Morton Gould
Film and Concert Music

* Show Piece for Orchestra (1954)
* Piano Concerto (1938)
* StringMusic (1994)

Randall Hodgkinson (piano)
Albany Symphony Orchestra/David Alan Miller
Total time: 70:12
Albany TROY300

* "Pavane" (from Symphonette No. 2)*
* Music from Cinerama Holiday, World War I, and Holocaust*
* "Interlude" (from Festive Music)*
* Formations: Suite for Marching Band
* Concerto Grosso for 4 solo violins and orchestra**

Jeffrey Silberschlag (trumpet)*
John Weller, Mikhail Shmidt, Maria Larionoff, Mariel Bailey (violins)**
Seattle Symphony/Gerard Schwarz
Total time: 60:47
Delos DE3166

Summary for the Busy Executive: Solid Gould.

Of first-rank American composers, Morton Gould stands among the least
known and most distinctive.  A composing prodigy, he began writing full
score almost immediately and worked as a CBS staff arranger while still in
his teens, back in the days when CBS and NBC both ran network orchestras.
He wrote music both as required and as he pleased.  I consider him that
rarest of birds, the fine composer with the ethic and technique of the
complete pro.

Gould's music sounds personal without strain.  Like many of his generation,
he sought to integrate pop and classical - to arrive at a distinctly
American-sounding music that would speak to large masses of people.
He Incorporated jazz (or what was loosely called "jazz" 'way back when),
folk music, spirituals, and the dances from the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.  He wrote concert pieces, musicals intended for
Broadway (Billion Dollar Baby with Comden and Greene, Enter Juliet with
Carolyn Leigh), radio music, TV and film scores, and "concept" LP albums.
He championed Ives early on, and the older composer influenced him.  The
music shows wit, power, great energy, as well as a focus and clarity Ives
often lacks.  It's even pretty, a rather rare quality.  He also conducted
and made, as they say, a good living.

With all of this going for him, we can ask why he isn't better known or why
he's usually left out of serious discussions of American music.  Anything
I'd have to say would be a guess, so take the following with a grain of
salt.  Although he received prestigious commissions throughout his career,
Gould never belonged to a circle of composers.  He was out of the Copland
sphere of influence, for example.  As far as I know, Copland never beat the
drum for Gould.  Furthermore, Gould was kept out of a major New York venue
for many years because of a long-running feud with Leonard Bernstein,
undoubtedly the greatest proselytizer for American music of his time.

Gould's music divides roughly into "serious" and "light." He has more
pops pieces in his catalogue than most composers mainly because he worked
successfully as a commercial musician.  That so many of these bon-bons
should be so distinguished musically comes down to a matter of talent and
craft.  The Delos CD concentrates on the lighter Gould, the Albany on the
concert composer.

The "Pavanne" (Gould spelled it this way to "facilitate pronunciation")
qualifies as one of Gould's genuine hits - sort of an American take on
Prokofiev's "March" from The Love of Three Oranges.  Benny Goodman even
played an arrangement of it, but it's a bit of a shame, since this is the
only part of the Symphonette that gets played and the other movements,
particularly the finale, are terrific.  You can hear all three movements
on Albany TROY 013-014, if still available.

I remember seeing Cinerama Holiday in a theater especially equipped
with three screens and three projectors - one for left, one for right,
and one for center image.  I even heard talk of permanently converting
the theater, since Cinerama was going to be the Next Big Thing.  It didn't
work out that way.  I was still a kid, but I remember asking myself why
this was supposed to be so wonderful.  Apparently, others had the same
idea.  It was a notion - "Wider Screen Is Better" - as much of its time
as tail fins on automobiles.  At any rate, I didn't remember the music.
Gould's contributions show him as a good movie composer, with the ability
to evoke place or mood instantly.  Much of this has to do with his ability
to mimic other styles.  For Cinerama Holiday, it's the music of Les Six.
For the documentary World War I, it's the ballroom dances of the Edwardian
period.  However, even here Gould manages to do something interesting.
In the "Prologue and Drum Waltz" to World War I, Gould sets march rhythms
(4/4) against a symphonic waltz (3/4), and it all fits together like a
jigsaw puzzle.  Part of this suite also includes a movement called "Sad
Song," which essentially cheats - imitating the cabaret styles of Weill and
Eisler.  As the liner notes remark, you can almost hear Lotte Lenya and see
the smoke curling from her cigarette.  The complete suite for the TV
mini-series Holocaust appears in a fine recording by David Amos and the
Krakow Philharmonic on Koch 3-7020-2.

Incidentally, all of the above pieces are heard in Gould's own arrangement
for the trumpeter Jeffrey Silberschlag, who performs them here.  The only
disappointment is the "Pavanne," which sounds wittier in its original
scoring.

Festive Music's "Interlude" pays tribute to Bix Beiderbecke.  It sounds
like one of Beiderbecke's impressionistic piano pieces, like "In a Mist."
As far as I know, no one has recorded the entire suite.  This section is
lovely, emotionally close to Copland's Quiet City.

