Three Dance Episodes From on the Town

Leonard Bernstein

Almost twenty years after Leonard Bernstein’s death, the critics are still arguing over the meaning and impact of his legacy. What is clear, however, is that the world rarely enjoys the genius of someone who excels supremely in so many artistic endeavors. Pianist, conductor, television personality, teacher, mentor, social gadfly, and composer of both popular musical theatre and “serious works,” Bernstein wore all hats with avidity. And he enjoyed stunning success in most. He had a passion about everything that he essayed, whether conducting the Mahler that he loved so well, or in his many teaching roles, helping audiences “peel” apart the mysteries of music. He knew so much, and could do so much, that he genuinely thought that he could do it all. His leadership of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and other orchestras is legendary, but everyone knows there were some concerts that, frankly, got away from him in his self-indulgence. He worked assiduously as a composer of “serious” music, but those works—from youthful successes to his late efforts–have enjoyed only mixed success. All that says is simply that he was human. Other than his epochal conducting, there is one field in which he garnered almost universal acclaim, and that is musical theatre. When all is said and done, he possessed a talent and a facility for the stage that was as deep as it was prolific. He understood the genre and its demands well.

He plunged in early, writing for student productions at Harvard, and working with a cabaret group (that included Judy Holiday) while a student at the Curtis Institute. When he was twenty-six, his ballet Fancy Free was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera and On the Town opened on Broadway. Wonderful Town, Peter Pan, Facsimile, Candide, and, of course, West Side Story, followed in succession. But, the music that Bernstein provided for Fancy Free was the beginning. The ballet is by the giant of choreography, Jerome Robbins, and went on to be reincarnated that same year (1944) as the Broadway musical On the Town. The Broadway show subsequently was made into a film in 1949; however, most of Bernstein’s music was thrown out by Hollywood as too “complex and operatic.” Those who have seen the show in any of its versions will easily remember the simple premise of the plot: three sailors on liberty in New York City, looking for female companionship, engage in a series of ritual dances of courtship, competing for the affections of the girls, all the while romping through the remarkably diverse cityscape of the “Big Apple.”

Bernstein extracted the three subject dances from the musical, and the concert piece was given its première by the San Francisco Symphony early in 1946. Taken together, the three dances are a marvelous period piece of New York urban musical culture circa 1944. The young Bernstein, totally smitten with the energy of his adopted city—especially the swing, blues, and bebop jazz of the time—put it all into the show. Stir into this a completely obvious and conscious adoption of the musical style of the young Bernstein’s musical idol and mentor, Aaron Copland, and you have accounted for most of what you hear. All cities constantly change, and there’s not a lot of the present New York City of today in On the Town—of course. Jazz has changed and not many composers write like Copland, today, but it’s all well done, and infectiously appealing. Upon the occasion of its revival in 1971, the drama critic of the New York Times snarkily wrote: “The music…has worn less well, too many of the nostalgic ballads sound like sub-Puccini filtered through Glenn Miller.” But, never mind. It’s New York! It’s Leonard Bernstein! And memorably, it’s “New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!”

The first dance, “The Great Lover,” is the Act I scene with our hero, the sailor, Gabey, early in the day (the whole show is set in a single day) asleep on a subway car, after having seen a poster of the beauty queen of the rails, “Miss Turnstile,” and dreaming of wooing her. The punchy, dissonant accents over a jazzy, frantic tempo perfectly depict the sleepy sailor valiantly trying to get forty winks on the lurching, noisy New York subway. A variety of short, melodic “licks” punctuate the relentless tempo. Some are jazzy, and some are just plain banal—all reflective of the kaleidoscopic thoughts of the sailor. And, of course, throughout, the familiar metrical displacements and accents of Copland inform the young composer’s score. Each of the dances is dedicated to someone from the production, and the first dance is dedicated to none other than the ballerina, Sono Osata, who was “Miss Turnstiles.”

The second dance, “Lonely Town,” is a short little pas de deux between a worldly sailor and a young high-school girl encountered Central Park. While surely occurring in the daytime, it has an almost nocturnal, melancholic mood. In Bernstein’s words: it’s “both tender and sinister” as the sailor woos her, and then callously casts her off. It adroitly evokes the almost desperate, hopelessness under the circumstances of the two souls having anything but a fleeting relationship. It is dedicated to one of the immortals of American musical theatre, Betty Comden, who wrote the show, along with Bernstein, and her long-term professional partner, Adolf Green. And—while Bernstein wrote the great tune in the dance, any informed music lover who was unfamiliar with the show, would understandably think it was composed by Aaron Copland, so perfect is the evocation of the latter’s musical style.

