John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951)
Born February 28, 1876, in Park Ridge, Illinois
Died April 26, 1951, in Chicago

Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life
Composed 1923-24
Premiered on February 19, 1926 in New York, New York at the Metropolitan Opera House conducted by Louis Hasselmans featuring dance soloists Albert Troy, Rita de Leporte, and Roger Dodge

Performance Time: Approximately 21 minutes

Few composers in the 1920s walked a finer line than John Alden Carpenter between the rarefied aesthetic realm of the “New Music”—as exemplified by Stravinksy, Schoenberg, or the ultramodernists—and the new American, more accessible, jazz-oriented idiom. By the time he began working on Skyscrapers in 1923, Carpenter had already experimented with incorporating these two musical trends in a number of works—most notably in Krazy Kat, the composer’s “jazz pantomime” of 1921. Skyscrapers saw his most successful and persuasive blend of the modernist ethos, with its strident orchestration, compulsive ostinatos, irregular rhythms, and loud dissonances with the vernacular, here vividly represented by popular tunes, ragtime dances, and jazz instruments (such as banjo, the first such use in a symphony orchestra).

The orchestral score is influenced by the jazz bands Carpenter heard at Colosimo’s Café in Chicago. There, Carpenter heard the hot jazz styles of musicians arriving from New Orleans—Joe “King” Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet, among others.

Like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) and Poulenc’s one-act ballet Les biches (1923), Skyscrapers was commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. Skyscrapers, however, was never produced by him; it was first staged instead in 1926 at the Metropolitan Opera House (at its original 39th Street and Broadway location), where it enjoyed a remarkable two-year run. The fact that, following a successful European premiere in 1928, it had multiple subsequent performances across Europe and Latin America, as well as the United States, attests to the score’s lasting impression and the high regard it drew from Carpenter’s contemporaries, easily making it his most well-known work.

Carpenter wrote that Skyscrapers is “a ballet which seeks to reflect some of the many rhythmic movements and sounds of modern American life. It has no story, in the usually accepted sense, but proceeds on the simple fact that American life reduces itself to violent alternations of WORK and PLAY, each with its own peculiar and distinctive rhythmic character. The action of the ballet is merely a series of moving decorations reflecting some of the obvious external features of this life.”

The dichotomy of WORK and PLAY is represented musically by sharply contrasting music—and contrasting dance gestures in the original choreography, too. The WORK music features driving and mechanistic rhythms. Much like the traffic, trains, and factories in a modern metropolis, this music never stops. Dissonant chords and a large percussion section—calling for six percussionists and two pianists—evoke the clangor and cacophony of city life. The dancers moved in lockstep, miming work with sledgehammers and riveters, as pyrotechnic devices shot flames up through a hole in the center of the stage to suggest the huge furnaces in steel mills. On either side of the stage, traffic lights flashed red toward the audience, the lights carefully coordinated with the music and notated in the score.

The PLAY music is lighter and brighter. It feels like a movie montage, as the audience’s attention is pulled from one character in the crowd to the next. In one moment, we hear evocations of Broadway musicals, then the banjo and saxophones typical of hot jazz in the 1920s. There are hints of folk songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and spirituals. In the ballet, one scene opens in front of “an exaggeration of the Coney Island type of American amusement park,” and the traffic lights go dark. Various characters emerge from the reveling crowd: a German street band, three barkers drawing crowds to their attractions, a “strutter” and his back-up dancers, a street cleaner, and a procession of men wearing sandwich boards. At one point, a merry-go-round is assembled at center stage, before dancers ride off into the wings on its wooden horses. Following a frenzied climax, the dancers return to the drudgery of WORK as the piece nears its end.

Like many American composers in the 1920s, Carpenter sought to find a distinctively American musical sound. Here, drawing inspiration from the skyscrapers rising in our metropolises and from the amusement parks surrounding them, Carpenter contrasted mechanistic modernism with the sounds of the expanding popular music industry. His moving exploration of modern American life is in turns boisterous, reflective, violent, and sentimental—all facets of the same evocative coin. By examining this dialectic— this cyclical interplay between skyscrapers and amusement parks, the moods of work and play—Carpenter perhaps subtly concludes that the two may not in fact be as incompatible as they seem on the surface, but rather complementary, as with all cycles in one’s life.

Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942)
Born June 8, 1894, in Prague, Bohemia,
Died August 18, 1942, in Wülzburg
concentration camp in Bavaria

Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, Op. 43
Composed 1923
Premiered on March 15, 1925 in Prague by Tschechische Philharmonie conducted by Václav Talich with soloist Karel Šolc

Performance Time: Approximately 21 minutes

A prolific and versatile composer, Erwin Schulhoff wrote in most musical forms and in a dazzling array of musical styles. His output, dating back to the late 1910s, is a microcosm of the early twentieth century: starting in a late-Romantic idiom, he then went on to explore folk-infused nationalism, the second Viennese school, neoclassicism, German “New Objectivity,” Dadaism, and jazz.

