String Fling



Aaron Copland
1900-1990

Aaron Copland
“Hoe-Down” from Rodeo

By the mid-1930s Aaron Copland was beginning to feel “… an increasing dissatisfaction with the relation of the music-loving public and the living composer.” In order to reach a wider audience he gradually began to simplify his style, making it more accessible yet without sacrificing artistic value. The first work in this more popular vein was El Salón Mexico (1936). He composed Rodeo for the dancer Agnes de Mille, who also wrote the scenario. She prefaced it with: “This is the story of The Taming of the Shrew – cowboy style.” Rodeo opened in October of 1942 and was a smashing success, garnering 79 performances by the end of the following year.

In Rodeo, Copland used authentic folk tunes and dance rhythms, evoking the scenes and sounds of the old West. It is the story of a cowgirl who has her eye on the head wrangler but is too much of a tomboy and not enough of a real cowboy to attract him.

The Orchestral Suite of four dance episodes, including all but five minutes of the original ballet, followed a year later. As he did with his other ballets, Copland enhanced the orchestration for the suite.

In the finale, “Hoe-Down,” The cowgirl reappears suddenly in a party dress, at last drawing the cowboys’ attention. Both the Wrangler and the Roper claim her, but in the end she decides that a plain bird in her arms is worth more than a fancy bird in someone else’s. While she would have preferred the Wrangler, she settles for the Roper.

The two square dance tunes are a few measures of "McLoed's Reel" played in folk fiddle style and “Bonyparte's Retreat."



Anton Stepanovich Arensky
1861-1906

Anton Stepanovich Arensky
Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky, Op. 35a

Anton Stepanovich Arensky was one of that unfortunately large group of prodigiously talented musicians who died young. The son of a physician, who was also an amateur cellist, and a mother who was a pianist, Arensky was already composing songs and piano pieces well before his tenth birthday.

A star composition student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky immediately began teaching at the St. Petersburg Conservatory upon his graduation. He later became a colleague of Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, where he was a teacher of Aleksander Skryabin and Sergey Rachmaninov. In 1895 he became the director of the imperial chapel in St. Petersburg, resigning in 1901 on a significant pension to devote himself to composition, gambling and alcohol.

Arensky’s output is not extensive. He greatly disappointed Rimsky-Korsakov for abandoning the Russian nationalist movement and supporting Tchaikovsky’s more cosmopolitan romanticism. His eclectic approach is clearly evident in the Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky, an arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement from his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 35, composed in 1894 as a memorial to Tchaikovsky, who had died the previous winter.

Arensky’s seven variations and a coda are based on the theme from Tchaikovsky’s song “Legend,” No. 5 from Sixteen Children’s Songs, Op. 54.

The variations are in the style of the Brahms/Haydn variations, with changes in harmony and mood, rather than a piling up of decorative passages over a static harmonic progression. The piece ends with a gentle, almost wistful, coda.

Among the most interesting variations are: number 1, which involves a little canon between lower and upper strings and modulates to another key (the relative major);

The obligatory variation in the opposite mode, number 3;

number 4, which works with fragments from the theme;

and number 6, the fastest of the group.



Gustav Holst
1874-1934

Gustav Holst
St Paul's Suite, Op. 29, No. 2

Composer, educator and conductor Gustav Holst is known outside his native England essentially as a one-work composer. The Planets, composed between 1914 and 1916, gained him international fame, and snippets of its opulent music with its broad orchestral palette have become a favorite fodder of advertisers. He composed, however, many other works, including symphonies, operas and chamber works.

Holst came from a musical family and was taught the piano by his father. He was a precocious, but not a particularly healthy, child who started composing while in grammar school. As a teenager he developed neuritis in his right arm, forcing him to give up the piano, but he picked up the trombone as a cure for his asthma. At the Royal College of Music, which he entered in 1893, he continued with the trombone in addition to composition, and from 1897 to 1903 performed as a freelance trombonist, mostly with opera companies. The experience inspired him to write numerous works for brass band, including two Suites for Military Band and Hammersmith, the latter written for the BBC Military Band.

Holst was influenced by mysticism and developed his own individual blend of Indian music and English folksong. His early works were inspired by the Vedas, Sanskrit holy verses, which he modified and adapted for his own compositions. In 1908 he wrote a chamber opera, Savitri, based on a story from the great Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.

A quiet, introverted person, for most of his life Holst devoted his musical efforts to teaching. From 1905 until his death he taught music at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammersmith, and many of his compositions were written for the school’s orchestra and chorus. The St. Paul’s Suite was composed in 1912, originally for strings only, but Holst later added wind parts for performance with full orchestra. It is in four movements, opening with “Jig,” depicting English fiddle dance tunes, skillfully blended with a contrasting second theme.

The second movement, “Ostinato,” a series of whimsical melodies introduced by the second violins, set over an ostinato (a repeated melodic figure).