The last dance is dedicated to the great Nancy Walker, a member of the original cast—you know her from a thousand appearances on fifties and sixties TV, not to mention her indelible performance as the waitress in the Bounty paper towel commercials. It’s called “Times Square Ballet,” and a better depiction of that mad, tourist-crammed, light show cannot be imagined. Our sailors meet to embark on a night on the town, go to the famous Roseland Dance Palace, and, well—do what sailors do. Opening with a jazzy, solo clarinet, the dance quickly segues to the evergreen, “New York, New York,” and after a slow down and a rhythmic change to swing time, a solo saxophone contributes its own transformation of the famous tune. Anything goes in the city, and apparently anything goes in the music, too, so, we hear a rather stylized rendition of what seems to be a chicken-clucking fiddle tune, in the best vaudeville style. A growling trumpet leads to what appears to be the aftermath of a bit too much to drink, followed by a crashing, rhythmically-layered conclusion, in the best Bernstein style. Not a bad way to start a fantastic career.

Program notes by:
Wm. E. Runyan
©2016 William E. Runyan

Appalachian Spring: Concert Suite for Full Orchestra

Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland is generally considered America’s greatest composer. That is, it is he, through his compositions and through his essays, books, lectures, and other thoughts on music who has done more than any other individual to establish a corpus of “serious” music in this country that largely defined an “American Sound.” He lived a long life; influenced generations of young composers; advanced the cause of art music in this country; and composed music that delighted millions in the audiences of ballet, chamber music, symphonic music, radio, television, and the movies. The son of Jewish immigrants, he lived for most of his life in New York City—or close by—but assimilated so much of the disparate elements of our culture that he came to be considered as representative of all of it. In his music one finds jazz, ethnic, western, folk, intellectual, and populist elements and references—and much more: Cuban, Mexican, and European Continental. But his wide-ranging intellect easily synthesized it all into an inimitable style (or small group of stylistic voices) with which his music spoke with a clear and unified expression.

His greatest musical influence was undoubtedly the grande dame of teachers, Mme. Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied in Paris during the early 1920s. Teacher of generations of distinguished performers and composers, she counted Copland as her greatest pupil. Of course, while spending those years in Paris—along with the so-called “lost” generation (Copland was assuredly not part of it)—he was exposed to a wealth of musical styles and composers. Of them, Stravinsky was the other great influence upon Copland. Upon his return to the USA his early dalliances with jazz and “symphonic jazz” were more or less replaced by a severe, often dissonant style—one not often associated with Copland by many of today’s audiences, but definitely a life-long option for him in his compositions. During the 1930s his interest in socialist perspectives crystallized for him and he turned to a more accessible, populist style that has come to be his hallmark for mainstream America. His ballets, Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, as well as his music for the films, Of Mice and Men and Our Town and other works all endeared him to a wide audience and made his reputation as a composer of “American” music. He continued that trend with the Lincoln Portrait, music for the film adaptation of Steinbeck’s Red Pony, and even wrote a clarinet concerto for the great Benny Goodman. How mainstream American can you get? But about 1950 both Copland’s musical style and his popular place in society took a distinct turn. His earlier support of socialist causes (he supported the American Communist Party in the election of 1936) made him a target of Red Hysteria and Senator McCarthy. The Republican Party cancelled a performance of his Lincoln Portrait for Ike’s inauguration, and other indignities followed him for a few years. His music began—but not completely—to return to the severe and dissonant basis that informed his early work, and he occasionally disappointed those who commissioned works thinking they were going to get another Appalachian Spring. By 1972, in his own words, it was “as if someone had simply turned off a faucet,” and he gave up composition completely. He died in 1990 of Alzheimer’s disease.

In 1943 the great American dancer and choreographer, Martha Graham, armed with $500 from a prominent patron, approached Copland with the idea to write some music for her ballet company. He had already garnered success with Billy the Kid, and Rodeo—Copland was a lifelong aficionado of dance—and soon produced a half-hour or so of music appropriate to a story quite unlike that with which we now are familiar. He simply entitled the work, “Music for Martha.” Dissatisfied with the original story, Graham completely reworked it into a scenario (following the published score) that concerns a pioneer celebration:

“… in spring around a newly-build farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.”

