“Voices of a Nation” Program Notes

This program brings us the voices of four quintessentially American composers, beginning with a pair of works inspired by recent American-hosted Summer Olympics: John Williams’s rousing Olympic Fanfare and Theme, written for the 1984 Los Angeles games, and Michael Torke’s spirited Javelin, written in anticipation of the Atlanta Olympics of 1996. Then, we have Aaron Copland’s patriotic A Lincoln Portrait, written in the dark days following the Pearl Harbor attack that launched America into World War II. Peoria-native R&B sensation Liv Warfield will read Abraham Lincoln’s words. To close we have Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, inspired by one of America’s great landscapes

 

John Williams (b. 1932)
Olympic Fanfare and Theme 

Williams wrote this music for the Los Angeles Summer Olympic games in 1984. He conducted its premiere at the opening ceremonies on July 28, 1984. Duration 5:00.

 

Background

This program opens with a work by the greatest of living American film composers, John Williams. Williams’s musical career began as an arranger and composer in the Air Force Band. He returned to New York to study at Juilliard and to work as a jazz pianist. In the late 1950s, he moved to Hollywood to work as an orchestrator and studio pianist and conductor. He also began to compose scores for television and movies, and by 1967 had his first Academy Award nomination—the first of dozens—for Valley of the Dolls. In his later career, Williams has earned equal fame as an orchestral conductor, leading the Boston Pops from 1980-1993 and making many guest conducting engagements annually. He is also recognized for his concert music: a symphony, several concertos, and concert versions of his film scores. Williams has created many of the most enduring musical images in American movies—the threatening two-note motive of Jaws, the vast array of musical themes heard in the Star Wars movies, and countless other memorable themes. In 1984, when Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics, the city turned to one of its own—Hollywood’s leading composer—to write a new Olympic fanfare, together with a theme that would be used in all of the many broadcasts and award ceremonies of the games. Williams’s task was not to replace the famous Leo Arnaud fanfare that has long been a feature of Olympic broadcasts, but to create music that would be symbolic of the Los Angeles games in particular. Several years later he noted that this music represented “the spirit of cooperation, of heroic achievement, all the striving and preparation that go before the events and all the applause that comes after them.” 

What You’ll Hear

The Olympic Fanfare and Theme begins with a simple brass fanfare and flourish. The theme is appropriately heroic, with a solemn marchlike contrasting episode that leads to a return of the fanfare, now in combination with an even broader march-style version of the main theme.

 

 

Michael Torke (b. 1961)
Javelin

Torke composed this work in 1994. It was premiered on September 8, 1994, by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Yoel Levi. Duration 9:00.

 

Background

Milwaukee-born Michael Torke is among America’s most active and prominent composers. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, and at Yale University, before launching a successful career as an independent composer. Torke has published nearly 100 works, in nearly all genres. His works tend to bring together influences from classical and popular music, and many of his pieces have been influenced by visual images, particularly colors. Ecstatic Orange (1985), written while he was still a student at Yale, was among his first widely successful orchestra compositions, and later works in this series include Bright Blue Music, Green, Purple, Black and White, Slate, and Ash. His music is usually bright and optimistic in tune. According to Torke: “I try write music that makes people feel good; for me music is not about personal expression or an attempt to describe the horrors of existence.” 

What You’ll Hear

Torke provides the following description of Javelin, which was written in celebration of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s 50th season, and in anticipation of the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996:

I had three goals for this Atlanta Symphony anniversary piece: I wanted to use the orchestra as a virtuosic instrument, I wanted to use triads (three-note tonal chords), and I wanted the music to be thematic. I knew I would welcome swifter changes of mood than what is found in my earlier music. What came out (somewhat unexpectedly) was a sense of valor among short flashes and sweeps that reminded me of something in flight: a light spear thrown, perhaps, but not in the sense of a weapon, more in the spirit of a competition. When the word javelin suddenly suggested itself, I couldn’t help but recall the 1970s model of sports car my Dad owned, identified by that name, but I concluded, why not? Even that association isn’t so far off from the general feeling of the piece. Its fast tempo calls for 591 measures to evoke the generally uplifting, sometimes courageous, yet playful spirit.

Javelin captures the spirit of playfulness in the woodwind arabesques of the opening bars. This same character underlies even a couple of heavier moments in the middle section, filled with perpetual motion. In the end, Torke’s grand main theme is laid out forcefully above a pulsing background, before he brings the piece to a cheeky ending.

 

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
A Lincoln Portrait

Copland composed this work in 1942, and it was first performed by the Cincinnati Symphony on May 14, 1942 with poet Carl Sandburg narrating. Duration 14:00.

 

Background

The historical event most often cited, as we as a nation tried to make sense of the attacks of September 11, 2001, was the attack on Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier. No historical parallel is exact, but the outpouring of grief, anger, and patriotism was comparable, and in each case there was a clear sense of national resolve that poured forth in the arts. Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait comes from the dark days of early 1942, when the United States was still reeling from its entry into a world war and defeats across the Pacific. Conductor Andre Kostelanetz, responding the need for patriotic music, approached Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Jerome Kern with commissions for works that would comprise a “portrait gallery of great Americans.” Each composer was encouraged to choose a figure that would inspire audiences. Thomson chose Fiorello LaGuardia, New York’s great Depression-era mayor. Copland had originally planned a piece honoring Walt Whitman, but when Kern chose another literary figure, Mark Twain, Kostelanetz suggested Lincoln.

