America’s Voice: Barbara Hannigan Conducts Ives, Ruggles and Gershwin

About the Work

‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ is one of the best-known American hymns. Robert Lowry, a Baptist minister in Brooklyn, wrote words and tune in 1864, and it was published the following year. Its picture of the saints meeting beside the river of life comes from the last chapter of the Book of Revelation.

Charles Ives grew up with hymns like this one in the churches and outdoor revival meetings of Connecticut, and they run through his music from first to last. He used Lowry’s tune in the finale of his Fourth Violin Sonata, subtitled ‘Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting’, and around 1916 he reworked that movement as a short song for voice and piano called ‘At the River’. Aaron Copland made his own, plainer arrangement of the same hymn in 1952.

The LSO lists the piece under the hymn’s first line and does not say in what version it will be heard. Barbara Hannigan is billed as soprano as well as conductor, and the four minutes allowed are a good deal more than Ives’s song takes on its own.

What to Listen For

Ives leaves the tune almost intact and changes everything around it. The harmony leans away from the melody, as if the accompanist were half remembering a different key, and the phrases stretch and hesitate the way a congregation’s singing does. Listen above all to the ending. Lowry’s refrain answers its own question with a confident ‘Yes, we’ll gather at the river’. Ives lets the question come back once more and leaves it hanging.

About the Work

From the Steeples and the Mountains dates from 1901, when Ives was in his mid-twenties, three years out of Yale and beginning the career in life insurance that would pay for his composing. It is one of the short experimental pieces he wrote for himself in those years.

The scoring alone makes it unlike anything else of its time: a trumpet, a trombone and four sets of bells. The composer and conductor Gunther Schuller, who conducted it, pointed out that Ives wrote for bell pitches that did not exist in 1901 and are still hard to find, so that every performance has to decide how to realise them with chimes, other tuned percussion or pianos. The idea behind it is one Ives returned to all his life: sound heard across open space, with several sources that take no notice of one another, like the bells of different churches ringing over a New England valley.

What to Listen For

The bells begin almost inaudibly, in pealing patterns that overlap and clash. The trumpet and trombone enter hesitantly with angular lines that copy each other at a distance, and their rhythms grow steadily more intricate as the bells grow louder. The piece is a single crescendo. After three or four minutes it reaches a clangorous peak with everything sounding at once, and then the players stop and leave the bells to ring away into silence.

About the Work

By the late 1930s Ruth Crawford Seeger had all but stopped composing. A decade earlier she had been one of the most original of the American ‘ultramodern’ composers, and her String Quartet of 1931 is still counted among the finest American works of its kind. Then came marriage to the musicologist Charles Seeger, children, the Depression and a move to Washington, where the couple threw themselves into collecting and transcribing American folk song. After a concert of her earlier music in New York in 1938, a member of the audience asked her to write something that more people could listen to. She replied that she would.

Rissolty Rossolty was the result, and it is the only piece she wrote in this manner. CBS commissioned it for a radio series on American folk music presented by Alan Lomax, which introduced short orchestral pieces on folk tunes by composers including Copland and Roy Harris. At the first broadcast the Kentucky singer Aunt Molly Jackson sang the title song before the orchestra played. The piece then lay almost unperformed: there were only a couple of concert performances in the composer’s lifetime.

What to Listen For

Three tunes are packed into a few minutes. The chattering repeated-note figure at the start comes from ‘Rissolty, Rossolty’, a comic song about a newly married man and his wife’s housekeeping. A second song, ‘Phoebe’, appears in a flute solo and in plucked strings. The last section is driven by a fiddle tune, ‘The Death of Callahan’, which Crawford Seeger had transcribed from a field recording. She does not present the tunes one after another in neat arrangements. She weaves fragments of them together, and at the climax all three are going at once in different parts of the orchestra, a moment that owes something to Ives.

The ending is the best joke. The music simply stops, and then a scrap of the opening starts up again and breaks off. Folk musicians, she observed, do not round off a tune with a formal close; they pause, ready to begin again.

About the Work

Wallingford Riegger belongs with Ives, Ruggles and Henry Cowell in the small group of American modernists who organised their own concerts between the wars. He came to that company late. Trained in New York and Berlin as a cellist and conductor, he wrote in a conservative style into his forties. Study in Sonority, composed in 1927, is the piece in which he changed direction, and its publisher describes it as a significant break with his classical upbringing.

It is written for ten violins, or, as the score allows, any multiple of ten, so that a full orchestral violin section can play it. As the title says, Riegger treats the ensemble as a laboratory: with only one kind of instrument and no bass, the interest has to come from spacing, register, dynamics and ways of playing.

What to Listen For

The ten parts are layered. One writer on Riegger describes four players carrying the melody, four the harmony and two the lowest line, though the roles shift. The harmony is built from dense, dissonant chords that Riegger holds and re-voices so that they glow instead of grate, and the whole piece grows from a short motif of a few notes that returns in different guises.

Without violas, cellos and basses the sound has no floor, and that is the point: everything happens in the upper half of the orchestra’s range. Riegger marks dynamics and tempos with great precision, sometimes giving each note of the motif its own level, so listen for how much light and shade ten identical instruments can produce.

