Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) was an enormously eminent French musical pedagogue who taught many American composers including both John Vincent and David Diamond. One notable IPO encounter with Ms. Boulanger’s heritage was when the it performed the Aaron Copland Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in 2017. Copland was one of Boulanger’s earliest American students, and the Organ Symphony was premiered by Boulanger as organ soloist in Boston (1925). (Her earliest American student had been the female composer Marion Bauer who taught Boulanger English in exchange for her music lessons. It is amusing to imagine the distinguished French eminence speaking English with an American accent.)
Among her other students were many important composers, soloists, arrangers, and conductors, including Grażyna Bacewicz, Daniel Barenboim, Easley Blackwood, Elliott Carter, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Astor Piazzolla, Walter Piston, Elinor Remick Warren, Virgil Thomson, and George Walker.
But how did one get to study with Mademoiselle Boulanger? John Vincent (1902-1977), after mentoring with George Whitefield Chadwick of the New England Conservatory (The IPO has performed his “Jubilee”), was nominated by his Harvard professor Walter Piston for a John Knowles Paine Fellowship in 1935. Vincent had impressed Piston (who authored a very famous text simply titled, Harmony) by contradicting one of Piston’s theories of harmonic organization by introducing the concept of modes as a means of analysis. Vincent, who became Schoenberg's successor as professor of composition at UCLA, a position he held from 1946 to 1969, published his book The Diatonic Modes in Modern Musicin 1951. Lest one think that Vincent was solely a high-brow, Frenchified New Englander, he was born in Birmingham, Alabama and spent much of his youth with a crude recording device documenting the church services of Southern Blacks and the folk songs of rural Southern whites—recordings available today in the Library of Congress. His compositional style unites diverse streams of the American culture.
Among his works are a Symphonic Poem after Descartes, a string quartet, the ballet, Three Jacks, the La Jolla Concerto, a film score, “Red Cross” (1948), an opera, “Primeval Void” (1969), a piano quintet, and other chamber music, choral works, and songs. The Symphony in D was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra which premiered it in 1955. At the suggestion of Eugene Ormandy, the ending of the work was somewhat expanded, and in this revised version it was first performed by Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1957. Those forces made a magnificent recording of the work in early stereo, remastered in 2023.
The Symphony is in one movement. Editor Brian Hart, in his Introduction to the recently published The Symphony in the Americas, speculates that it was the influence of the Sibelius Symphony No. 7 (in one movement) as well as the success and popularity of the one-movement Roy Harris Symphony No. 3 (1938) that resulted in many American symphonies being constructed in single movements. (A table in that volume lists more than 90.) Yet, five “sections” of the Symphony in D can be discerned.
The very long, introduction-like opening material “Andante moderato” (moderate walking pace) relies on evolving melodic germs punctuated by the leap of a fifth (think of the chant of the wicked witch’s soldiers in “The Wizard of Oz”). In contrast to these leaps are rising and falling scale elements in the woodwinds and strings. The second section bursts loudly onto the scene with an “Allegro” (fast) brass-driven rhythm of a repeated galloping pattern of two eighth notes followed by a quarter note. There shortly follows a pensive, quiet section where Vincent seemingly releases his inner Puccini. This contemplative mood is broken by a solo, rhythmic side drum and timpani cadenza with the galloping rhythm leading into a long section of rambunctious, imitative counterpoint. After a brief hushed moment, the final section is a brilliant culmination.
These are Vincent’s comments on the Symphony:
Although it is in no sense programmatic, my Symphony has a special significance to me. It was written during a very happy time and in it I sang a song of deep personal joy. It reflects the warmth and love of great, good friends and expresses my thankfulness for a rich and full life. From the contemplative opening measures, I tried to express the course of growth of the consciousness of joy, which, toward the end of the first section, arrives at an ecstatic level (cello and horn melody). After a short lyric commentary, one is picked up and whirled away towards a singing tutti allegro, exuberant in character. From here on the mood of the piece is prevailingly that of a celebration, a festival in music. Successively tempestuous and broadly lyrical, the concept is primarily melodic with a strong rhythmic urgency. The ending of the Symphony is tumultuous, triumphant.
