Scott Joplin
Overture to Treemonisha
Born November 24, 1868 in Texarkana, TX
Died April 1, 1917 in New York, New York

Composed 1911
Premiered on January 28, 1972 in Atlanta, Georgia
Conducted by Robert Shaw
Performance Time: Approximately 8 minutes

While all the composers on this program worked in a variety of genres and styles, Scott Joplin’s (1868- 1917) success almost entirely came from his compositions for piano, in particular piano rags—which makes the existence of his opera, Treemonisha, all the more unusual: the opera was never completely staged in Joplin’s lifetime, and only received a full performance more than a half century after the composer’s death. While there were Black composers in the late 19th century who received training in European compositional forms like the opera or the symphony, few had the financial means or societal support to see their works published or performed in large venues. Racism and cultural stereotyping kept Black composers relegated in the public’s eye to spirtuals and gospel, and later to forms of popular music like blues and jazz. Thus the challenge Joplin faced in wanting to create an opera, drawing on the style of music he knew best, was all the more formidable.

The exact date and place of Joplin’s birth are unknown, although it was around 1868 and either in Shreveport, Louisiana, or somewhere near Marshall, Texas. Equally mysterious are his early years as a musician, although we do know he was in Sedalia, Missouri by 1896, where his earliest piano compositions were published by local music publisher John Stark. The syncopated rhythms that his pieces explored with such beauty and virtuosity, referred to as “ragging” or “ragtime,” become so popular and pervasive that piano rags became a genre of their own in the music publishing business, with everyone hoping to cash in with their own take. Few were as compelling or original as Joplin’s, however, and his became the standard against which most others were judged. Eventually ragtime rhythms showed up in forms of music as well, from Sousa’s marches to pieces by Debussy and Stravinsky, among many others. Following the runaway popularity of the “Maple Leaf Rag,” Joplin relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, where he continued to write piano rags, but also wrote A Guest of Honor (1903), a one-act “ragtime opera” made up of 12 individual rags. The work was performed only a handful of times, mostly in small towns, as well as once in St. Louis. The tour was cut short when someone made off with the receipts. His publisher refused to publish the score, and no sign of A Guest of Honor has surfaced in more than 100 years. But Joplin was not finished with opera, not yet.

Joplin biographer Edward Berlin points to Will Marion Cook— Oberlin-educated, Dvořák-trained, and Joplin contemporary—as another likely person to experiment by bringing together the practices of European opera with the au courant sound of ragtime. Cook collaborated with poet and writer Paul Laurence Dunbar produced shows including Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898) and In Dahomey (1903). While the latter production, in particular, featured some of the biggest names in Black theater of the time—Bert Williams, George Walker, Aida Overton, among others— it marked a shift in musical theater overall, bringing together a range of styles, including minstrelsy, musical comedy, vaudeville. The productions made no immediate impression on the mainstream (read: white) opera world. Perhaps this was the state of things that Joplin had in mind as he worked to create his new ragtime opera.

By 1907, Joplin was talking about a new opera project: Treemonisha. The story centers on a baby girl who magically appears under a tree to a recently freed Black couple “somewhere in the State of Arkansas, Northeast of the Town of Texarkana and three or four miles from the Red River”; the parents name the girl Monisha, then change it to Treemonisha because the girl so loved to play under the tree where they found her. The action itself takes place in 1884; Treemonisha is 18 and seeks to raise her community out of ignorance, represented through the machinations of conjurers who prey on the superstitions of those around her. Joplin describes, in his preface to the score of the opera, the meaning of the very first notes of the overture: “This strain of music is the principal strain in the opera and represents the happiness of the people when they feel free from the conjurors and their spells of superstition.”

