Summermusic 2026, Part 3: Jantelagen - Songs with Tenor Curtis Bannister & Pianist Mark Markham

At 4:00 this Sunday, July 19th, the air-conditioned Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg will be the setting for the final program of Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic 2026, a program of songs with tenor Curtis Bannister and pianist Mark Markham setting texts that illuminate the Swedish cultural concept of JANTELAGEN which can be defined as “a focus on collective unity and humility over praise of the individual.”

Curt Bannister & Mark Markham

The recipient of the Actors Equity Foundation Roger Sturtevant Award and a Drama League Award nominee, tenor Curtis Bannister has been praised by the Broadway World as a "commanding performer." He has performed with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Atlant Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Cincinnati Symphony.  

Pianist Mark Markham was a recital partner of the legendary late soprano Jessye Norman for over twenty years and is familiar to our audience from his appearances as a piano soloist with the Harrisburg Symphony as well as his performances as a pianist prented by Market Square Concerts including a memorable recital with the late tenor Limmie Pulliam back in 2023.  

This concert will take place on Sunday, July 19th, at 4pm at the Market Suqrae Presbyterian Church. Free parking is available at the garage adjacent to the church at the corner of Second and Chestnut Streets. You will need to provide the license plate number to a staff person when you enter the church through the atrium in order to activate your validation.

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To explain Jantelagen, I can do no better than quote verbatim the program notes supplied by Curtis Bannister:

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Jantelagen (the Law of Jante) is a Scandinavian social norm that discourages bragging, individualism, and standing out from the crowd for attention. Instead it favors the praising of the collective and all its achievements. Such a practice or mindset can be seen as disingenuous, particularly in the U.S. The need to achieve and be seen as a success is a constructive trait, but many in our American society have found a way – as we often do with many norms from other cultures – to put an emphasis on the need to be singularly successful and elevated. This mindset is the practice of placing self-importance above the ideals that shaped and save the America we love and enjoy today.

I first performed this recital just outside of Washington DC on November 5th, 2024 – the day after the 2024 election. I chose these songs as a collective to express the possibilities of what was to come no matter the electoral results. Once the results were known, this program became a rallying cry for unity, principles, and the need to remember who we are as Americans, where we came from, and the importance of listening before a response or reaction. We as a collective community that make up the United States do not and should not always agree but we should always stand on principle, debate, morality, and the right to agree to disagree. This program is my interpretation of being one among an incredible many to create and achieve greatness. No one achieved greatness alone.

Be the best. Be seen as the best. Be known for being the best even if we are not: in our current social climate, to dismiss humility and replace it with hyper ego can be perceived as a superpower – as a strength before all else while lacking self-awareness. Without self-awareness we feed the dangerous elements of ego. Ego is needed to survive, but when it consumes all, it can be more detrimental than being ignorant; it can cause harm to another for self-benefit and advancement without care or apology. Modesty is seen as a negative vulnerability and conformity as a weakness because it’s not “all about us/me”. Somehow sentiments that exude open-mindedness, community and cooperation are seen as negative in a culture that thrives off of hyperbole and the feat of being irrelevant. But historically, progress (not to be confused with political progressiveness) an clarity of understanding is achieved by community.

America and The American Experiment has made the remarkable feat of reaching 250 years. That’s 250 years of trial and error, victories, embarrassment, maturity and absolution. We did not become the “beacon on the hill” by playing it safe, being selfish and irresponsible, and watching out for self. America was born from the collective agreement and dream of like-minded individuals who believed in peace, freedom, liberation, and the pursuit of happiness away from the “big brother” eye and hand of a singular opinion or rule. Jantelagen is an extension of this ideal in tangible practice. As individuals we are all special, smart, humorous, compassionate and powerful. When such individuals, as we all are, realize and put to action what we can achieve together, while using our common sense and humanity, we will have the honor and right to celebrate another 250 years – as “us,” not as “I.”

