Second Concert of the 76th 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 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.

Johann Sebastian Bach is so well-known that it is almost unnecessary to give any biographical information. He was the quintessential Baroque composer, whose lifetime represents the era of the Baroque as far as music is concerned. He was extremely prolific, having sired twenty children, not to mention his musical output. Apparently, some of his children were not very good-looking, and one of his acquaintances told him so. Bach's response was reported to be "Don't be too critical; I was working in the dark." Nobody has been known to have made a similar criticism of his music.

Known cantatas number over 200, and that is counting only the church cantatas. Far more of his works have been lost than have been saved. He was a master organist and acoustical expert, being able to assess the characteristics of churches and concert halls so as to set the registration of every organ and every composition to be debuted there to take full advantage of the acoustics.

In addition to the enormous number of solo keyboard works, Bach produced concertos and orchestral suites, as well as major choral works, such as the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the Easter Oratorio, the Mass in B Minor, and, of course, the work we hear today, the Magnificat.

The Magnificat was probably written for the Christmas Day vespers of 1723, but Bach altered it both in key and orchestration, shifting from E-flat to D, and substituting transverse flutes for recorders. He left out several hymns with specific reference to the Christmas story, presumably to make it appropriate for performance at occasions other than Christmas.

The Highland Holiday is a medley of three Scottish songs orchestrated by David Giardiniere, an American composer and arranger living with his wife near Philadelphia. He is the head of the Product Evaluation Department at J.W. Pepper & Son, the Director of Music at Faith Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, DE, and a vocalist with Voces Novae et Antiquae of Philadelphia. He holds a PhD in Music and Choral Conducting from New York University.

This seems to be the day for unusual musical instruments. We have the chain in Scrooge, and now we have the pennywhistle and the bodhrán in Highland Holiday.

The bodhrán is basically a drum. It has evolved from the tambourine and in Ireland, at any rate, began as a home-made farm tool for winnowing grain, or even carrying peat! In all its forms, it is a circular wooden frame, sometimes with cross-braces inside, with skin stretched over it. Versions of it can be found throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In those places, and elsewhere in Britain, it goes by other names, and is slightly different in each place.

Although these drums, or variants, have an early history, the sort we know today is of very recent times, having become popular in the 1960s. Where then bodhrán differs from other tambourine-like instruments is that it is tunable to a certain extent. The drumhead can be tightened or loosened to change its pitch, and, while earlier versions were often "played" with the fingers, most of them, and now all of the Celtic ones, are played with a "tipper," or cipin, a wooden beater in the shape of a bone (in older versions) but more like a standard drumstick in more recent ones. Also, the modern versions lack the jingles of the tambourine, which were sometimes made with pennies. Seán Ó Riada declared the bodhrán to be the native drum of the Celts, and, though generally associated with Irish music, it is also popular in Scotland.

Speaking of pennies, the so-called "pennywhistle" is, like the bodhrán, a very old instrument, and, like other old instruments, has had many versions over the years. The pennywhistle is also known as the tin whistle, for obvious reasons, but it is most often made of brass these days. Physically, the pennywhistle or tin whistle is a tube, like a recorder, but with only six holes. It was called a pennywhistle because it originally cost a penny, and like the harmonica and the kazoo, started pretty much as a toy. A penny in those days was worth more than it is today. Even when I was studying in England, I occasionally came across a half-penny (pronounced "hay-penny") and even a farthing. So the "pennywhistle" cost about a quarter in U.S. money.

Both the pennywhistle and the bodhrán were used by Howard Shore in his "Concerning Hobbits" from The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.