Following World War I, Schulhoff established his professional career in Dresden, where he moved in the same circles as avant-garde composers, writers, and painters. However, the rising tide of post-war anti-Semitism in Germany eventually pushed him back to Prague in 1923. By the 1930s, the influence of the Nazi party left Schulhoff with increasingly limited opportunities to work. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Schulhoff tried to flee. However, before he could finalize his arrangements the Nazi authorities arrested him and imprisoned him in the Wülzburg concentration camp, where he died from tuberculosis.

After World War I, Schulhoff’s music had moved in several new directions, often juxtaposing disparate styles. He studied with Debussy in Paris, he was part of the Dada group based in Berlin, he engaged with the expressionistic music of the Second Viennese School, and he was a passionate lover of jazz—thanks in no small part to his close friendship with George Grosz, a German painter who was among the first Europeans to collect American jazz recordings.

A brilliant pianist and enfant terrible par excellence, Schulhoff composed early works that betrayed an unbridled enthusiasm for the grotesque, satire, and Dada provocations: for instance, in Bass Nightingale (1922) for solo contrabassoon, he added the following text: “The spark of the gods can be present in both a liver sausage and a contrabassoon.” In the score of an earlier composition, In futurum (1919), for solo piano, the measures are written in impossible time-signatures and intricate rhythms, but are, however, entirely devoid of notes.

Written in the span of one month in the summer of 1923, Schulhoff’s single-movement Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra typifies the fascinating mixture of styles that characterizes his oeuvre from this period. The opening conjures the tonal language of Debussy. Two chromatic ideas appear in varied form throughout the first sostenuto section, while prolonged, idiosyncratic ostinati in the orchestral accompaniment display a certain minimalist conception. The aggressive march that follows is ironically marked “twice as slow,” making it too slow for a proper march; the same minimalist treatment continues here, when, toward the end of the march section, the entire orchestra repeats the same material for eight measures.

After a grand, virtuosic cadenza, the final section is marked Allegro alla Jazz, which includes a massive percussion section (contradicting the “small orchestra” claim from the title of the work). The material presented here is vastly different than what came before: it is forceful, energetic and highly syncopated; even the solo piano is treated somewhat percussively. After a brief, lyrical section (marked Alla zingaresca) featuring only the piano and a solo violin, the main idea roars back to life starting with a rumbling in the low strings that moves upwards through the rest of the orchestra, leading to a stirring finale that slowly establishes the tonal center of C major.

Edgard Varèse (1883-1965)
Born December 22, 1883, in Paris, France
Died November 6, 1965, in New York, New York

Arcana
Composed 1925-27
Premiered on April 8, 1927 in Philadelphia at the Academy of Music by The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski

Performance Time: Approximately 17 minutes

Edgard Varèse began his musical studies in Turin, where his family moved in 1893. He pursued advanced studies in Paris beginning in 1903, but was frustrated by the conservative attitudes that predominated at the Schola Cantorum and the Conservatoire. A decisive moment happened in 1907, when he read Ferruccio Busoni’s newly published and radical treatise, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music. Varèse moved to Berlin in search of like minds and soon found himself entrenched in the avant-garde scenes in both Berlin and Paris. In addition to Busoni, he grew close to Claude Debussy, the conductor Karl Muck, the musicologist Romain Rolland, the poets Jean Cocteau and Guillaume Apollinaire, and the novelist and librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, who introduced Varèse to his frequent collaborator, Richard Strauss.

In 1915, with World War I raging and with many of his early scores destroyed in a warehouse fire, Varèse found himself unable to secure any kind of permanent musical position, so he moved to New York. There, introductions from his friends in Berlin gave him access to the city’s musical and artistic circles, including the Dada group led by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. In the late 1910s, he gained a reputation for conducting avant-garde musical works in New York and Cincinnati. Building on this, he sought to organize composers interested in the shared pursuit of advancing the art of music. Much of the remainder of his career was devoted to creating and promoting experimental music, both his own and by other composers, and to encouraging the development of electric instruments, the first of which he had encountered in Paris in 1913.

Responding to Arnold Schoenberg’s reference to the “emancipation of the dissonance” in his atonal works, Varèse once wrote that the ultimate objective in his own music was the “liberation of sound.” Varèse’s conception of the pure exploration of all sonic properties of musical sound made him perhaps the first composer to think of sound in terms of a spatial, sculptural design, free from any conventional melodic, harmonic, or expressive implications.

Arcana is part of a series of works from the 1920s in which, drawing from his contemporary Igor Stravinsky and certain medieval and early Renaissance composers, Varèse developed the concept of “sound-masses,” an approach to composition that removed traditional “thematic” material, and instead emphasized contrasting blocks of sounds that could be juxtaposed, alternated, overlapped, or combined. These sound-masses might be distinguished by particular combinations of rhythms, pitches, intervals, instruments, shapes, tempi, and so on. The key works in this series include Hyperprism (1922–23), Octandre (1923), Intégrales (1924– 25), Arcana (1925–27), and Ionisation (1929–31).

