PROGR A M NOTES “You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.” — Aaron Copland It would be unthinkable not to include Aaron Copland on a concert dedicated to the experience of the Common Man. Through his orchestral, ballet, and film scores he pioneered what is commonly agreed to be the American sound in classical music. One of his most memorable works, Fanfare for the Common Man, was composed in response to a commission from conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Eugene Goossens. In 1942, with the US entangled in the Second World War, Goossens engaged 18 composers to create fanfares to galvanize the public and to give them hope. All of them were premiered during the 1942-43 season, but only Copland’s has remained in the standard repertory. The fanfare is so familiar, even the most uninitiated classical music listener has heard it at least once. This makes it difficult to analyze the piece to understand why it is so memorable. What is striking is the leanness of his musical materials. Opening with several strikes from the percussion, the silences are as crucial to the work as any of the notes. The unforgettable melody appears first in the trumpets, soaring above the timpani and bass drum. Through the next two minutes the work alternates between percussion and brass, carefully developing the theme in the most gradual and seemingly inevitable ways. The Fanfare for the Common Man is one of those works of art that is so clear, so moving, and so direct that it seems to have always existed, as if Copland transcribed a deeper musical truth rather than creating it from scratch. Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, op. 72 were widely popular and, along with the first set of dances, largely responsible for his gain in notoriety as a composer. Born in 1841, Antonín Dvořák was the son of a working class family; his father was a butcher, innkeeper, and professional zither player. His musical talents were clear from a young age and he was encouraged to pursue them, developing 4 Chicago Sinfonietta
into a talented violin and viola player and gaining a position with the Bohemian Provisional Theater Orchestra for most of the 1860s. Originally written for piano 4-hands, and modeled after Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, it was Brahms himself who recommended Dvořák to the music publisher Fritz Simrock. With the first set of dances published in 1878, Dvořák became a household name and Simrock’s publishing house earned a great deal of money. This prompted the composition of the second set (op. 72) in 1886 and a full orchestral version of all of the dances, with orchestrations by Dvořák himself. Unlike the Brahms’s Hunarian Dances, Dvořák did not literally quote any folk tunes. Rather, he used the harmonies and rhythms in the folk tunes of his native Czechoslovakia to craft his own original pieces. Instantly appealing in their tunes and dazzling in their bold orchestration, the deft craftsmanship of these pieces almost slips by unnoticed. Michael Daugherty, drawing much of his inspiration from popular culture, has written a vast number of works for the orchestra that refuses the elitisms and exclusivity often associated with classical music. With pieces including the Superman-themed Metropolis Symphony, an opera about Jackie O, and Dead Elvis for a bassoon playing Elvis-impersonator, Daugherty has created works that engage the “common man”. Written in 2003, Fire and Blood, a concerto for violin and orchestra, is no exception. In 1932, Edsel Ford commissioned the Mexican modernist artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) to paint a mural representing the automobile industry of Detroit. Rivera came to Detroit and worked over the next two years to paint four large walls of the inner courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Considered among his best work, Rivera’s extraordinary “Detroit Industry” murals have inspired me to create my own musical fresco for violin and orchestra. It was Rivera himself who predicted the possibility of turning his murals into music, after returning from a tour of the Ford factories: “In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped