bit, Villa-Lobos, ever his own “melting pot,” wrote a series of pieces inspired by the combination of Bach and various kinds of Brazilian music of which the most famous is the Bachianas Brasileras No. 5 for soprano and cellos written in 1938. After years of political turmoil in Brazil, Villa-Lobos was able to tour Europe, wrote many works – concertos, symphonies, and choral works reflecting his Brazilian roots – that were mostly well received. He wrote most of his string quartets between the 1930s and 1957, leaving sketches for an 18th Quartet incomplete when he died. In 1958, MGM commissioned him to write music for a Hollywood film, Green Mansions, starring Audrey Hepburn, conducting the filmscore himself, but in the end, after some studio turmoil (always with the politics) replaced the original director, the decision was made to use only a portion of the original score, though one assumes Villa-Lobos got to keep the original $25,000 commission. Disillusioned, he incorporated much of the music into a work called “Forest of the Amazon” in 1959 which became his last major work. He had managed to alienate many musicians at home when he complained in an interview in June, 1959, that Brazil was “dominated by mediocrity.” He died at the age of 72.

Here is a video with score of a performance by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano of Villa-Lobos’ String Quartet No. 17 which opens their Market Square Concert’s program.

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Skipping ahead to the work that concludes the first half of the program, there is a famous anecdote that almost sounds apocryphal (given the number of variations on its details) but the end result is the same. The advice speaks volumes of truth for many composers, not just a 33-year-old Argentinian named Astor Piazzolla. In 1954, he had left Buenos Aires – at the urging of Argentina's leading “classical music” composer of the day, Alberto Ginastera – to study with one of the most influential teachers in Paris, Nadia Boulanger. However it happened, many young composers, especially from the United States, were drawn to Paris to study with her, ranging from Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Elliott Carter to Burt Bacharach and Joe Raposo (more famous for the songs he wrote for Sesame Street).

In the early-1940s, Piazzolla – his childhood is complicated, as a boy moving to New York City before returning to his native Argentina – grew up in the world of tango bars and became a bandoneon player in various dance bands in the capital city. He met the pianist Artur Rubinstein, then living in Buenos Aires, who urged him to study with Ginastera, with whom he studied the scores of Stravinsky, Ravel and Bartók, listening to orchestra rehearsals by day and playing the dance clubs by night. By 1950, he gave up his own band to concentrate on composing “serious” music and in 1953 his “Buenos Aires Symphony” won a competition and was given its premiere. Despite a fight breaking out in the audience between those who supported the “newness” of combining classical and popular influences and those who found this insidious and degrading (really, using not one but two bandoneons?), Piazzolla won a scholarship which allowed him to travel to Paris to study with Boulanger.

Piazzolla played through a number of his “classically-inspired” pieces for his new teacher with little response. It wasn't till he started playing one of his tangos – Triunfal – that she reacted: “This,” she said, “is the real Piazzolla!” Dismissing the pile of “serious” works, she said “this” was what he should focus his efforts on. And you could say, he never looked back. (By the way, imagine if Mozart had waited till he was 33 before “finding his voice”?)

Primarily, he studied counterpoint with her – it was, according to Carter, what she was most brilliant at – and it would, in fact, become a major feature in the development of his “New Tango” style. It was the synthesis of the “serious” which he'd started to learn with Ginastera, with the “popular” element he'd grown up with and which was such an important aspect of his environment.

So here we have another great “What If...?” game: if Piazzolla had stayed with his “serious” side, would as many people today know the name and hum his music if he instead wrote symphonies and operas and string quartets like his mentor Alberto Ginastera? Would his “serious” music have had the same sincerity his tangos have?

Following his stay in Paris, Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1955 and formed another band, expanding the traditional tango ensemble of two bandoneóns, two violins, bass and piano, by adding a cello and electric guitar. For his Octeto he composed his “Tango Ballet” in 1956 which was later transcribed for full orchestra as well as for string quartet.

While many of his works translate well to other combinations like the string quartet, his “Four for Tango,” written in 1989 for the Kronos Quartet, is originally for a string quartet. A single movement work – some sources describe it as a six-minute or an eight-minute piece (here, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano play it in five) – it may not seem like a tango you can dance to (but then, Chopin never expected people to dance the waltz to, say, “The Minute” Waltz either). He has, by this time, combined his classical training from Ginastera and Boulanger with his life in the smoky bars of Buenos Aires with his Nuevo Tango to create a synthesis that is both modern and inspired by popular dance, the national sound we automatically identify as the Argentine Tango.