The title Arcana is drawn from Arthur Edward Waite’s 1910 translation of The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus The Great. In one part of The Archidoxies, a likely misattributed work Paracelsus (c.1493–1541) describes the arcana as the four incorporeal and immortal elements—Primal Matter, the Philosophers’ Stone, the Mercury of Life, and the Tincture—from which the spiritual universe is created, much as the ancients believed that the physical universe was created from Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. Varèse opens the score for Arcana with a passage from Hermetic Astronomy, in which Paracelsus outlines the seven incorporeal stars that govern people’s souls: the Apocalyptic star, the astrological ascendant, one star for each of the arcana, and the star of imagination.

Arcana does not unfold in any conventional form, but instead repeats and reshuffles all existing material in ever-changing ideas and relationships. It is an infinite fresco that moves through colors, timbres, and tempi, leading to the climax toward the end, a shattering dissonant chord built on tritones, before it disintegrates slowly into nothingness. Dramatic as it is inventive and rhythmically and texturally mesmerizing, Arcana is an ever-fascinating sonic exploration, the embodiment of Varèse’s concept of music as a spatial art, as “moving bodies of sound in space.”

William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Born May 11, 1895, in Woodville, Mississippi
Died December 3, 1978, in Los Angeles, California

Symphony no. 1 ‘Afro-American Symphony
Composed 1929-30
Premiered on October 29, 1931 in Rochester, New York by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Howard Hanson

Performance Time: Approximately 24 minutes

William Grant Still’s musical career began during his undergraduate studies at Wilberforce University, in southwestern Ohio. To satisfy his mother, he enrolled in premedical courses, but his real passion was for music. After leaving Wilberforce in 1915, Still performed with bands in Dayton and Columbus, and his burgeoning skills as a composer and arranger drew the attention of W.C. Handy. After additional studies with George Chadwick at the Oberlin Conservatory, Still moved to New York City in 1920 and was soon playing in and arranging for bands led by Handy, Willard Robison, Artie Shaw, Sophie Tucker, Don Voorhees, and Paul Whiteman.

In the 1920s, Still continued his composition studies with Edgard Varèse. As a member of Varèse’s International Composers’ Guild, Still would also become a founding member of Varèse’s Pan-American Association of Composers in 1926. Still’s chameleon-like, six-decade career would reflect his versatile skills as a composer, performer, conductor, orchestrator, and more. Still appears to have done it all: he composed five symphonies and nine operas, chamber music compositions, four ballets, popular songs, radio music, television music, and film scores; he arranged and orchestrated works for jazz artists, musical theatre shows, and major Hollywood composers.

Still broke numerous racial barriers in American music. He advocated strongly for Black artists through his extensive collaborations with the writers and creators who made up the Harlem Renaissance, and he was an ardent commentator on music and race relations.

Still described his art music as moving through three style periods. The “ultramodern” period of the 1920s captures his association with Varèse, a time when Still was creating experimental music that combined the rousing sounds of jazz and the bent notes of blues with the highly dissonant language of modern music. His compositions of the 1930s reflects an effort to more overtly incorporate elements of blues, jazz, and spirituals into a lyrical and romantic context. Finally, his works composed from the 1940s through the 1960s focused on broadening the scope of his musical explorations.

Completed in just two months, Still’s Afro- American Symphony is the quintessential piece from his second compositional period. The opening English horn solo is a plaintive blues lick that leads into a conventional sonata-form movement in which Still replaces the typical 8-bar phrases with 12-bar blues choruses. The second movement expresses sorrow; here, the melodies are infused with the call-and-response patterns found in many spirituals. The third movement introduces two lively, syncopated themes, each with its own variations, presented in the sweet jazz style associated with Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin. The finale is often described as an homage to Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony—a fitting tribute given Dvořák’s assertion that African American folk musics must be essential to any serious attempt to create a distinctively American musical sound. Here, a hymnlike introduction gives way to a lively and triumphal closing movement that recalls some of the themes that appear in earlier movements.

Still offered multiple hints at a program for the symphony. (Later, Still also recorded titles for each of the movements in his sketchbook for the unfinished opera Rashana: “Longing,” “Sorrow,” “Humor,” and “Sincerity.”) The published conductor’s score offers epigraphs for each of the movements, drawn from four poems by the pioneering African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906): “Twell de night is pas’,” “It’s moughty tiahsome layin’ ’roun’,” “An Ante- Bellum Sermon,” and “Ode to Ethiopia.” With text from the fourth poem, “Ode to Ethiopia,” Still accompanies the symphony’s final movement:

Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul.

Thy name is writ’ on Glory’s scroll

In characters of fire.

High ’mid the clouds of Fame’s bright sky

Thy banner’s blazoned folds now fly,

And truth shall lift them higher.