Page 25 - Muscatine Symphony Orchestra - MasterWorks II: The Grandest of Them All

contemporaries, most notably Carlos Chávez. In 1928 he wrote of Chávez, “His music is
not a substitute for living but a manifestation of life. It exemplifies the complete overthrow
of nineteenth-century Germanic ideals which tyrannized over music for more than a hun-
dred years. It propounds no problems, no metaphysics. He is one of the few American mu-
sicians about whom we can say that he is more than a reflection of Europe.” This was writ-
ten before he had developed the style we now recognize as Copland, but his desire to break
free of European musical traditions is evident. In less than ten years, he had achieved his
paradigm.

Grand Canyon Suite……………………………………………………………Ferde Grofé

Though he was a fairly prolific composer and a gifted arranger with a long career, Ferde
Grofé’s present-day fame rests almost entirely on his orchestrations of George Gershwin’s
1924 Rhapsody in Blue (especially the original jazz-band version and a later one for full
symphony orchestra) and on his own 1931 Grand Canyon Suite. Grofé was the arranger for
conductor Paul Whiteman, who led the premieres of both Rhapsody in Blue and the Grand
Canyon Suite with His Orchestra.

There are five separate movements:
“Sunrise.” Few natural phenomena have been pictured in music more frequently—and
memorably—than dawn. A music lover’s list might merely begin with Grieg’s Peer Gynt,
Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, Debussy’s La Mer and Respighi’s Fountains of Rome.
Grofé’s dawn, quite memorable in its own right, starts out simply with a timpani roll, a
quiet sustained chord for the strings, and ascending scales for the clarinets. The piccolo
offers the beginning of a musical theme that soon turns into birdcall. Other instruments
echo the piccolo’s opening notes while the flute tries a new melody, followed by the
English horn’s fuller melodic extension of the piccolo phrase. More and more instruments
join in, with the violins and violas eventually offering a counter-melody that seems to grow
out of all that has been heard before. Since this is not just any sunrise but the spectacle of
intensifying light revealing one of the world’s most stunning landscapes, the music
becomes grand indeed, as the full orchestra joins in and the tempo increases like an
overexcited pulse.

“The Painted Desert.” Serving as a kind of slow movement to the symphonic suite, this
section portrays an early morning desert scene, presumably shimmering in intense heat.
Unresolved chords and a hypnotic harp figure set the scene, while bass clarinet and violas
offer an erratic musical theme. At the climax of the movement, the violins offer a warmer,
lovelier version of the theme, but the music subsides into the eerie quiet with which it
began, with English horn and bass clarinet in high register trailing off.