Joplin published a piano-vocal score of the opera himself in 1911, but struggled to find financial support for a production. A full staging of the opera never occurred in the composer’s presence; he died in 1917. Treehmonisha finally had its premiere in the midst of a surge of interest in Joplin and his work that occurred in the 1970s. A new generation of listeners took interest in Joplin following numerous recordings of his piano rags, beginning with a 1970 album of eight rags realized by pianist and musicologist Joshua Rifkin, Scott Joplin: Piano Rags. A collection of all of Joplin’s known rags was published two years later, and the pervasive use of Joplin’s rag “The Entertainer” in the hit 1973 film The Sting further pushed Joplin’s name and music into the general public’s consciousness. After years of effort and research, a fully staged production of Treemonisha took place at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center in 1972; numerous other productions have since followed. Joplin’s dream was finally realized.

Florence Price
Suite of Dances (for orchestra)
Born April 9, 1887, Little Rock, Arizona
Died June 3, 1953, Chicago, Illinois

Composed 1933
Premiere information unknown
Performance time: Approximately 6 minutes

Florence Price (1887-1953) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887. Her mother (also named Florence) provided her with her earliest musical training on the piano, with the young performer having her first recital at age four; she sold her first musical composition to a publisher at age 11. Following her graduation from high school, Price was educated at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, one of the few musical institutions in the country that accepted Black students; one of her teachers included the eminent composer (and NEC director) George Chadwick. She returned to the South to teach music for almost 20 years before she and her family moved to Chicago, where her work as a composer began achieving national attention. A well-known story is that she became the first Black woman to have a work played by a major symphony orchestra when the Chicago Symphony performed her first symphony, in 1933. Price continued to compose both orchestral works and especially songs, which were taken up by significant performers including Marian Anderson, who premiered many of Price’s vocal works. It was Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord” that Anderson performed as part of her recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939, attended by 75,000 in person and countless more who heard the concert broadcast nationally.

Scholar Douglas Shadle notes that the Suite of Dances is probably Price’s best-known work: an adaptation she created of an earlier trio of solo piano works, Three Little Negro Dances, which were intended as teaching pieces for her students. The songs are based on familiar folk dances, especially notable with the clearly syncopated tunes. Theodore Presser published the pieces individually in 1933, and again as a set in 1949 as part of a teaching methods book; Presser also printed the dances in their extremely popular music magazine The Etude, which provided current music news, teaching tips, good advice and, best of all, new music, for musicians and music teachers all over the world. The piano pieces were eventually arranged by Erik W. G. Leidzén for concert band and quickly gained popularity with ensembles around the country, among them the U.S. Marine Band. Price’s work has been known and celebrated since her passing, but was almost entirely missing from the active performance repertory, as the greater classical music industry has largely omitted or ignored music by women and/or people of color. New attention came to her story recently when a significant collection of her unpublished manuscripts, papers, books, and other materials were found in an abandoned house, about to be refurbished, in a small Illinois town in 2009; the house turned out to have been Price’s summer home at one time. The papers fortunately joined other Price materials already in the collection of the library of the Univeristy of Arkansas. Scholars including Shadle, Samantha Ege, and the author of Price’s first biography, Rae Linda Brown, have helped to bring information about Price’s background to the public’s attention, and more and more of her formerly unknown music is being performed and recorded.

Bernard Herman
Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra in Three Parts
(edited by Christopher Husted)
Born June 29, 1911 in New York, NY
Died December 24, 1975 in Los Angeles, CA

Composed 1960
Film score from Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho (1960)
Performance Time: Approximately 14 minutes

Bernard Herrmann’s promise as a composer came early, winning a composition prize at age 13. He studied music at NYU (with Percy Grainger) and at Juilliard (with Albert Stoessel). His career began, like so many others at the time, on radio, as a composer for CBS radio. One of his many assignments included writing music for radio dramas created for CBS by John Houseman and Orson Welles of the theater company the Mercury Theatre. Herrmann’s music thus appears on one of the most infamous radio broadcasts of all time, Welles’ 1938 radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. At the same time, Herrmann’s career writing for the concert hall was thriving; his works from this time include a cantata (Moby Dick (1940)) and a symphony (1942), culminating with the completion of his opera, Wuthering Heights (1951).