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It might seem odd to find Dvořák on a program of American Music, considering he was born in Bohemia and was a protege of Brahms, but seven years after his first international success with what we know as his 7th Symphony in London, the Czech-born composer Antonin Dvořák found himself Professor Dvořák at the National Conservatory in New York City where, in 1894, he completed what became his last symphony, nicknamed “From the New World” and a number of chamber pieces like the “American” String Quartet. 

He also began this Cello Concerto. He was not only homesick but also worried the money was going to run out – not his, but the school's. His initial salary at the school was twenty-five times what he was making at the conservatory in Prague. After taking “cuts in pay” each semester, once the school could no longer pay him any salary, he returned to his home on April 25th, 1895, taking with him his recently almost-finished concerto.

After his initial arrival and within days of finishing his “Columbus Cantata” (as he called it) one cold January day, he began a new symphony, the one he called From the New World, which he completed on May 24th, 1893. A week later, the rest of his family arrived from Bohemia for the summer, posed for that group photo on the steps of the Dvořáks' home at 327 E.17th Street, and then in a few days they would leave for Spillville, Iowa.

It was his secretary and translator, Josef Kovařík, an American-born Czech who'd suggested the holiday destination: it was his home town and Kovařík's father was still a prominent businessman there. Given its large Czech population, it seemed a good way to assuage Dvořák's homesickness and his interest in seeing more of America than just noisy and crowded New York City.

Shortly after they arrived, he began sketching a new string quartet, completed in eight days. Three days later, he began a string quintet, adding another viola to the standard quartet, and then finished that on August 1st, a little over a month later. Obviously, the town of Spillville agreed with him.

"I have been on vacation since 3 June here in the Czech village of Spillville and I won't be returning to New York until the latter half of September. The children arrived safely from Europe and we're all happy together. We like it very much here and, thank God, I am working hard and I'm healthy and in good spirits."

For decades he had toiled unsuccessfully to find a balance between his overflowing melodic invention and a clear structure. Finally, in his twelfth quartet, the American Quartet, everything came together.

A characteristic, unifying element throughout the quartet is the use of the pentatonic scale, usually associated with stereotypical Chinese music but also found in the folk music of, say, Scotland and also, not coincidentally, many Slavonic folk songs which Dvořák was already familiar with. This scale, less typical of those harmonic progressions associated with “Art Music” and standard tonality, gives the whole quartet its open, simple character, a character that is frequently identified with American folk music.

The quartet incorporated the song of the scarlet tanager Dvořák heard on his walks in the town's Riverside Park. (As if musicologists can expend lots of warm air about American versus Czech influences in the style of Dvořák’s “American” music, ornithologists have argued that the bird was “probably” a red-eyed vireo). Regardless, he was delighted to have heard birds singing for the first time in eight months – and in the fourth movement one could detect echoes of the organ from the local church which he would play every morning before walking along the Turkey River. In the quintet, listeners claim to hear the sound of the Native American drums accompanying the ritual song of the Iroquois Indians – from the Kickapoo tribe – who visited Spillville that summer to sell their herbal remedies. “Dvořák was enchanted by the performances they gave to promote their wares and, for the duration of their stay in the village, he apparently attended every one.”

Aside from an unexpected disruption to attend the Chicago “World's Fair” in mid-August to celebrate “Czech Day” where he conducted a hastily organized concert of his works, he had only two more weeks of his holiday before Dvořák reluctantly left to return to New York on September 16th. 

Unfortunately, he never had a chance to return to Spillville: ten years later, a year before his death, he told a friend he'd thought Spillville “was an ideal spot; that’s when I felt happy, and I should have stayed there.”

In a first private performance of the quartet in Spillville, June 1893, Dvořák played first violin with members of the Kovařík family: father Jan Josef playing second violin, his daughter Cecilie the viola, and son Josef Jan (Dvořák’s secretary) the cello. It was premiered in Boston the following January by the legendary Kneisel Quartet, then shortly afterward in New York City where one critic was disappointed it lacked the “soaring” of “the mighty Beethoven,” but another one heard "the spirit of eternal sunshine" that is "the soul of Mozart's music.”  