William Grant Still (1895-1978) did not go overseas to study with Nadia Boulanger. But for a Black American composer living in a country where educational opportunities were limited due to racism, it is surprising how his developmental experiences overlap with both John Vincent and David Diamond. Somewhat unusual for musicians of this level, none of our three composers tonight was at all proficient at the piano. Vincent was a flutist who, at times, was the “fifth” flute or a substitute with the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky, including playing The Rite of Spring under him. Still and Diamond were violinists, though Still readily picked up almost any instrument and learned it -- including accepting a job as a banjo player in a band before he had ever touched the instrument. But he seemed to draw the line at the piano. So, his scores are “pure” orchestrations not illuminations of piano pieces. Diamond played viola in the radio orchestra for the Hit Parade; Still played oboe in the pit orchestra for the astoundingly influential Broadway play, Shuffle Along.
Shuffle Along, an all-Black production with music by ragtime virtuoso Eubie Blake, was a landmark in Black musical theater, credited with inspiring the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. The show premiered at the 63rd Street Music Hall in 1921, and launched the careers of Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills, Fredi Washington, and Paul Robeson. When the show traveled for a run in Boston, Still took advantage of the proximity to the New England Conservatory to take months of private lessons in composition from George Whitefield Chadwick (who also taught Vincent). Recognizing talent, Chadwick would not accept any payment from the impecunious Still.
Still was born in Mississippi. When he was four, his band director father died, rumored to have been poisoned by whites who wanted his land, and his schoolteacher mother moved them to Little Rock, Arkansas where he lived in a relatively integrated neighborhood. Still viewed integration as an ideal and had strong disagreements with the Black separatists of the 60s and 70s as well as the Communist-sympathizers of the 30s and 40s like Robeson. Rejecting Robeson as well as the cultural elite white liberals of the East Coast made Still a political outlier to both Blacks and whites that just added to the difficulties getting his music performed.
There were two other major influences on Still. First, was the band leader (and “St. Louis Blues” composer) W.C. Handy with whom Still worked as an arranger as a young man starting in 1916. He hooked up with Handy in Memphis and toured the South with his band which unfortunately took place under appalling Jim Crow conditions. Once he had learned about the blues in their original context, Still realized that he could employ the blues in the “dignified” symphonic literature. The second influence, as shocking as this might seem to those who know his avant-garde compositions, was Edgard Varèse. Inspired by Dvořák’s having taught many Black musicians at the National Conservatory, Varèse called the New York-based Black Swan recording company, where Still was music director, to inquire about any Black composers that would benefit from lessons. Still didn’t hesitate. So, he had the most intimate experience with the blues and was taught the most advanced, even dissonant, European techniques.
This resulted in Still’s breakthrough with the tone poem Darker America, composed in 1924 but premiered in 1926 in the same New York venue as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924). Darker America, though getting nowhere near the acclaim of the Gershwin, integrates the classical symphonic orchestra with blues and jazz -- and arguably did this before Gershwin -- while also employing Varèse-influenced modernist dissonance. Though Still was subsequently to eschew any advanced techniques that would get in the way of communicating with his audience -- like the ‘liberation of dissonance” -- he had one more early sensation. This was the quirky, modernist-jazzy Levee Land, (1926) a performance-art, song cycle which was sung/acted by his star Black Broadway colleague, Florence Mills at an International Composers Guild concert. Toscanini was among the luminaries to congratulate Mills and Still.
Still’s most influential work, by far, was his Symphony No 1 “Afro-American” which was the first Black-composed symphony performed by a major American orchestra when it was premiered by the Rochester Symphony Orchestra under Howard Hanson (1931). As chair of the Eastman Conservatory of Music in Rochester, Hanson also had Still give lectures in orchestration to his students to at least provide enough income that Still could travel upstate for his Rochester premieres. (Hanson acted nobly regarding the career of the Black Still, though in David Diamond’s telling, Hanson was homophobic and anti-Semitic, as well as self-centered to the point of denying Diamond any significant Rochester performances.) In the “Afro-American Symphony,“ Still cheekily quotes the melody of “I’ve Got Rhythm” which he claimed originated with him.