– Curtis Bannister

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When it comes to writing about various works on these concerts, if you follow the blog with any regularity, you know that I essentially delve into what I call the music’s biographical background as well as (at least for this particular creative moment) the composer’s. Sometimes, programs are constructed with some sense of order – a theme, a thread that permeates the selection of the music – or perhaps there’s a historical juxtaposition (for instance, writing about Dvořák’s “American” String Quintet and Arthur Foote’sPiano Quintet on last Wednesday’s program, written just a few years apart and very much to the heart of the question, then very contemporary, of “What Is American Music?”), but in this case, none of my usual options make much sense. I will offer some recordings to familiarize listeners with some of the music, but that won’t be necessary for all of them. Still, the biographical context of the Strauss songs, I think, may enhance the listener’s appreciation; whereas, with some of them, it hardly matters. I mean, I can go on and on about, say, Bernstein’s West Side Story, but for a “curtain raiser” to the topic of the program – “Something’s Coming” – is all that that important? Going from Bernstein to Barber may not seem so much of a stretch but keep in mind that Bernstein was a curious figure in American Music, an artist with… how to put this… many feet in many different fields: conductor, pianist, lecturer, but even as a composer, a composer of music that straddled various definitions, both “popular” and “serious” (terms Bernstein would’ve hated). As I’ve often mentioned the definition of “popular” versus “classical music” a high school music teacher I knew back in 1970 gave her class, “Classical Music was the music nobody liked” (she also told them “John Philip Sousa was the greatest American composer”) but I digress.

Both Bernstein and Barber struggled with acceptance (as did most composers: think Beethoven and Brahms, for that matter). Bernstein wanted to write “serious” music that was appreciated by the “serious” composers he championed at the New York Philharmonic but which, in many cases, often came up short in the approval of both his desired audience and the audience-at-large. What was wrong with being the composer of West Side Story or The Chichester Psalms? Samuel Barber, who was treated like an anachronism in a musical universe largely populated by serialists and the avant-garde, was often dismissed, like Bernstein, for writing tonal music when tonality as such was “soooo last century.” Of course, now, the shoe has moved completely over to the other foot, but that’s another story...

Bernstein wrote West Side Story, a Broadway musical (and one of the most enduring ones in the repertoire) in the mid-1950s. Barber wrote his song cycle The Hermit Songs in 1953, but the one on our program today – usually described as an “art song” to distinguish it from a “pop song” – Sure on This Shining Night was composed in 1934 around the time he graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music and four years before he wrote what would become the Adagio for Strings. One of his most frequently performed songs, it is a fine example of his lyrical romanticism yet combines a keen sense of classical structure, “carefully crafted interplay between the voice and piano that emphasizes canonic imitation” (which sounds dreadfully academic, but is an example of a composer who can be both “romantic and classical” at the same time: again, think Beethoven and Brahms). Given the multiverse that is Modern Music today with all the different styles available to the listener, there has become a more open, shall we say “diverse” awareness of the “different kinds of musics” whether we pigeon-hole it or not, and that today we think of “Wagner and Brahms” as just two more Romantic Composers from the 19th Century, regardless of the intense animosity between them and their adherents in their day, simply based on the difference of their musical styles.

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Two of the three Strauss songs on the program set texts by the Scottish-German poet, novelist, and anarchist John Henry Mackay whose father, a Scottish insurance broker, had died when the boy was two years old, so his German-born mother returned to her home in Hamburg, where Mackay grew up. While his novels explored various political and social themes (he also wrote “sports novels”), his poetry attracted composers like Strauss and Schoenberg. Since some of his poems, because of their “socialist content,” attracted the attention of the German censors, he had many of his poems published in Switzerland instead.

Both are from the Op. 27 set, written when Strauss was not yet 30. Heimliche Aufforderung ("The Secret Invitation") was composed on May 22, 1894, and given to his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna, as a wedding present. During their American tour in 1904, she sang it to conclude her Carnegie Hall debut recital. This particular song describes a man among party-goers wooing a woman he then invites to join him for a later tryst.

Here is soprano Jessye Norman, in this case with pianist Geoffrey Parsons:

The more famous Morgen! (“Tomorrow!”), composed the day before Heimliche Aufforderung, concludes Strauss’ original set. Mackay’s poem describes how “the sun will shine tomorrow, uniting us as we descend to the beach, looking into each other’s eyes: upon us will sink the mute silence of happiness.”

While most of the recordings that surface on YouTube use an orchestration, here is a video (with score) of mezzo-soprano Janet Baker and pianist Gerald Moore: 

The “Jantelagen” program concludes with a third song by Strauss, Zueignung (“Dedication”), written shortly after his 21st birthday, and the first of his songs to be published. Written for tenor voice, this caused a rift in the Strauss family because the composer’s father wanted these first songs to be dedicated to Aunt Johanna as thanks for all her support in the boy’s musical development. Instead, the songs were dedicated to the heldentenor Heinrich Vogl who’d sung, among various Wagnerian roles, Loge at the first complete Ring of the Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876.