Formations, originally written for the University of Florida Marching Band
and dedicated to the composer's sons (in college at the time), also found
life in the theater when Elliot Feld used it for his ballet Half-Time.
Gould has written several major works for band (including at least one
symphony), and the woodwind choirs have always elicited something special
from him.  He pulls off the following trick: marching-band music ten times
better than most marching-band music.

For me, the most ambitious work on the Delos CD is the Concerto Grosso
for four solo violins and orchestra, part of Gould's score for the
Balanchine ballet Audubon.  It has four movements: "Prelude and Fugue,"
"Air," "Variations," and "Rondo." Here we see Gould's craft at its most
stupendous, but Gould doesn't make craft an end in itself.  This is
primarily dance music.  The independent strands of Gould's counterpoint
contribute to the rhythmic excitement of the fast movements and point
out the exquisite simultaneous separateness of solo dancers in the slow
movements.  It must have made Balanchine's heart skip a couple of beats,
for this music fits dance theater like Spandex.  The liner notes try to
make a case for the "Variations" section as influenced by minimalism, but
my ears tell me different.  I hear little affinity, in fact, with, say,
Glass, Young, or any other standard-brand minimalist.  Despite the
implications of the movement titles, Gould doesn't work the standard
neoclassical riffs.  The work doesn't come across as Olde Worlde with
a twist, but as thoroughly current.

Columbia Records commissioned Gould's Show Piece as a hi-fi demo that
showed off their recording technology.  Ormandy and the Philadelphia
premiered the work and even recorded it, although Ormandy, dissatisfied
with the sessions, refused to allow the recording's release.  As befits the
commission and the intended orchestra, Gould shows off all the sections,
much as Britten did in his hi-fi demo classic Young Person's Guide to
the Orchestra.  Gould is less systematic than Britten, but I find it
interesting that both composers use theme and variations as their formal
skeleton, with Gould adding the wrinkle that the first variation precedes
the theme.

The work divides into the following movements: "Tune Up," "Theme,"
"Scene," "March," "Serenade," "Ballad," and "Toccata." "Tune Up" conjures
up that familiar pre-concert orchestral sound.  From an A on the oboe,
various fragments of the theme coalesce to form a gorgeous D-major chord
which spreads over the orchestra and crumbles to glitter.  The theme lacks
a really strong profile, however, and it takes a bit of work to figure out
the exact relations of the variations to the theme.  Fortunately, however,
each piece stands on its own.  The surprises in the orchestration will
make your jaw drop. It's not merely new, it's also convincing.  What
comes across is Gould's wit, but that may be too faint a word for what
Gould provides, especially when we tend to devalue wit in favor of "deep."
Mozart's Symphony No. 40 (in a minor key) probably ranks higher in
people's estimation than his Symphony No. 39.  Yet it's much harder to
make up a joke than a sermon.

Gould, a pianist himself, has written several concerted works for the
instrument.  The concerto is one of the finest by an American.  Written
in 1938, until the Nineties it enjoyed only its premiere performance, a
radio broadcast with Gould as soloist and Wallenstein conducting.  Amazing.
Gould liked to point out its similarities to Stravinsky ("That Stravinsky's
been stealing from me since I was a kid").  To me, it resembles more the
Prokofiev second concerto.  There's almost no revamping of Baroque or
Classical keyboard fingerings, and the rhythm taps out more lyrically than
I find in Stravinsky.  It's gracious, vivacious music - traditional
fast-slow-fast - a real find.

StringMusic finally won for its composer a Pulitzer Prize, shortly
before his death.  It's a wonderful piece, but no more wonderful
than many works in Gould's catalogue: Fall River Legend, Interplay,
Derivations, the Concerto Grosso, Soundings, Columbia, Spirituals for
Orchestra, Venice Audiograph, or Vivaldi Gallery, to name some favorites
off the top of my head.  The sound of the ensemble always figures
prominently in Gould's work.  Here, he manages to get a variety of colors
from the largely "black-and-white" string orchestra, not only through
textural invention and antiphonal voicing but also through different
bowings, fingerings, and plucks.  Many of these techniques have become
cliches of the avant-garde, but Gould manages to integrate them into the
total affect of the piece.  Structurally, the work is a wonder, with Gould
working through complex rhetorical progressions without apparently breaking
a sweat.  Gould's command of symphonic planning and string color reminds me
of Tchaikovsky's masterpiece Serenade in C.  Above all, Gould soars to a
high level of thematic and harmonic invention.  He not only says
complicated things clearly, he has something persuasive to say.

The performances, all professional, nevertheless do not stand out.  I find
Schwarz and the Seattle on this occasion a bit gauche, antithetical to the
elegance and wit of the music.  Miller and the Albany have a restricted
dynamic range (they can't play a true piano or less) and are a bit lax as
far as intonation and rhythm go.  Consequently, they lose some of Gould's
most striking effects.  Still, the performances are by no means terrible
and are furthermore the only recordings of these marvelous works we're
likely to see for a while.  The sound on both discs is good.

Steve Schwartz