The “Intermezzo,” in ABABA form, opens slowly with a solo violin introducing the theme, accompanied by pizzicato chords.

A viola eventually joins the violin in a duet. The tempo picks up to a quick country tune that alternates with the slow opening theme.

Holst, of course, renders this theme, as well as others, a little more quirky by adding the kind of dissonant harmonies of the sort one might more likely hear with composers of twentieth century art music or very out of tune country fiddlers.

The final movement, “The Dargason,” is an English folk ballad traceable to the 16th century and used as a country dance melody. Holst had used it previously in the last movement of his popular Second Suite in F for Military Band. The folk tune is introduced softly, answered by the cellos playing the familiar “Greensleeves” as a counter melody. The two melodies, played together, end the suite.



Samuel Barber
1910-1981

Samuel Barber
Adagio for Strings

For all the hoopla over Public Radio – whose affiliates are quickly converting their classical music programming to all-news-all-the-time – gone are the days when a commercial AM radio station had its own resident symphony orchestra, much less with the world’s foremost maestro to conduct a weekly broadcast. But in 1937, NBC inaugurated its live orchestral series under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. Musically conservative in taste, Toscanini, nevertheless, was eager to include suitably lyrical works by American composers on the series. Samuel Barber submittedfor the maestro’s consideration both the First Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for Strings, an orchestral transcription of the Adagio from his String Quartet in b minor.

Not always a paragon of tact, Toscanini sent back both scores without comment, infuriating the composer. Barber profoundly revered the conductor and had endeavored to compose something worthy of him only to receive a snub. In actuality, Toscanini had kept the scores just long enough to commit them to memory and intended, as he told the composer’s friend Gian Carlo Menotti, to perform both works on the air. He premiered both on November 5, 1938.

The neo-romantic Adagio was an instant success and has remained Barber’s most popular work by far. Its emotional power lies in the imperceptible gradual buildup of tension by the repetition and elaboration of the stepwise theme in different registers and instrument combinations.

At the powerful climax there is a short pause after which the theme is restated in its original form and then winds down peacefully.



Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Serenade for Strings, Op. 48

The year 1880 was not a very productive one for Tchaikovsky, but in the fall he produced in quick succession two vastly dissimilar works: The bombastic 1812 Overture, composed for the consecration of the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow to commemorate Russia’s victory over the armies of Napoleon; and the Serenade for Strings, one of his warmest, heart-felt creations.

Tchaikovsky commented on the two works: "The overture will be very loud, noisy, but I wrote it without any warm feelings of love and so it will probably be of no artistic worth. But the Serenade, on the contrary, I wrote from inner compulsion. This is a piece from the heart and so, I venture to say, it does not lack artistic worth." He wrote to his friend and publisher: “Whether because it is my latest child or because in reality it is not bad, I am terribly in love with this Serenade and can scarcely wait to have it presented to the world.”

He was not to be disappointed. The Serenade was received enthusiastically at its first performance in St. Petersburg, and the valse had to be encored. It is surprisingly lighthearted, compared to the composer's many melancholy works and has remained a favorite with audiences ever since for its freshness and charm, its brilliant string writing, its graceful waltz, its richly expressive elegy, and its lively finale based on a Russian folk tune.

In a way, the Serenade was an accident. When he started writing, Tchaikovsky was planning a symphony or perhaps a string quartet, and the Serenade just evolved. In the heading of the score, the composer wrote: “The larger the string orchestra, the better will the composer's desires be fulfilled.''

The themes of the first movement each represent a gradual increase in tempo. It opens with a majestic main theme that recurs as a frame for themovement – and the Serenad as a whole.

A transition theme gradually picks up the tempo

into the main subsidiary theme, a whirling waltz.

The Allegro section is repeated with the opening theme, serving as a frame to close the movement.

The Waltz, the equivalent of the Classical minuet/trio, is an ABA form with internal repeats

and a short contrasting middle (or B) section.

The Elegie represents the emotional heart of the Serenade. Its three themes all resemble each other in shape – each one beginning with a full measure rising scalar "upbeat." But they differ sharply in character. The first resembles an accompanied recitative,

which leads into a more lyric second theme, introduced by pizzicato strings (in the style of a guitar or lute).

The third theme is simply a variation of the second theme, although rendered more emotionally intense by its rising sequences.

The final movement, marked Tema russo (Russian theme), begins with a shimmering slow introduction, an echo of the mood of the preceding Elegie. Whether Tchaikovsky intended this Andante melody

as the Russian theme in question is not clear, since it breaks out into another Russian virtuosic Allegro con spirito, showcasing the fast staccato bowing prowess of the upper strings.

The second melody is a contrasting legato.

An extensive coda is a reprise of the very opening of the Serenade, plus a final flourish of the Allegro melody.