The poem is by the Austrian poet Hermann von Gilm whose day-job had been being a lawyer in Vienna; he had died the same year Strauss was born, 1864. Gilm’s original title was Habe Dank (“Have thanks”), the poem’s refrain, but Strauss changed it to “Zueignung.” The lover is tormented by their being parted, but after he’d drunk “the blessed draught” (how very Tristan-like) he finds the evil spirits banished and, comforted, “sinks into your embrace – have thanks!”

Here is tenor Jonas Kauffman with pianist Helmut Deutsch

(Incidentally, here is a 1921 recording with baritone Heinrich Schlusnus and the composer at the piano!)

Maurice Ravel may be better known for his orchestral and solo piano works but he wrote a number of songs throughout his career, including two sets of songs in 1914 based on “traditional melodies” (usually implying folk songs), one pair of Hebraic Songs (Deux mélodies hébraïques or “Two Hebrew Songs”), the other “Five Popular Greek Songs.” The first of two Hebrew songs is a setting in Aramaic of the Kaddish with its central theme of the magnification and sanctification of God’s name and often associated with mourning, a prayer that is one of the central elements of the Jewish liturgy. It hardly sounds like Ravel, the composer of… well, what else was he writing around 1914? The Piano Trio, for one, and he also began work on what would become Le Tombeau de Couperin; and two years earlier he’d written the ballet Daphnis et Chloe (Bolero, his most famous, if not infamous, piece would be written in 1929). In Ravel’s uncharacteristic setting, the accompaniment is almost minimalist, the whole focus on the singer and the words of the prayer. By not setting it in French, perhaps Ravel was thinking the audience would need to follow the translation in the program – did they do that in 1914? – so they would be forced to face the words of the prayer, thus, Believers or not, they were made part of the community.

In this recording, cantor Azi Schwartz sings Ravel’s setting of the Kaddish text with pianist Fadi Deeb, recorded at the Jerusalem Music Center in 2010.

Part of that side of American Music that encompasses everything from Rodgers & Hammerstein to Bernstein to Sondheim and many more (and many different styles) in between, community is certainly a part of the other songs in this set: Adam Guettel, born a hundred years after Richard Strauss, “is known for his rich, operatic style and for writing major Broadway musicals such as Floyd Collins, The Light in the Piazza, and Days of Wine and Roses. His work often blends storytelling with lush, dramatic music, and “Build a Bridge” fits this tradition – combining emotional depth with melodic beauty.”

Here, Audra Macdonald sings “Build a Bridge,” part of Guettel’s Myths & Hymns collection, a series of concert pieces drawing on themes and melodies from his stage works. It’s “a lyrical, reflective piece that uses the metaphor of building a bridge to convey emotional and spiritual connection,” expressing “longing and determination to overcome obstacles (‘the water’s wide,’ ‘battle the tide’) to reach someone or something important. The repeated call to ‘build a bridge’ symbolizes creating a connection across distance, time, or difference. It’s both a personal plea and a universal metaphor for hope, perseverance, and unity.”

Stepping outside the program’s continuity (since I already blew that as a concept with the Strauss songs, anyway), the second half of the program opens with another Guettel song, “Awaiting You,” from the album “Myths and Hymns” released in 1999.

"In his song cycle, Myths & Hymns,” Concord Theatricals writes, “Guettel paints an emotional landscape of faith and yearning that embraces a boundless spectrum of ideology and spirituality. ...The musical vocabulary sweeps from romantic art song and rock to Latin, gospel and R&B. Myths & Hymns elucidates our fantastic desire to transcend earthly bounds, our intrinsic need to connect with something or someone greater in our restless search for enlightenment.” Here is “Awaiting You” with Billy Porter:

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Alas, between the heat, the oppressive air quality as I try to finish this, and the joint cantankerousness of my back and my computer, I’m going to have to cut this short if it’s to be posted before the concert… Well, I’d said I wasn’t planning on covering every song: some of them may be more familiar than others and their context within the program’s theme, Scandinavian or not, fairly obvious – if we’re talking about building bridges to connect to a greater community, of course you’re going to include Sondheim’s “No one is alone” from Into the Woods (sung here by Bernadette Peters) or a true Broadway classic from 1945, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel (“When you walk through a storm, keep your chin up high – and don’t be afraid of the dark… Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone…” You only need to see the words and you’ll be able to sing along!).