Despite the work’s immediate and lasting success, Copland’s choice of Lincoln was clearly a daunting one. He later wrote 

I was hoping to avoid the difficulty by doing a portrait, in which the sitter himself might speak. With the voice of Lincoln to help me I was ready to risk the impossible. The letters and speeches of Lincoln supplied the text. It was a comparatively simple matter to choose a few excerpts that seemed relevant to our own situation today. I avoided the temptation to use only well-known passages, permitting myself the luxury of quoting only once from a world-famous speech.

What You’ll Hear

In A Lincoln Portrait, Copland created an innovative and free-flowing musical form that supports and reacts to five excerpts from Lincoln’s speeches and letters—in Copland’s words, “…to draw a simple but impressive frame about the words of Lincoln himself.” Here is the same sense of space and openness that we hear in his contemporary ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, and the same kind of evocations of traditional American music. He includes brief quotations of tunes contemporary to Lincoln, Camptown Races and Springfield Mountain. Lincoln’s words and Copland’s music, moving towards a stirring conclusion, are as appropriate and moving in 2026 as they were in 1863 and 1942: “…that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

 

Ferde Grofé (1892-1972)
Grand Canyon Suite

Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite was written in the summer of 1931. It was premiered on November 22, 1931, in Chicago, by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Duration 33:00.

 

Background

Grand Canyon Suite was the last product of Grofé’s long association with the bandleader Paul Whiteman. Born in New York City, Grofé received classical training in Germany as a child. He spent his teens working as a violinist and pianist in dance bands. Though he was familiar with classical music, and eventually played in the Los Angeles Symphony, Grofé became increasingly involved with the new style known as “rhythm music” or jazz, and worked as a pianist and arranger in early Los Angeles jazz bands. He was hired as an arranger by Whiteman, the self-styled “King of Jazz,” in 1920, and was largely responsible for creating Whiteman’s successful “symphonic jazz” style. In 1924, Grofé provided the arrangement for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and later composed many successful works for the Whiteman Orchestra. By 1930, Grofé’s music was becoming more “symphonic” than “jazz,” and in 1931, he composed his Grand Canyon Suite. Though it is based upon a famous American landmark, the Grand Canyon Suite is programmatic music very much in the European classical tradition. 

The piece was written at Whiteman’s request in the summer of 1931, and Grofé reportedly retreated to “a secluded lakeside cottage in Wisconsin” to finish the work. Though the piece is a musical picture of Arizona’s most famous landmark, most of Grofé’s direct inspirations came from closer to home. The galumphing donkeys of On the Trail were probably based on the rhythm of pile drivers at work outside of Grofé’s Chicago apartment, and the cowboy ballad at the middle of that movement apparently came from the squeaking of his son’s baby carriage. And the inspiration for the famous Cloudburst finale was not the spectacular weather of the Grand Canyon, but a Wisconsin thunderstorm that Grofé witnessed rolling across the lake at his cottage in the north woods of Wisconsin.

The Suite became a factor in Grofé’s angry split from Whiteman. After Whiteman moved his base of operations to Chicago in 1930, Grofe’s role as lead arranger was largely taken over by another musician, and he began to moonlight as an arranger for radio and for other bands. The Grand Canyon Suite was a tremendous success when Whiteman introduced it in the fall of 1931, so much so, that it became Grofé’s ticket out of the band. He began to conduct performances of the piece that did not involve Whiteman; the last straw was when he arranged for a concert in New York that competed directly with a Whiteman show. They did not speak for years afterwards, and even though they would reunite later for revivals of the Whiteman Orchestra, they were never again on friendly terms. For his part, Grofé went on to a successful career as a conductor and composer for radio and film. The Grand Canyon Suite remains his most familiar work, particularly in the full orchestra version played here, first recorded by Arturo Toscanini in 1935.

 What You’ll Hear

Sunrise, the opening movement, is based upon a continuously-rising ostinato that builds to a great orchestral climax, as woodwind chirps and twitters stand in for the awakening birds. Painted Desert is a quiet moment of mysterious Impressionist effects, portraying the stark beauty and heat of this landscape. On the Trail is Grofé’s famous sound portrait of the donkey trains that carry tourists down into the canyon. After a “hee-haw” of protest and a brief violin cadenza, the donkeys begin a steady pace down the precipitous trail. At the bottom. there is a more lyrical cowboy song, as our tourists rest their saddle sores in preparation for the long ride home. Sunset, opens with a horn call, answered by the main theme, played in rather spooky string timbres. The movement eventually dies away to into darkness. There are many orchestral renditions of thunderstorms, but Grofé’s Cloudburst has to be one of the most effective. It begins quietly, but moves inexorably towards a crashing climax, driven by ostinato-style writing in the brass, and flashes of orchestral lightning. In the end, the storm fades away and is replaced by a broad statement of the cowboy tune from On the Trail.

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program notes ©2025 by J. Michael Allsen