Needless to say, Copland’s music was conceived with none of this in mind, moreover, the title that Graham chose originated in a Hart Crane poem about a mountain rivulet. Copland was often amused later at plaudits accorded him for evoking the “hope” inherent in simple people in the “spring” season. Nevertheless, his angular melodies, spare textures, and relatively simple harmonies were brilliantly exploited by Graham in her appropriation of his music for her choreography. While much of Copland’s earlier work consciously had used folk melodies as part of his musical resources, Appalachian Spring is based around original material that seems to evoke folk simplicities. The major, important exception is his use of the Shake dance tune, ‘Tis a Gift to be Simple,’ around which he builds a set of variations that lead to the climax of the work. His rhythms echo the muscular, almost jerky, movements that—as every serious dancer knows—are characteristic of Graham’s choreographic style. Metrical shifts and constantly changing accents inform most of the livelier sections.

This little gem of a ballet has assumed a place of favored—almost iconic—status for American audiences. It, along with Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait, Rodeo (Beef—It’s What’s for Dinner!), and other brilliant compositions have all come to help inform our sense of who we are as Americans. And, it is a comment upon the great, sprawling nature of our country that one of its most eloquent creators of that image was a gay, leftist, son of Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn.

Program notes by:
Wm. E. Runyan
©2015 William E. Runyan

Rhapsody in Blue

George Gershwin

George Gershwin was arguably the most successful and talented of America’s composers of popular music. His songs constitute the core of the “American Songbook,” whether composed as part of his immensely successful Broadway shows, or as standalone popular tunes. Born of Russian Jewish immigrants, he didn’t evince his formidable musical talents until about the age of ten, when a piano was purchased for his older brother and later collaborator, Ira. Much to the latter’s relief, George soon commandeered the piano, and the rest is, as they say, history. His audiences rewarded him substantially—he is estimated to have become the wealthiest composer in modern times. He earned over a quarter of a million dollars for Rhapsody in Blue during the first decade of its life, and it still is bringing in the bucks, as witnessed by the commercials for United Airlines.

Rhapsody in Blue was written in great haste for a 1924 concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall given by Paul Whiteman–billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music.” Notwithstanding the description, you wouldn’t have heard Stravinsky or Schoenberg that night, rather Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, and others of that ilk. However, Jascha Heifetz, Sergei Rachmaninov, and other luminaries of music were in the audience. The poster read that Whiteman would be “assisted by Zez Confrey and George Gershwin”—notice that the composer of “Kitten on the Keys” and “Dizzy Fingers” received top billing to the young Gershwin. Gershwin had been asked late in 1923 to write a piece for the Whiteman orchestra, but he had turned his attention to more pressing matters, and was horrified to read in the New York Tribune on the 4th of January, 1924 that he was to première a “jazz concerto” on February 12. Gershwin plunged in and presented his brilliant succession of “American” themes to Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s orchestrator, to arrange for large jazz band and piano (the symphonic version came later)—Gershwin didn’t have the skill to do this at this point in his career.

The composition opened the second half of the concert, with Gershwin as soloist—using no music, and probably considerably “enhancing” the solo part. The opening clarinet glissando evocative of traditional Jewish Klezmer music kicked it off, and the now-familiar tunes came rushing by. While Rhapsody in Blue really is not “jazz,” and certainly not a concerto in the traditional sense, Gershwin turned out a masterpiece that is a model of what came to be called “symphonic jazz.”

What is specifically germane to appreciating this composition is the importance of so-called “serious” or “classical” musical interests and training in Gershwin’s life that is quite unprecedented for someone who enjoyed his kind of success. He certainly was not some sort of untutored musical genius who later sought “legitimacy” after having proven himself in the popular world. Rather, early on, as a young boy he studied and performed under traditional piano teachers the music of composers such as Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy. Later, he journeyed to Paris to study under the famed teacher of composition, Nadia Boulanger, as well as Maurice Ravel. However, both rejected him, more or less afraid to compromise the genius evident in his burgeoning success. While in Paris he met and admired the music of eminent composers such as Prokofiev, Poulenc, and Milhaud. Gershwin’s ambitions were such, that long after he had achieved the kind of success that any popular composer would have envied, he assiduously studied formal composition with established teachers. And he was successful. His Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess are masterpieces of his unique bridging of the so-called gap between popular art and “high” art.

Program notes by:
Wm. E. Runyan
©2015 William E. Runyan