After winning a Gugenheim in 1934, Still left New York permanently for Los Angeles where he settled with his second wife Verna Arvey. She was a pianist, journalist, and, subsequently, Still librettist and memoirist. As an interracial couple, they had to get married in Tijuana, Mexico. In Los Angeles, Still composed for film & television and wrote several operas. Still always considered himself an operatic composer that also wrote symphonies. [Langston Hughes, poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote the libretto for the Still opera, Troubled Island. I am the proud owner of a Hughes-autographed copy of the libretto.]
The Symphony No. 3 “The Sunday Symphony” depicts a day in the life of a devout worshiper and was completed in 1958. But it had its premiere posthumously in 1984 by the North Arkansas Symphony under Carlton Woods. It is in four short movements. The first movement “The Awakening” is a tuneful march that is loudly introduced by a scale up to a tritone, “the Devil’s interval.” (is this a contradiction?) The beautiful second movement titled “Prayer” has plenty of blues-inflections and non-triadic harmonies. The melody is played by the English horn (also employed in the famous Dvořák “Largo”). There is an impassioned middle section and a display of masterful orchestration at the recap of the prayer. The third movement is the Scherzo-like “Relaxation” with tambourine, triangle, and drums -- it seems these churchgoers like to “relax” by performing Native American dances. (While labeled Black, Still also claimed to have Native American, Spanish, and Scots-Irish genes.) The Finale is another march, in a minor key, “Days End and a New Beginning.” It, too, is in ABA form with a broader bluesy middle section which transitions seamlessly back to the march tune.
The way young American composers came to study with Nadia Boulanger is unique to them. For David Diamond (1915-2005) it was a meeting in Cleveland with the touring Ravel that was his ticket to France and Boulanger. Diamond, born in Rochester, New York, was living in Cleveland with his family and studying violin and music composition at the Clevland Institute of Music as a 13-year-old.
As Diamond told the story to Ellen Taffe Zwilich:
Mr. de Ribeaupierre [Diamond’s composition teacher in Cleveland] took me back [stage to see Ravel after his second Cleveland concert so Ravel could evaluate a new Diamond composition]. Now I was wearing… a purple turtleneck sweater…we were very poor…So, I washed my turtleneck sweater every other day and I had green corduroy pants. I loved wearing those green corduroy pants…and suede shoes. I don’t know how I came to the suede shoes, but I, I must have been a walking rainbow for sure .and all this red carrot curly hair falling all over my head.
Ravel invited Diamond and Ribeaupierre to his Hotel the next day.
Mr. de Ribeaupierre was to bring me to the Wade Park Manor… There was a grand piano in the room and… [Ravel] was now wearing a regular afternoon suit, and this is what he was wearing…yellow shoes…with stripes…orange wool socks…a green shirt… An orange tie on a green shirt… a jacket that was a mixture of the… turquoise and the green of the shirt and…it all fit, but he was a walking rainbow. So, this time I guess I was looking at him and then he said something again in French and broken English about, “I, I am in competition with you…”
But it was a congenial competition. And Ravel saw promise in the young composer.
“…Il faut that you study, study, you will come to France and you will study with,” and now I heard for the first time the name, Nadia Boulanger.
After the family moved back to Rochester, Diamond studied at the Eastman School of music -- both in high school and subsequently. It is possible that Diamond’s openly gay orientation as well as his Jewishness and abrasive personality cut his stay at Eastman short. He moved to New York in 1934 and studied privately with the fine American composer Roger Sessions. Finally, Diamond traveled to Paris and trained with the eminent French musical pedagogue Boulanger intermittently from 1936 to 1939.
Diamond’s long career had its ups and downs, including playing in pit orchestras and the radio Hit Parade orchestra to make ends meet. After his roommate, the female artist Allela Cornell, died from the lingering debility of her suicidal acid ingestion, the impecunious Diamond, himself, took an overdose of Seconal and alcohol. He was only saved by the intervention of conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos who spoke to Diamond on the phone, and sensing the situation, called the police.
