Program
“Let Freedom Ring”
Jerry Junkin, Artistic Director & Conductor
The Honorable Rex Tillerson
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
November 12, 2019 | 7:30 p.m.
Fanfare
Fanfare for a New Day (2019) – Kevin Poelking
Dallas Winds Brass and Percussion
Matteo dal Maso, Conductor
Program
Eternal Father, Strong to Save (1860/1975) – Claude T. Smith
The U. S. Field Artillery (1917) – John Philip Sousa
American Variations (1970) – Jerry Bilik
Of Our New Day Begun (2015) – Omar Thomas
A Lincoln Portrait (1942) – Aaron Copland/Walter Beeler
The Honorable Rex Tillerson, narrator
Program Notes
Claude T. Smith (March 14, 1932 – December 13, 1987)
Born in Monroe City, Missouri, Claude T. Smith was an American conductor, composer, and music educator. He was exposed to music as a child by his grandmother, who taught piano and played organ at church. When he joined band as an eighth grader, he chose the cornet as his instrument. By the time he got to high school he was learning to conduct, leading the local Boy Scout band. He switched to horn in college, and joined the 371 st Army Band upon graduation, serving during the Korean conflict.
Following his service, he returned to college to complete advanced degrees in music and begin to experiment with composition. He taught music in public schools in Missouri and Nebraska, then moved to the college level, leading the University Symphony Orchestra at Southwest Missouri State (now Missouri State University) for two years. In 1978 he left teaching to focus on composition full time, relocating to Raytown, Missouri. Over the course of his career he completed over 110 compositions for band, as well as works for orchestra and chorus. Eternal Father, Strong to Save was commissioned in 1975, and premiered at a Kennedy Center celebration of the 50th anniversary of the United States Navy Band.
John Philip Sousa (November 6, 1854 – March 6, 1932)
Sousa began his musical education when he was six, and must have settled on a musical career early. His father apprenticed him to the United States Marine Band at age thirteen to keep him from running away to join a circus band. He served out his apprenticeship with the Marines, then joined a series of theatrical orchestras, where he learned to conduct. In 1880 he returned to become the conductor of the “President’s Own” Marine Band, serving under five different presidents. In 1892 he left to form his own civilian wind ensemble, and rapidly scaled the heights of popular music to become the first American superstar. Over the next 39 years, until Sousa’s death, the Sousa Band toured America nearly every year, traveled to Europe at least three times, and once toured all around the world, with stops in England, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii before returning the mainland United States—all in the age of railroad and steamship travel.
In 1917 George Friedlander, a Lieutenant in the United States Army’s 306 th Field Artillery, asked Sousa to compose a march for his regiment based on The Caissons Go Rolling Along, which Friedlander assured Sousa was an old Civil War song, long since in the public domain.
“It was never published. The composer is dead,” one imagines Friedlander assuring Sousa. “Trust me.”
Sousa should never have trusted him. Shortly after U. S. Field Artillery debuted, he learned that the original caisson song was composed only nine years earlier, in 1908, by artillery Lieutenant (eventually Brigadier General) Edmund L. Gruber, who was still very much alive and not too happy about Sousa stealing his composition. Sousa reportedly passed all his royalties from the composition on to Gruber, but Gruber continued to fight a losing court battle to regain his rights and collect a portion of the profits on the song from various publishers and cover artists until his death in 1941.
In 1952 the Army conducted a nationwide contest to select an official anthem, but none of the entries caught on with the troops. From infantrymen to top brass, Gruber’s The Caissons Go Rolling Along won the popularity contest hands down. It was renamed The Army Goes Rolling Along, and became the Army’s official anthem in 1956.
Jerry Bilik (born October 7, 1933)
Jerry Bilik is an American composer and arranger whose works have found homes everywhere from the symphony orchestra to Disney on Ice. He has worked for Dick Van Dyke, Leonard Bernstein, Barbara Streisand, Neil Diamond, and many others. He called American Variations, written in 1970, “a musical portrait of the United States, as a series of ethnic variations on a single theme . . . Barbara Allen.
Possibly a folk song, with origins lost to time, Barbara Allen might equally be a show tune circa 1666. Samuel Pepys refers to “the little Scotch song of Barbary Allen,” sung by Mrs. Elizabeth Knepp, a popular actress, singer and dancer of the day. Some historians speculate that the song was written for Mrs. Knepp as part of her act.
