Song of Democracy Howard Hanson
American composer, conductor, theorist, and educator, Howard Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska on October 28, 1896 and died in Rochester, NY on February 26, 1981. Hanson’s self-characterized his Romantically-inspired music as "springing from the soil of the American Midwest. It is music of the plains rather than of the city and reflects, I believe, something of the broad prairies of my native Nebraska." Among the composers who had a deep influence on his style was the Finnish master, Jean Sibelius, with whose Nordic provenance Hanson felt a close affinity. Famous for his leadership of the Eastman School of Music (1924-1964), he maintained his activity as a composer and conductor and was responsible to supporting the careers of many American composers through his directorship of the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, an institution that performed and recorded a large number of new compositions. Hanson and his wife, Margaret, also spent many summers at the Chautauqua Institution, where her parents owned a vacation home.
The Song of Democracy, composed in 1957 and based on poetry by Walt Whitman, is one of Hanson’s most popular compositions. Written to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Education Association and the 50th anniversary of the Music Educator's National Conference. It was first performed by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC, followed by a performance by the Howard University Afro-American Chorus for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The work is scored for chorus, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp, and strings.
Written in an appealing style, and filled with optimistic patriotism, Song of Democracy has been a favorite of high school and college choruses throughout the United States. Opening with a motto derived from Hanson’s popular Symphony no. 2 (“Romantic”), the 13-minute work brings Walt Whitman’s words of inspiration to life though clear declarative writing for the chorus and rich orchestral textures and colorful sonorities. At times slow and reflective, at others faster and triumphant, the work exudes a confidence that is much needed, perhaps more than ever in the politically divisive time in which we are currently living. Arguably the most memorable moment of the entire work is the setting of the following:
Sail, Sail they best, ship of
Democracy
Of value is thy freight,’tis
not the present only
The Past is also stored in
thee.
Program Note by David B. Levy, © 2024
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 (“Choral”) Ludwig van Beethoven
One of history’s pivotal composers, Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16 or 17, 1770 in Bonn, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. His Ninth Symphony, op. 125 was composed over a period of many years, most intensely between 1822 and 1824, culminating in its premiere in Vienna’s Kärtnertortheater on May 7, 1824. It is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, timpani, and strings.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has acquired a status of universal approbation unmatched in the symphonic repertory. The British affectionately call Beethoven’s Ninth the “Choral” Symphony, while the Japanese, who each December present well over one hundred performances of it, have dubbed the work “Daiku” (“Big Nine”). It is a mainstay of concert halls and music festivals throughout the world. Wagner saw fit to conduct a performance of it when he laid the cornerstone of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1872. In the summer of 1989 in China, revolutionary students gathered in Tiananmen Square and played its finale through loudspeakers in order to bolster their spirits. Later the same year, in Berlin, Leonard Bernstein led a ceremonious performance of it on December 25, altering Schiller’s “Freude” (Joy) to “Freiheit” (Freedom) in symbolic celebration of the razing of the Wall which had divided that city.
The Ninth is, at the same time, one of Beethoven’s most perplexing
compositions—a work that remains one of the world’s most revered musical masterpieces, but which is not without its problematic side. Its musical syntax is a curious mixture of complexity and simplicity, and over time critics have seen fit to assail it on both counts, although virtually no composer after Beethoven could escape the Ninth’s immense shadow. Stemming as it did from a particular time and circumstance—Vienna during the during the age of Metternich—with all the musical, social, and cultural associations of that period, the Ninth Symphony has emerged as ceremonial piece par excellence, befitting artistic and political summitry, as well as populist symbol for freedom-loving citizens from Beijing to Berlin. The Ninth Symphony is much more than a monument of Western music: it is a cultural icon. UNESCO declared it to be the first musical composition to be entered into the Memory of the World Register in 2001.
Beethoven’s last symphony represents the culmination of two discrete projects. The first was the fulfillment of a commission for a new symphony tendered by the Philharmonic Society of London in 1822, itself the partial satisfaction of an earlier request from the Society for two new symphonies. The other project dates back to 1792, the year in which we have the first evidence of Beethoven’s interest in setting Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem, An die Freude (Ode to Joy), to music. The joining of these separate enterprises into the Ninth Symphony did not occur until relatively late in the symphony’s evolution. First performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824, the Ninth Symphony immediately made a tremendous impact, despite its faulty execution.