Herrmann’s work with Welles at CBS led to the upstart young director calling upon the equally upstart composer (Herrmann was only four years older than Welles) to provide the score for Welles’ first film, Citizen Kane (1940). Herrmann’s next film score, for The Devil and Daniel Webster (also known as All that Money Can Buy (1942)), garnered Herrmann his first—and only—Academy Award (from a total of five nominations). Herrmann’s long list of credits reads like a Golden Age of Hollywood role call; we find him working with some of the most influential, successful, and/or notorious directors in Hollywood, including Joseph Mankiewicz, William Dieterle, Michael Curtiz, Fred Zinnemann, J. Lee Thompson, François Truffaut, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese. Dramas seemed to be his stock in trade, not only in film, but also on television, for which he also became a prolific composer: he created the opening and closing credit music for the first season (1959-60) of The Twilight Zone and for six episodes of the series, as well as for numerous episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Some of his most memorable film scores include the blaring four note brass motive that announced the wicked intentions of villain Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) in Cape Fear; the score proved so indelible that when Martin Scorsese remade the film in 1991, they retained Herrmann’s score (albeit in an altered form, overseen by Elmer Bernstein).

Herrmann’s longest and arguably most famous partnership, however, was with Alfred Hitchcock: he worked on nine of Hitchcock’s films, including as a sound consultant for The Birds. Many stories around the inception and production of the music for Psycho exist; one is that Herrmann, a master of orchestration, deliberately chose to use only a string orchestra, as he put it, “to complement the black-and-white photography of the film with a black-and-white score.” Perhaps the most astonishing fact is that Hitchcock had not intended to use music at all during the infamous shower scene, and that Herrmann’s score uses just the violins to achieve the stabbing, screeching sounds that perfectly illustrate the on-screen crime. Herrmann commented, “People laugh when they learn it’s just violins… It’s just the strings doing something every violinst does all day long when he tunes up. The effect is as common as rocks.” Another enduring sound from Psycho comes in “The Madhouse,” which may be one of the most suspenseful and influential cues from the film; the excruciatingly deliberate pace of the held notes, as each dissonant line comes slowly into conflict with the next before releasing the tension, dovetailing with yet another, anxiety-inducing note, remains the exemplar for so many tense scenes in cinema, television, and video games.

Kurt Weill
Kleine Dreigroschenmusik
Born March 2, 1900 in Dessau, Germany
Died April 3, 1950 in New York, NY

Composed in 1928
Premiered on February 7, 1929 in Berlin, Germany
Conducted by Otto Klemperer
Performance Time: Approximately 22 minutes

Kurt Weill (1900-1950) no doubt learned much about the power of musical drama from his father, a cantor in Dessau, Germany. The young composer was mentored by composers and theater musicians alike, and many of his early efforts were stage works. So much of his output—and so much of his fame—centers on dramas, including songspiels, musical comedies, ballets, operettas, radio dramas, incidental music for plays, and so on.

The work that in many ways defined his career was Die Dreigroschenoper or “The Threepenny Opera,” a collaboration with writer Bertolt Brecht; the show was adapted from John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, a ballad opera—that is, an opera made up of popular or traditional songs that alternate with spoken dialogue— which has been performed regularly since it first appeared in 1728. Like its progenitor, the newly-created songs in Die Dreigroschenoper teem with references to current cultural themes, poltical issues, and social controversies—all of which would be excised when Weill created an instrumental suite of the tunes.

The show appeared during a time in Weill’s life when he was especially productive. Die Dreigroschenoper premiered on August 31, 1928; within a few years of its premiere he also worked on a comic opera, a one-act opera, the Mahagonny songspiel- later the Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (another collaboration with Bertolt Brecht); another comic opera, radio music, incidental music for numerous other shows and prodcutions, works of his own, songs and workers’ choruses.