Either way, the Barbara Allen was popular enough to be sung throughout the British Isles and to follow British colonists into the New World. It has been collected by such widely separated ethnomusicologists as James Francis Child (1860), Percy Grainger (1907), and Steve Roud and Julia Bishop (1970). Jean Ritchie, Joan Baez, Eddy Arnold, Pete Seeger, and the Everly Brothers each recorded a version.
The lyrics tell of a young woman who spurns the dying wish of a young man because he snubbed her at a party. When he dies, she is grief-stricken, and dies too. The pair are buried side by side. A rose grows from his grave and a briar grows from hers, twining together into a lover’s knot. One suspects there was more to their relationship than the song explains.
Bilik takes the song as a metaphor for the broad spectrum of diversity in America, and arranges it to reflect cultural groups from the symphony hall through a barn dance, a blues club, Jewish, Italian, Greek, Irish, Slavic, and Hispanic festivals, and a rock concert.
Omar Thomas (born 1984)
One of today’s most interesting new American composers, Omar Thomas combines jazz, gospel, and classical influences to create sparkling new works that audiences love. Born to Guyanese parents in Brooklyn, New York, in 1984, Thomas moved to Boston in 2006 to pursue a Master of Music in Jazz Composition at the New England Conservatory of Music.
At the age of 23, while still completing his Master of Music Degree, Thomas was appointed Assistant Professor of Harmony at Berklee College of Music. He is currently on faculty in the Music Theory department at The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Thomas wrote Of Our New Day Begun to honor the nine victims of the 2015 mass shooting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“My greatest challenge in creating this work was walking the line between reverence for the victims and their families, and honoring my strong, bitter feelings towards both the perpetrator and the segments of our society that continue to create people like him,” Thomas said. “I realized that the most powerful musical expression I could offer incorporated elements from both sides of that line – embracing my pain and anger while being moved by the displays of grace and forgiveness demonstrated by the victims’ families.”
He rooted the work in John Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing, weaving blues harmonies and melodies into the mix, and featuring singing, stomping, clapping, and tambourines in the instrumentation. The consortium assembled to create this work was led by Dr. Gary Schallert and the Western Kentucky University Wind Ensemble.
Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900—December 2, 1990)
One of the best-known American composers of the twentieth century, Aaron Copland is mainly remembered for his ballet music, although he also wrote symphonies, chamber music, opera, and film scores. His works, Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Fanfare for the Common Man are standards of the American classical repertoire.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, as the youngest of five children, Copland did not grow up in a particularly musical home. His father owned a shop, and put all his children to work there. It was Copland’s mother who encouraged the children to take piano or violin lessons. He began writing his own songs when he was eight years old. By age 15 he had decided to become a composer, and from 1925 — when he returned to America after studying in Paris — he was able to support himself by his music alone.
Determined to develop a distinctly American voice, Copland found few classical predecessors to draw on: only Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles made Copland’s cut. But American music was rich with jazz and blues from such artists as George Gershwin, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong. In the 1930s Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller provided additional jazz influences and, at a time when many classical composers were leaning toward the 12-tone scale and other abstract styles, Copland opted to keep his music accessible to the average listener.
“The composer who is frightened of losing his artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience is no longer aware of the meaning of the word art,” he said.
In the early 1940s, conductor Andre Kostelanetz asked Copland to write a work for orchestra to celebrate “an eminent American.” Although A Lincoln Portrait was commissioned for the New York Philharmonic, it debuted on May 14, 1942, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
The work weaves together excerpts from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches with themes from popular music of Lincoln’s day, including Camptown Races and On Springfield Mountain. A narrator—usually a prominent individual—reads Lincoln’s words above the music. The text portions are drawn from Lincoln’s first inaugural address, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and the Gettysburg Address.
Past narrators of A Lincoln Portrait have included Neil Armstrong, Marian Anderson, Bill Clinton, Henry Fonda, Walter Cronkite, Tom Hanks, Danny Glover, Al Gore, Katherine Hepburn, and James Earl Jones.
–program notes written by Gigi Sherrell Norwood