Indeed, the work itself seems immeasurable. The opening Allegro un poco maestoso is not the longest first movement that Beethoven composed, yet its scale is greater than any other. One reason for this lies in the density of its content. From a barely audible murmur, fragments in the strings grow in speed and intensity as they coalesce to form the titanic first theme. The time scale in which this occurs is small, but its implication is immense. Never before, and rarely since, has such a force ever been unleashed in music. The opening of the movement is unique, yet all subsequent imitations of it (Bruckner and Wagner, most notably) were conceived in fully self-conscious homage to Beethoven. Equally cataclysmic in its impact is the explosion in D major that launches the movement’s recapitulation. The powerful funereal peroration from the coda also has also been imitated—most notably by Gustav Mahler—but never equaled. The first movement of the Ninth Symphony is tragedy writ large.
The scherzo (not identified as such in the autograph score), is placed as the symphony’s second movement. The tragedy of the first movement is now re-played as a farce. It begins dramatically, as the strings and timpani hammer out its distinctive motif. After a full-scale treatment of the Molto vivace cast in sonata form and replete with a fugal exposition and metrical trickery in its development section, the pastoral trio in D major offers the first true moment of respite. The word scherzo means joke, but anyone familiar with Beethoven knows that his humor often has its dark side, and the scherzo of the Ninth Symphony is one of the demonic ever penned. The final “joke” of this movement comes in its coda, where Beethoven threatens to repeat the trio section, only to thwart our expectation with an abrupt ending—a gesture that he used in the scherzo of his Seventh Symphony (1812).
The Adagio molto e cantabile third movement dwells in the realm of pure melody and dance. Aestheticians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fond of making a distinction between the “sublime” (lofty) and the “beautiful” in art. If the first two movements are representative of the former, the third movement of the Ninth Symphony surely is an exemplar of the latter. The movement is cast as a rondo with varied reprises for each of its two themes. A distinguishing characteristic of the first theme is the woodwind echo that occurs at the end of each phrase of the hymn-like theme played by the strings, a feature that is retained in each of its returns. The second theme is a contrasting Andante moderato in triple meter. The literal midpoint of the movement (and, in fact, the entire symphony) is its ethereally calm development section, where the color of woodwinds (Harmoniemusik) dominates its landscape. The fourth horn emerges out of this heavenly serenity in a celebrated passage which culminates in an unaccompanied scale. Listeners should attend to how this instrument continues to play a prominent, and often virtuosic, role throughout the remainder of the movement.
The onset of the finale rudely shatters the calm with a glancing dissonance and a passage that Wagner dubbed the “horror fanfare” (Schreckensfanfare). Evidence from Beethoven’s sketches reveal that Beethoven had considerable difficulty effecting a transition from the purely instrumental opening movements to the choral part of the finale. How, after all, does one introduce an element that never before had belonged to a genre? Using every bit of his ingenuity, and bringing his experience gained from previous works to bear (the “Choral” Fantasy and several piano sonatas), Beethoven hit upon the idea of using instrumental recitative—played here by the cellos and contrabasses—as a conduit from the world of purely instrumental music to that of instrumental/vocal.
The instrumental recitative is a superbly effective device, used as a link between fragmented reminiscences from the previous movements. The reason for these thematic recollections has been interpreted by analysts in various ways. Most writers suggest that the recitative serves as a rebuff of the spirit of these earlier movements, each of which in turn is spurned by the cellos and basses until the famous “Joy” melody is presented. But there is another possible reason why Beethoven elected to bring back these themes, a purpose that is as much prospective as it is retrospective. The elaborate multi-sectional finale plays out as an entire four-movement symphonic structure in miniature. Viewed from this perspective, the episode of recitative and recollection is an introductory prefiguration of the landscape of the entire finale.
The presentation of the “Joy” theme in variations (both instrumental and vocal) comprises the gesture of a first “movement.” The portions of Schiller’s An die Freude used in this part are the ones that are most overtly profane or pagan in spirit. This is followed by the “Turkish” music that acts as a kind of scherzo, which in turn yields to a solemn slow “movement” (Seid umschlungen, Millionen). This third section devotes itself to the most overtly sacred parts of Schiller’s poem. The re-entry of the “Turkish” percussion movements marks the onset of the “finale,” where Beethoven joins together the profane and the sacred in a symbolic marriage of Athens and Jerusalem. Joy, then, serves as the agent through which “all men become brothers.”
Notes by David B. Levy © 2008/2016/2019/2022/2024