Second Concert of the 74th Season

Leroy Anderson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1908, and died in Woodbury, Connecticut, in 1975. He studied composition at Harvard with George Enesco and Walter Piston. Anderson became very active in musical circles. He was chairman of the board of review of the American Society of Composers, and was a board member of the New Haven and Hartford symphony orchestras. He was a linguist, fluent in nine languages, but specializing in German and Scandinavian ones. He served with U.S. Intelligence in Iceland and in the United States during the Second World War, and was recalled to duty during the Korean War in 1951. He was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. While working there in Military Intelligence, he found time to write several of his most popular works, such as Blue Tango.

He is best known for his attractive melodies and jaunty rhythms in such pieces as The Syncopated Clock and Sleigh Ride. He was also notable for his use of unconventional instruments, as in The Typewriter and The Sandpaper Ballet (yes, a typewriter and sandpaper were both used as instruments).

Anderson had been discovered by Arthur Fiedler, director of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and was championed by Fiedler, who invited him to conduct his own works with that orchestra. When he conducted The Typewriter, he did so wearing a green visor, with his sleeves rolled up, and pretending to be typing in time with the music.

Sleigh Ride is perhaps the most often performed Anderson work. The Manchester Symphony Orchestra plays it very often during the holidays.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was a major symphonist, writing nine of them. (Yes, it is pronounced "Rafe." That's the way Ralph is pronounced in England.) He was an extremely prolific composer in general, and wrote in many different genres. His early studies were with Parry and Stanford, and he eventually became far more successful and famous than either of them. At Cambridge, one of his cousins recalled overhearing a conversation about "that foolish young man, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who would go on working at music when he was so hopelessly bad at it."

Vaughan Williams was not a proud man, speaking of his "amateurish technique," early on, but resolving to persevere. He later studied with Max Bruch in Berlin, and Maurice Ravel in Paris. He went on to become the most influential English composer of his generation, and is credited with rejuvenating English music. Like several of his contemporaries on the Continent, such as Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary, he was a collector of folk music, and was known for the use of Medieval modes, often the mixolydian, a scale system common to folk music. Vaughan Williams became a close friend of the English composer, Gustav Holst, who also was enamored with folk music. Throughout their lives, they submitted their works to each other for criticism.

Vaughan Wiliams wrote a great deal of "religious" music, and was closely involved with church choirs and organ performances. I write "religious" in quotation marks because he was not religious in the conventional sense. He had been an atheist when he was at Cambridge, and then evolved into an agnostic, but he was deeply spiritual, if you can unravel the paradox. He was a very humane person, and had a reverence for the past, and the importance of each person who had contributed to that past in every way. One critic said that when listening to his music, one never knew whether he was hearing something very old -- or very new.

Hodie (This Day) is a telling of the Nativity. The words are from various sources, including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and works of John Milton, Miles Coverdale, Thomas Hardy, George Herbert, William Drummond, and the poet, Ursula Wood, who eventually married Vaughan Williams after the death of his wife. His "Englishness" is exemplefied by his use of so many English writers.