The popularity of Die Dreigroschenoper and its tunes led to a variety of works based on the original in some way; the first was this instrumental suite, a collection of eight of the most memorable melodies from the show, scored for a “wind ensemble” of 16, including banjo, guitar, piano, and bandeoneon. Weill wrote a letter to his publisher in February 1929, stating: “I heard the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik (I deliberately avoided using the word ‘suite’) yesterday at rehearsal; I am very content with it. There are eight numbers in all new, concert versions, with some new intermediate strophes and an entirely new orchestration… I believe the piece can be played an awful lot, since it is precisely what every conductor wants: a snappy piece to end with.” Kleine Dreigroschenmusik officially premiered at the Berlin Staatsoper on February 7, 1929, conducted by Otto Klemperer, who also featured the suite at a performance just a few weeks prior on a program with pieces by Berlioz (Rákóczy March) and Johann Strauss II (Emperor Waltz).

Die Dreigroschenoper took on an entirely new life—a veritable renaissance—in the late 1940s, when the American composer Marc Blitzstein, who saw the show in Germany in the late 1920s, began adapating some of the lyrics into English. Earlier translations had been made, but none had been successful or had met with Weill’s approval. Weill died at age 50; he never got to see the wild success of Blitzstein’s production—which opened in 1954—or the renewed popularity of his songs, in particular the transformation of “The Ballad of Mack the Knife (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer)” into “Mack the Knife,” which became a wildly popular hit for both Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin, and was recorded by dozens of other artists.

Leonard Bernstein
Three Dance Episodes from “On the Town”
Born August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, MA
Died October 14, 1990 in New York, NY

Composed 1945
Premiered on February 3, 1946 in San Francisco, Clifornia
Conducted by Leonard Bernstein
Performance time: Approximately 11 minutes

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) stands apart from the other composers on the program not because of his compositional output, but rather because so much of his fame came from his career as a conductor. Like everyone else on this program, he too experimented in diverse forms, was known to many for one style, wished to be taken seriously as a composer, and yet did not refrain from working in genres that were not seen as being “serious.”

On the Town was inspired in part from an earlier commission, from the choreographer Jerome Robbins, to score a ballet around the idea of three sailors on leave in New York City, which became Fancy Free (1944). As musicologist Carol Oja has shown, several genres come together in On the Town, including the war musical, itself a unique framing device particular to the 1940s, when both Broadway musicals and war stories (in films and stage musicals) were at a particular peak; the stories often try to diffuse anxiety about the war with comedy, and include shows like Irving Berlin’s This is the Army and Cole Porter’s Something for the Boys. On the Town also evinces many charateristics of the late 1930s/ early 1940s screwball comedy, with the various shenanigans that occur as the trio race around the city; some of these silly situations also remind us of the mischief of comic opera. Bernstein infuses the score with references to—or complete excursions within—popular genres of music at the time, rather than staying entirely within one sound or style.

On the Town premiered on December 28, 1944, and was an immediate hit, garnering rave reviews; it ran for 462 performances, closing on February 2, 1946, followed immediately by a national tour, which ran for four months. Bernstein created the suite we’ll hear tonight in 1945, during the show’s original run. He dedicated the movements to the female leads of the original production: the first movement goes to fashion and art icon Sono Osato, who played Miss Turnstiles, aka Ivy Smith; movement two is for Betty Comden, who not only played Claire De Loone (!) in the show but also co-wrote the lyrics and book with her writing partner, Adolph Green (who played Ozzie in the show); and the third goes to Nancy Walker, who starred as the brash and brassy Bruennhilde “Hildy” Esterhazy.

The composer described the episodes by saying, “I believe this is the first Broadway show ever to have as many as seven or eight dance episodes in the space of two acts… The essence of the whole production is contained within these dances… That these are, in their way, symphonic pieces rarely occurs to the audience attending the show, so well integrated are all the elements.” Indeed, the suite provides a thrilling and evocative overview of the emotional highs and lows of the two-act musical, perhaps best captured in episode three, “Times Square,” which displays the joyful abandon and innocence of the three sailors as they go on their quest, with Bernstein’s up-down, jarring sounds meant to evoke the feeling of the biggest and most exciting city in the world. Osato herself perhaps best described the music: “Lenny’s music was brash, bold, frantic, and funny, capturing the pulse of New York Life. It was symphonic, jazzy, atonal, and operatic. It was low-down, honkytonk, and ‘hot.’”