American Boulangerie Program Notes

Concert info: https://philharmonianw.org/american-boulangerie/

Prelude

What does it mean to be a great teacher? As an educator for over 25 years, this is a question I often ponder. While there are outcomes to evaluate and rubrics one could use, there may be no better metric to measure the success of a teacher than the work and achievements of their students. If this metric is an indication of greatness in a teacher, then Nadia Boulanger can be considered one of the greatest music educators of the 20th Century. Over the entirety of her teaching career, which spanned the time from when she was 17 years old in 1904 until her death in 1979 at the age of 92, she taught many of the leading composers of our time, from Olivier Messaien to Quincy Jones to Philip Glass, and many, many more.

In addition to being a renowned educator, Nadia Boulanger was also an outstanding organist, pianist, conductor, and composer. She came of age in France in a time of incredible musical growth, studying with Gabriel Fauré and witnessing the premieres of works such as Stranvinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which she adored, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which she did not. She was the first woman to conduct both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic and was a lecturer at Harvard, Peabody Conservatory, and the Crane School of Music, in addition to directing the French Music School for Americans at Fontainebleau, which continues to this day. In 1962, she was invited to dine at the White House by John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, a rare honor for a female musician at that time. These accomplishments are only a small sample of a remarkable and remarkably influential woman.

Today’s concert, ingeniously programmed by Music Director Michael Wheatley, explores music from several of Boulanger’s students, including some of the more famous in Copland and Barber, and lesser-known but equally important in Dett and Howe. The music we encounter today covers a vast array of tonal landscapes and emotional arcs, all through superb compositional craft, which Boulanger instilled in her students. Yet these pieces also bring us distinct musical voices, an attribute Boulanger believed was vital to great composition. “You need an established language and then, within that established language, the liberty to be yourself,” Boulanger once told Quincy Jones.  “Your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being.”

Nathaniel Dett, arr. James Ray: Cinnamon Grove

Canadian-born and American-bred, composer R. Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943) was a prolific composer whose music encompassed piano solos, choral compositions, and orchestral works. Often using African American folk songs and spirituals as the basis for his compositions, he believed in the “emancipation of the melodies of an enslaved people” and would receive many honors for his pioneering work, including honorary doctorates from Howard and Oberlin Universities. In 1929, he travelled to France to study with Nadia Boulanger.

Composed in 1928 for solo piano, Cinnamon Grove is an improvisatory work inspired by poetry and the language of spirituals. The version we hear today is the world premiere of an orchestration commissioned by Maestro Wheatley and Philharmonia Northwest from Dr. James Ray, Associate Professor of Music at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Dr. Ray offers of Cinnamon Grove and its orchestration:

“What I come away with is an impression of four movements that are distinct, but clearly unified by a sort of youthful optimism. Much of this for me is captured in the melodic and countermelodic activity, which I would characterize as breezy and carefree (I. Moderato molto grazio), songful and full of hope (II. Adagio cantabile), daring with a smirk (III. Ritmo moderato), and full of sublime giddiness (IV. Allegretto). There’s a complexity, though, in that while these movements may be light in character, there’s still a kind of emotional depth that each is able to get at in its own way.”  

So many of the works we now consider standard orchestral repertoire began their life as commissions and the practice is vital to the ongoing health of orchestral music. The partnership between Philharmonia Northwest and Dr. Ray offers a shining example of how local orchestras can play an important role in this tradition.

Samuel Barber: Knoxville Summer of 1915, Op. 24

It has become the time of evening
when people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently.

These are the opening words of James Agee’s 1935 prose poem Knoxville Summer of 1915, which would become the text for Samuel Barber’s renowned work of the same name for soprano soloist and orchestra. Barber, who studied with Nadia Boulanger for one year in the late 1930s, described the one-movement Knoxville Summer of 1915 as a lyric rhapsody, which finds cohesion through recurring refrains in the winds and an insistent sonic sentimentalism in the strings that illuminates the text. Though the winds and brass play an important role in the work, it may be Barber’s string writing, which many of us are familiar with from his more well-known Adagio for Strings, that propels Knoxville Summer of 1915 into masterpiece category. I offer that the strings act as the true conduit of the text, helping us understand the deep sense of trust and contentment found in Agee’s stream of consciousness storyline. As an example, listen to the soaring, longing string textures that accompany the following lines in the last third of the piece:

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening,
among the sounds of the night.
May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.

Mary Howe: Sand and Stars

Like many of her contemporaries, composer Mary Howe (1882–1964) travelled to Paris in 1933 to study with Nadia Boulanger. By this time she had already graduated from Peabody Conservatory and was becoming well known as a pianist, composer, and influencer in the orchestral world, having founded the National Symphony Orchestra in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Howe’s compositions, of which there are a large and varied amount, offer a strong sonic lineage of French Impressionism and an openness to modernism. The two short orchestral works we hear today, which Maestro Wheatley literally stumbled upon in the Eastman School of Music library during his doctoral studies, offer delightful interplay between strings, winds, and harp, very much in the spirit of late impressionism. Stars, in particular, resonates with tonality and textures that seem to pay homage to Debussy and Ravel, yet move beyond these allegiances with harmonic underpinnings that belie a 20th-century sensibility. Howe is just beginning to find the prominence in performance that her beautifully crafted music richly deserves.

Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring (Complete Ballet Version)

When Aaron Copland first went to Fontainebleau in France to study composition, he was not interested in working with Nadia Boulanger who was teaching harmony at the time, something Copland felt he did not need. After some persuasion from a classmate, Copland enrolled in one of her classes and was immediately taken with the power of her teaching. The two became lifelong friends with Boulanger introducing Copland to many people who would later champion his music. One scholar referred to Boulanger as “the reserved French woman behind the famous American composer.”

Many of us know the music of Copland’s Appalachian Spring but likely not in the version we will hear in this program, which is the full score of the ballet for which it was commissioned in 1944. With choreography by Martha Graham, the work garnered Copland the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1945 and became a staple for the Martha Graham Dance Company, so much so that it was not performed by another company until 1998. As we listen, we will hear the familiar Copland “sound,” what is usually referred to as essential American music: rich strings, soaring brass, and melodies that evoke the vistas of Western states. Knowing what we know about the influence of Boulanger’s teaching on Copland, I believe what she helped him achieve is the same quality Quincy Jones learned, that an original voice is what to strive for as a composer. No matter how much technique is on display in Appalachian Spring, and it is in spades, we never lose the sense that it is Copland we are listening to.

Postlude

I would be remiss in not mentioning the delightful pun of today’s concert title: American Boulangerie. The word “boulangerie” is French for bakery, of course, and a play on Nadia Boulanger’s family name. If we extend this metaphor a bit, we might have some fun thinking of each of the pieces on today’s concert representing different charms of a French bakery: Cinnamon Grove like a macaron with its dreamy delights, the two pieces by Mary Howe a kind of mille-feuille that brings us something new with each bite, Knoxville Summer of 1915 reminding us of un pain au chocolat, oozing with nostalgia and warmth, and Appalachian Spring a brioche, with its complexity and depth. If you’ll allow me to keep going, I’d suggest Nadia Boulanger is represented by the baguette in this concert, the bedrock of French baking: reserved, stable––not drawing attention to itself––but essential.

James Falzone
Dean and Professor of Music
Cornish College of the Arts