Here is the Emerson Quartet in this score-video with Dvořák's "American" String Quartet, the Quartet No. 12 in F Major:

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Let's see… Of the two remaining works on the program, George Gershwin wrote his Lullaby for String Quartet as a harmony assignment for his teacher Rubin Goldmark in 1919 when he was 21. Rubin Goldmark, born in New York City in 1872, taught theory at New York’s National Conservatory in the early-1890s but also studied privately with its new director, Antonín Dvořák, during his first year there. And Dvořák, as I mentioned, was a protege of Johannes Brahms – so that's how many connections? Consider that Rubin Goldmark was a nephew of composer Karl Goldmark who was another friend of Brahms'. Goldmark himself studied with Johann Nepomuck Fuchs whose brother Robert was a more well-known composer and teacher who included among his students Mahler, Sibelius (yes), and a fellow named Eusebius Mandyczewski. J.N. Fuchs studied with the famous teacher Simon Sechter who was old enough to have become famous because he gave one counterpoint lesson to Franz Schubert before he died in 1828!

There is, however, something curious here: while Goldmark was credited in numerous sources and biographies as being Gershwin’s teacher at the time – enduring enough Gershwin would later return to him for advice when composing his Concerto in F – he was not Gershwin’s only teacher. There is evidence to suggest that it’s more likely he wrote the Lullaby as an assignment from Edward Kilenyi (Sr.), a Hungarian-born violinist and composer who studied briefly in Rome with Pietro Mascagni and graduated from the Cologne Conservatory before arriving in New York City where he (supposedly) studied at Columbia University, earning his doctorate by 1915. There is evidence to suggest Gershwin came to him for advice about harmony at the same time he was studying with Goldmark (another Goldmark student at one time was Aaron Copland who found him “too pedantic,” so perhaps Gershwin approached Kilenyi for a “second opinion”?). Regardless, this “Lullaby” came about from the imagination of George Gerwshin, Tin Pan Alley song-plugger and future Great American Composer.

Samuel Barber, meanwhile, born and raised in West Chester, PA, was a pianist and singer and composer when he became a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (he was 14 at the time) where his composition teacher was the Italian violinist and composer, Rosario Scalero who, in 1900, went to Vienna and studied with Eusebius Mandyczewski – who was (ahem) a protege of Johannes Brahms.

Basically, Gershwin’s “Lullaby” is a young man on the brink of becoming a serious composer, though he found more joy working in Tin Pan Alley and turning out numerous jazz songs that made him a “hit song-writer.” By the time he was studying with Goldmark, he had already made a name for himself with the song “When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em,” his first published song in 1916, which earned him all of 50 cents. But by 1919, he’d also written “Swannee,” made famous by Al Jolson who’d heard the young composer play it at a party and decided to use it in one of his shows. I don’t think Gershwin approached Goldmark to become a “serious Classical” composer, but it gave him a foundation that the young man was then able to rise to the challenge when band conductor Paul Whiteman suggested he write something for his concert in 1924, a kind of “Jazz Meets Classical” program. At the last minute, having forgotten his commitment, he quickly wrote the work that would change his life – the Rhapsody in Blue. And the rest is history.

Here, members of the New York Philharmonic play Gershwin’s “Lullaby.”

Samuel Barber grew up in a musical household: his aunt was the famous contralto and star of the Metropolitan Opera, Louise Homer. His mother was a pianist, the daughter of a family tracing its roots (and social position) back to the Revolution, and she gave her son his first piano lessons when he was six and wrote his first composition the following year, a short piano piece in C Minor called Sadness. Overlooked in most short biographies of Barber’s childhood is the fact that his uncle Sidney Homer, Louise’s husband, was a respected composer of art songs who then mentored the young boy into the adult composer he would become, over a span on 25 years.

By the time he composed his first string quartet – actually, his only string quartet – he’d already composed the “Overture to The School for Scandal” when he was 21 (it would be premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1933), so by the time he started his String Quartet, later to be published as Op. 11, he’d already built quite a reputation, and a very enviable one for a man in his mid-20s. As I recall the story from Barber’s memoir, he was introduced to Toscanini while in Europe through his teacher Scalero, and Toscanini took an interest in him. Looking over the quartet, he suggested the slow movement, an Adagio, would make a very fine piece for string orchestra, and so Barber arranged it as suggested but Toscanini returned the score without comment, later telling Gian-Carlo Menotti who’d met Barber while they were at Curtis and who’d go on to become Barber’s life-long partner, that he’d already memorized it and scheduled it for a broadcast. It would add to Barber’s early fame and remains to this day his most recognizable work. In 1963, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it became the National Mourning Piece and has since been used (if not overused) in numerous contexts that it’s almost become a cliché. It’s not often heard in its original version, even less so as part of the complete quartet, but it is still a powerful piece on its own that, as one critic wrote, “rarely leaves a dry eye.”

Here is the Dover Quartet playing the original version of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” from his String Quartet, Op. 11:

- Dick Strawser