Download Three American Portraits

Notes on the Program
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May Chair
Fire Dance
Anthony DiLorenzo
Street Song
Michael Tilson Thomas
Three American Portraits
Bruce Broughton
A
substantial body of work for five-part
brass ensemble was produced during the
16th and 17th centuries, characteristically destined for ensembles comprising two cornettos
(hybrid instruments with a brass-type mouthpiece but with finger-holes resembling those
of a recorder) and three sackbuts (early trombones). By the 1830s, technological advances
had rendered brass instruments increasingly
chromatic, and chamber works were being
composed for different brass groupings. The
breakthrough to what would become the dominant combination arrived from 1848 through
1850, when the French composer JeanFrançois-Victor Bellon produced 12 quintets
for the combination of keyed small bugle in Eflat, piston-valved cornet (cornet à pistons) in
B-flat or C, horn, trombone, and ophicléide in
B-flat or C. (The ophicléide was a kind of keyed
bugle, patented in 1821, whose bass form eventually ceded its role to the tuba.)
The brass quintet truly began to flourish in
the second half of the 20th century, thanks in
large part to such groups as the New York
Brass Quintet (established in 1954), American
Brass Quintet, Philip Jones Brass Ensemble,
and Canadian Brass. By commissioning and
championing new music, these and other
brass groups coaxed into existence a vast
repertoire that includes entries by such notables as Leonard Bernstein, William Bolcom,
Elliott Carter, Peter Maxwell Davies, and
André Previn.
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The first of the selections played today is Fire
Dance by Anthony DiLorenzo. A trumpeter
as well as a composer, DiLorenzo performs as
a member of the Center City Brass Quintet and
the Proteus7 chamber ensemble, and has appeared widely as a featured soloist. He graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music and
worked with Bernstein at Tanglewood.
DiLorenzo is also an active composer and
arranger whose works have been performed by
such leading orchestras as the San Francisco
Symphony, New World Symphony, Tokyo
Symphony Orchestra, and Boston Pops Or-
IN SHORT
Fire Dance
Anthony DiLorenzo
Born: 1967, in Stoughton, Massachusetts
Work composed: 1996
Estimated duration: ca. 4 minutes
Street Song
Michael Tilson Thomas
Born: December 21, 1944, in Los Angeles,
California
Work composed: 1988
Estimated duration: ca. 14 minutes
Three American Portraits
Bruce Broughton
Born: March 8, 1945, in Los Angeles, California
Work composed: 2006
Estimated duration: ca. 14 minutes
chestra. He has also provided many scores for
film and television; his credits include Benji:
Off the Leash; music for more than 80 film
trailers, including Toy Story, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Red Dragon; and
music cues for a variety of television networks.
His fleet and energetic Fire Dance was premiered and recorded by the Center City Brass
Quintet, and it became an instant hit with
brass ensembles. One can easily sense that it
is the work of a composer with cinematic
bona fides, but one with an element of droll
wit that seems descended from Prokofiev.
Michael Tilson Thomas is acclaimed internationally as a conductor as well as for his
impressive abilities as a pianist. He has
served as music director of the San Francisco
Symphony since 1995 and is also founder and
artistic director of the New World Symphony
in Miami and principal guest conductor of
the London Symphony Orchestra. (Earlier in
his career, 1971–77, he oversaw the New York
Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts.)
He was born into a theatrical family — the
Thomashefskys were a force in the golden age
of Yiddish theater — and graduated from the
University of Southern California, where he
was mentored by the composer Ingolf Dahl.
Tilson Thomas adopted a concentrated focus
on composition in the late 1980s, when he produced three pieces that mark the start of his
catalogue of mature works: the song “Grace”
(1988), Street Song (1988), and From the Diary
of Anne Frank (1989–90). He explained:
What these three experiences did was to
cause me to take my writing seriously, to
care about it, and to care about wanting to
have people hear what was going on inside
my head. … I now understand what Aaron
[Copland] and Lenny [Bernstein] said
about committing oneself to writing it
down and to selecting more carefully what
is really essential.
In the Composer’s Words
Michael Tilson Thomas provided this commentary about his Street Song:
Street Song is a work in three contiguous
parts — and interweaving of three songs. The
first song opens with a jagged downward
scale suspending in the air a sweetly dissonant harmony that very slowly resolves. This
moment of resolution is followed by responses
of various kinds. The harmonies move between
the world of the Middle Ages and the present, between East and West, and always, of
course, from the perspective of 20th-century
America. Overall the movement is about starting and stopping, the moments of suspension
always leading somewhere else.
The second song is introduced by a yodellike horn solo. It is followed by a simple trumpet duet. It is folk-like in character and also
cadences with suspended moments of slowly
resolving dissonance.
The third song is really more of a dance. It
begins when a trombone slides a step higher,
bringing the work into the key of F-sharp and
into a jazzier swing. The harmonies here are
the stacked-up moments of suspension from
the first two parts of the piece. By now I hope
these “dissonant” sounds actually begin to
sound “consonant.” There is a resolution, but
it is in the world of a musician who after many
after-hours gigs greets the dawn.
Bruce Broughton, also a product of USC, has
created works for motion pictures, television,
and computer games, as well as concert
works. His first major film score, for Lawrence
Kasdan’s western, Silverado, earned him an
Oscar nomination in 1986 and the sound
track album for his next assignment, Barry
Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes, was nominated for a Grammy. He went on to compose
scores for such major motion pictures as Lost
in Space, Tombstone, Miracle on 34th Street,
and Honey, I Blew Up the Kids. His score for
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Heart of Darkness (1998) was the first orchestral work composed for a video game. He has
received nine Emmy Awards (out of 21 nominations), most recently for his score for
Eloise at Christmastime. As a composer of
concert music, he has carried out commissions for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Seattle Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, United States Air Force Band, and
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as
notable chamber ensembles such as the Westwind Brass, for which he wrote his Three
American Portraits. Broughton is a board
member of ASCAP, a governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a
former governor of the Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences, and past president of The
Society of Composers and Lyricists.
The Work at a Glance
These comments are excerpted from an interview with Bruce
Broughton conducted by Barry Toombs, horn player of the Westwind
Brass, prior to the premiere of Three American Portraits:
The bright and bustling opening movement, full of fanfares, is
named for Napoleon Hill (1883–1970), one of America’s first self-help
gurus. “I associate Napoleon Hill with the power of positive thinking.
In fact, the marking for the movement is ‘with a positive mental attitude,’ known to anyone who has read Hill simply as PMA.
A simple tune floats over a placid chorale in the middle movement, representing the 30th president of the United States. “Whenever I think of or read about Calvin Coolidge, I’ve noted more his
consistency, to the point of dullness, than any other quality. Taciturn ‘Silent Cal’ could never be caught laughing or expressing himself in any enthusiastic manner. This movement portrays, if
anything, consistency, relying upon no dynamic or harmonic modulation, and depends upon the positive motive from the Hill movement as an ostinato underpinning for the entire movement.”
There is an urgent, driving edge to the finale, and ominous harmonic colors. “Sherman was relentless. While reading U.S. Grant’s
memoirs, it was obvious to me that Sherman was the one general
that Grant could rely upon for getting a job done. Though it was
Sherman who famously said, ‘War is hell,’ I made no attempt at trying to reconstruct the terror or emotional content of that statement.
It was the unrelenting energy I was mostly interested in.”
Portraits of the three subjects in Broughton’s work, from top: Napoleon Hill
with his book, Think and Grow Rich, in 1937; Calvin Coolidge in 1918;
General William Tecumseh Sherman, in an 1865 photo by Mathew Brady
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