About the Work

Carl Ruggles finished about ten pieces in a life of ninety-five years, and Sun-treader is the biggest of them. He worked on it from 1926 to 1931, revising constantly. According to one account it was meant for a New York concert that Edgard Varèse was to conduct in the autumn of 1926, and missed its deadline by nearly five years. When Ruggles met Charles Ives in 1929 the two became close friends, and Ives had his best copyist prepare a clean score, which Ruggles promptly covered in corrections.

The title comes from Robert Browning’s early poem Pauline, in which the poet salutes Shelley: ‘Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever!’ Ruggles was less interested in the poem than in the single image of a giant striding across the sky.

Nicolas Slonimsky conducted the first performance in Paris in February 1932 and repeated it in Berlin, and the score was published in 1934. The first American performance is reported to have come only in 1966, when the composer was nearly ninety. It is still a rarity in the concert hall; Michael Tilson Thomas, who recorded all of Ruggles’s music, has been its most persistent advocate.

Ruggles’s method was his own. He wrote long, leaping melodic lines in which, as a rule, no note returns until at least seven or eight others have sounded, and he set those lines against one another in what has been called, in a phrase credited to his friend Charles Seeger, ‘dissonant counterpoint’. The result is as dissonant as the music of Schoenberg and Berg but follows no system, and it has a craggy, rhetorical grandeur that writers like to connect with New England granite.

What to Listen For

The opening is the image of the title. Timpani pound out heavy, even strokes and the brass stride upward over them in huge intervals. This music returns several times as a pillar holding up the structure, and it invites comparison with the drumbeats at the start of Brahms’s First Symphony.

Between the pillars the music moves in waves. A line starts low, climbs through the orchestra to a peak and falls back, and inside each large wave are smaller ones, so that the piece seems always to be straining upward. Quieter passages for strings and woodwind, where the lines turn lyrical, alternate with sudden accelerations. The work is in a single movement of about a quarter of an hour.

About the Work

Carousel opened at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway on 19 April 1945, two years after Oklahoma! and with the same team: music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Its source was Liliom, a 1909 play by the Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár about a fairground barker and the servant girl who loves him, which they moved from Budapest to the coast of Maine.

The show begins in an unusual way. There is no overture. Rodgers and Hammerstein open instead on a wordless scene at an amusement park, mimed and danced to this waltz, in which the audience meets the mill-girl Julie Jordan and the barker Billy Bigelow and watches them ride the carousel together. By the time anybody speaks, the situation has been set out and the love story has begun. The waltz has had a second life in the concert hall. Robert Russell Bennett began the orchestrations for the original production and scored the waltz before Don Walker took over the show; it is Walker’s name that the LSO attaches to the version played here.

What to Listen For

The piece starts with a fairground organ slightly out of tune with itself: woodwind chords that wheeze and slide, a few halting attempts at a rhythm, as if the machinery were being cranked into motion. Then the main waltz arrives, a broad, swinging tune.

It is a chain of waltzes more than a single one, in the Viennese manner, and each new strain is a little louder and faster than the last. Listen for the way Rodgers keeps pulling the harmony sideways when a cadence seems certain. The ending whirls the first waltz round at full tilt, with the whole orchestra and cymbals, as the carousel reaches top speed.

About the Work

George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess opened in Boston in September 1935 and moved to Broadway, where it ran for sixteen weeks. Gershwin made a concert suite from it himself the following year, which he called Catfish Row, and died in 1937.

The Symphonic Picture came five years later. Fritz Reiner, then conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, wanted a concert piece drawn from the score and went to Robert Russell Bennett, the leading Broadway orchestrator of the day and a friend and colleague of Gershwin. Reiner was unusually specific. He chose the excerpts and their order, which is not the order of the opera, and asked for saxophones and a banjo but no piano. The length, twenty-four minutes, was reportedly planned to fit on three 78 rpm records. Bennett said that he followed Reiner’s plan faithfully while staying loyal to what he knew of Gershwin’s harmonic and orchestral intentions, and much of the scoring is close to the composer’s own. Reiner conducted the first performance in Pittsburgh in 1943.

Where Catfish Row keeps to the more symphonic parts of the opera, Bennett’s piece goes for the songs. As the close of a programme that begins with Ives’s hymn, it also stands for the other American tradition this concert sets beside the experimentalists: music written for the theatre and meant to be loved at first hearing.

What to Listen For

Bennett’s sequence runs without a break. It opens on Catfish Row at daybreak, with the street cries of the Strawberry Woman and the Crab Man, almost the only passages in the opera that Gershwin took from what he had heard in Charleston. Clara’s music and the bustling introduction to Act One follow, and only then, several minutes in, comes ‘Summertime’.

After it the banjo strums in for ‘I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’‘. The hurricane music supplies the one stretch of real violence, with the full brass and percussion. Out of it rises ‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’, the love duet. The picnic music ‘Oh, I Can’t Sit Down’ restores the high spirits; Sportin’ Life’s two numbers, ‘There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York’ and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’, follow; and the piece ends as the opera does, with the spiritual-like ‘Oh Lawd, I’m on My Way’.