Being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s (Diamond did not name names), resulted in a prolonged exile in Florence, Italy. The post WWII domination of 12-tone music and chance music made Diamond’s tonal approach seem out of date and irrelevant. When Diamond returned to the United States in 1965, he became head of the composition department at the Manhattan School of Music. He remained in the position until 1967. In 1973, he began teaching at the Juilliard School of Music, where he enjoyed a long teaching career, remaining on the Juilliard faculty until 1997. Diamond’s astounding productivity (11 symphonies, 11 string quartets, over 50 preludes and fugues for piano, etc.) of high-quality compositions, fortunately, resulted in a renaissance of interest in his works in the 80s and 90s. This included a bevy of recordings of his orchestral pieces by his former Julliard student, conductor Gerard Schwartz. In 1995, Diamond was awarded the National Medal of Arts, which was presented by President Clinton at the White House. Weeks before his death in 2005, Diamond stated his view of the musical world, "If music doesn't communicate, it has no chance of survival. The need for beautiful music is stronger now than ever."
We have discussed the travails of Diamond’s career, but tonight’s work, Symphony No. 2, comes from one of the brightest periods in his life. The New York Philharmonic under conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos premiered his First Symphony in 1941 when he was 26, and his compositions were championed and introduced by prominent and influential conductors, including Leopold Stokowski, Pierre Monteux, Serge Koussevitzky, Artur Rodzinski, and Leonard Bernstein.
To counteract the depressing emotional trauma of the wartime, Diamond composed his Rounds for Strings (1944) for Mitropoulos, about which New York Times music critic Olin Downs commented, "There is laughter in the music and no waste notes. Rounds is Diamond’s most famous piece and truly an audience favorite.
He was once ordered out of a rehearsal by the New York Philharmonic under the dictatorial Artur Rodzinski. that he, unauthorized, had snuck into for his Symphony No. 2. Rodzinski heard him walking down the steps of the balcony at Carnegie Hall and immediately shouted at him to leave. Diamond went to the Russian Tea Room and got drunk. When Rodzinski happened into the bar after the rehearsal, Diamond yelled at him and punched him in the face. That scotched any plans for a performance of the Symphony. Bernstein, Copland, and others raised money to get Diamond psychiatric care for his anger management. Nevertheless, Rodzinski a few years later had forgiven him, played his Rounds for Strings, and helped get him a $20K commission in the immediate post war period. That was a tremendous lot of money then!
The Symphony No 2 was premiered by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky in October 1944 to great acclaim. Rachmaninov, having heard the radio broadcast of the Symphony, told Diamond, “You have more talent than me.” (Just two months later, Koussevitzky with the Boston forces gave the world premiere performance of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, a piece which has been in the standard repertoire ever since including IPO performances by Carmon DeLeone and guest conductor Alastair Willis).
The Symphony is in four movements. The opening movement “Adagio funebre” (Slow, funerial) captures the wartime gravity with its stately dotted rhythm. This is first heard quietly in the timpani, then in the growing, imitative, downward-gesturing violins before the timpani resolutely beat this. The horns invert the leap upward, and this upward leaping, dotted rhythm continues into an imitative, quietly reflective passage for strings which recalls the Barber Adagio (1938). A plaintive oboe solo irons out the dotted rhythm as the orchestra reaches its loudest passage including pounding bass drum strokes. The second half of the movement, beginning with the solo bassoon, is a type of long recap with passages of upward and then passages of downward dotted jumps. After a blast on the tam-tam, the movement’s ending is a quiet hymn. With the successful length of this movement, one can see why Schoenberg urged Diamond to avoid the 12-tone method and remain, “a young Bruckner.” The second movement, “Allegro vivo,” (fast, lively) has all the energy of an air raid or an urban tumult with its thundering bass-drum strokes. There is a seemingly slower, softer, less hectic middle passage before the tumult returns.
The third movement, “Andante espressivo, quasi adagio” (Moderately paced expressive and feeling like a slow pace) can last anywhere from over 14 minutes (conductor Gerard Schwartz) to 9 minutes (Koussevitzky at the premiere) depending on how “adagio-like” the conductor feels the music. This movement also has a very prominent, stately dotted rhythm but on one note. The melodic movement is almost always stepwise here including a poignant, hushed recitative for the first violins and a later quiet solo for the principal flute. After a prominent punctuation by the horns, the winds, then the strings with clarinet, and finally bass clarinet bring the movement to its peaceful close. The finale, “Allegro vigoroso” (Fast, vigorous) is – a hoe down -- written almost contemporaneously with the famous Copland “Hoedown” from Rodeo (1942) – though there is far less barnyard turkey in the straw in the Diamond version.