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If we’re talking about what makes America in these past 250 years, we would be remiss if we completely overlooked the Black Experience and the role of the Negro Spiritual and the influence they’ve had on American Music (and society in general) both popular and “serious.” The song “Strange Fruit” may be familiar thanks to Billie Holiday’s performances, both music and lyrics written by Abel Meeropol in 1934. It portrays “lynched African Americans as ‘strange fruit’ hanging from Southern trees, using stark imagery to contrast the natural beauty of the landscape with the horror of racial violence.”

Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” was to be the first movement of his instrumental suite, Black, Brown, and Beige, blending jazz, gospel, and spirituals in an attempt to tell the African American story through music, a work he premiered at Carnegie Hall in January of 1943. The lyrics “express a heartfelt prayer for divine guidance and protection, particularly reflecting the African American experience. Repeated appeals to "Lord, dear Lord above" ask God to "look down and see my people through," combining personal faith with collective hope. Biblical imagery and folk wisdom are woven throughout, with references to celestial permanence and moral guidance, such as the Golden Rule.”

In this recording, Duke Ellington performs with Mahalia Jackson.

There are books about the history, the meaning, and the significance of the African American or Negro Spiritual, musical expression that gave hope to a life in slavery, religious or social (the two intertwined). Their melodies have become familiar to audiences of all races, their lyrics sometimes less so, and the comprehension of them perhaps even less: tragedy as entertainment is always difficult, and sometimes the unbearable sadness and incomprehensible hopefulness may be uncomfortable (but then, Art is supposed to challenge us, to open us to experiences beyond ourselves).

Only one example is a song called simply “O Freedom.” “Oh freedom over me! And before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.” In this performance of one of many arrangements is the American tenor, George Shirley, raised in Detroit, who was the first African American tenor to sing a lead role at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Ferrando in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte in 1961. He would sing major roles for the next 11 seasons. (Point of note: the first African American singer in any major role at the Met was contralto Marian Anderson with her belated debut as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera in 1955. Time, moving slowly, has continued to move slowly in too many areas of equality in this nation of ours.)

With Dvořák’s quintet on the second program of Summermusic 2026, I mentioned briefly the Bohemian composer’s influence as a teacher in New York City in the 1890s where his advice to his American students was to look to American folk music for inspiration, just as he, a Bohemian (or Czech) composer looked to his own ethnic roots for inspiration. The problem was, none of his students really could say what “American folk music” was since they all came from Europe with English or German or Italian folk music in their blood – and one, at least, Henry T. Burleigh, had the Negro Spiritual in his heritage. In fact, he introduced his teacher to these songs. The story goes that Burleigh, a native of Erie, PA, putting himself through school while working as the Conservatory’s janitor, was singing in the hallways one night as he cleaned, and Dvořák, the school’s director, happened to hear him and asked him to sing more of these for him. Burleigh later wrote “I sang our Negro songs for him very often, and before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals.” Dvořák himself said, speaking about musical styles, “in the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”

While there is much that can be argued for and against Dvořák’s “Americanisms” in the works he wrote will in the United States, the famous “Largo” Theme in his “New World” Symphony may or may not be inspired by any specific Negro Spiritual (or capturing the essence of them in general), but in 1922, another Dvořák student, William Arms Fisher, added Spiritual-like words to Dvořák’s English horn melody to create the song “Goin’ Home,” speaking of the Chicken-or-the-Egg Conundrum.

But we forget Burleigh also studied composition with Dvořák: he didn’t just empty his waste baskets and sing for him. In all, Burleigh, well-known as a singer, also wrote between 300-400 songs of his own, some of them arrangements of spirituals, but most of them original, “serious” – there’s that word again – compositions. One of them is a setting of Langston Hughes’ “Lovely, dark and lonely one.” Hughes, one of the most famous African American poets and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote the poem, originally titled simply "Song," in 1925; Burleigh published his setting of it ten years later. Here, it’s performed by tenor Roderick George and pianist Katie Franklin.

And while the program concludes with Strauss’ Zueignung which I discussed above, we’ll close this blog post for now and look forward to seeing you Sunday afternoon at the concert!

– Dick Strawser

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