"VARIATIONS ON AMERICA"  SOLO PIANO

John Ferguson, Pianist

Native Americans and the 'Indianist' Composers
Music of the Calumet      Harvey Loomis (1865 - 1930)
- The Pipes are of God  
- Song of Sorrow  

African-American Traditions
Ragtime Compositions  
- Maple Leaf Rag      Scott Joplin (1868 - 1917)
- Dizzy Fingers      Zez Confrey (1895 - 1971)
- Dictys on 7th Avenue      Eubie Blake (1883 - 1983)
- Rhapsody in Ragtime      Eubie Blake

The American Classical Tradition
- Sanata Anna's Retreat      Stephen Foster (1826-1864)
- Ricordati, The Union (1862)      Louis-Moreau Gottschalk (1829 - 1869)
- "The Alcotts" From Sonata # 2 "Concord"      Charles Ives (1874 - 1953)

Coming to America - Jewish Immigration and American Music
Shimmy on Zez Confrey's 'Kitten on the Keys' From Jazz Etudes 1926      Erwin Schulhoff (1894- 1942)
Two Improvisations on Hassidic Melodies      Paul Schoenfield (b. 1950)
- Nigun  
- Nigun Rakud  

The Jazz and Broadway Era
Excerpts from 'The Songbook'      George Gershwin (1898 - 1937)
- Stairway to Paradise  
- Lady Be Good  
- I Got Rhythm, etc.  
Gershwin and the Blues  
- 2nd Prelude  
- Jazzbo Brown Blues  
Rhapsody in Blue George Gershwin  
- Arranged for solo piano by the composer  

The 20th Century….. Contemporary American Piano Music
Blues      Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Boogie Woogie Etude      Morton Gould (1913 - 1996)
Cowboy Nocturne (1975)      Robert Savage (1952 - 1992)
Lullaby (1987)      Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960)
Visionary Landscapes, opus 214      Alan Hovhaness (1911 - 2000)
Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (1979)      Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938)
- From "Four North American Ballads"  
The Serpent's Kiss (1969)      William Bolcom (b. 1938)
- The ragtime telling of the story of Adam and Eve  

'PROGRAM NOTES Variations on America' - Piano solo

John Ferguson, Pianist
Charles Ives 
In the short movement, 'The Alcotts', from the Concord Sonata of Charles Ives (1874 - 1953), one finds the distilled essence of the style of one of America's most beloved composers. A mostly self-taught man whose main occupation was as an insurance salesman, Ives loved to experiment with musical non-conformity and the use of 'street tunes' and gospel hymns in serious music. In the late 19th century Ives was already experimenting with quarter-tones, unusual harmonies and 'musical humanism' based on the Transcendentalist philosophers and poets - Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. In this piece, Ives drawn upon musical material as disparate as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a Protestant church hymn and a Scottish popular song to paint a portrait of pious New England family life in the 19th century.
 

Native Americans and the 'Indianist' Composers
In the year 1894, Antonin Dvorak was teaching in New York and advocating an American 'national' music based on the use of African-American and Native American melodies. Harvey Loomis (1865 - 1930) was one of Dvorak's students who took this advice to heart. In "Music of the Calumet", Loomis has synthesized songs from the daily life and religious rituals of the Calumet tribe with a late Romantic piano style reminiscent of Dvorak or Brahms. In 'The Pipes Are of God' one hears two distinct themes from a peace pipe ceremony accompanied by a steady drum beat and a contrasting whooping motif. In 'Song of Sorrow', a stark expression of grief, Loomis refers to the 19th century offensives on Native American cultures throughout America.
 

Three Ragtime Pieces
Ragtime is perhaps the first truly American music to emerge from the melting pot. It can be described as the meeting of Europe and Africa on American soil - the popular music of Europe
(Military Marches, Salon Music, etc.) is transformed by syncopated African rhythms into a delightful new sound. The first ragtime composers were the children of African-Americans freed from slavery after the Civil War and most were born between New Orleans and St Louis along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Ragtime quickly developed into Dixieland and Jazz and can be seen as the musical forefather of almost all of today's popular music in America.

Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag' of 1898 was his first big ragtime success. Joplin was one of the first African-American composers to have received classical training and he went on to write not only dozens of ragtime hits, but also an opera, 'Treemonisha'.

Eubie Blake (1883 - 1983) was born in Baltimore and lived to be 100 years old. His long musical career included association with not only Scott Joplin, but also later in life, contemporary composers such as William Bolcom. His 'Rhapsody in Ragtime' was composed at the age of 95 at the request of William Bolcom.

Zez Confrey was typical of the New York school of white ragtime composers often referred to as Tin Pan Alley or Novelty composers. Dizzy Fingers, one of his best-known works, is a ragtime 'moto perpetuo' .
 

The Influence of Europe
Louis-Moreau Gottschalk
The first American composer to establish important connections with Latin America, Gottschalk (1829- 1869) was born in New Orleans, the cradle of most innovation in 19th and early 20th century American music. His mother was a French Créole and his father an Englishman of Jewish extraction. Sent to study at the Paris Conservatory at an early age, he came into contact with Chopin and Liszt who influenced his development of a highly individual 'American exotic' musical style incorporating the Créole, African, French and Latin American influences of his childhood in New Orleans.

While 'The Union' displays the influence of Franz Liszt, 'Ricordati' displays the impression made upon Gottschalk by Frederic Chopin during his stay in Paris. Written in the style of a Nocturne, this short piece is based on a quote from Dante's 'Divine Comedy'.

Gottschalk composed 'The Union' in 1862 during the height of the American Civil War. As a Southerner who was most active performing in the North, he felt obliged to show his sympathies with the North during tragic conflict. A vivid montage of the Civil War, the opening section recreates the clash of battle which gives away to a melancholy version of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' followed by a triumphal 'Hail Columbia' and 'Yankee Doodle'.
 
Erwin Schulhoff
The Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894- 1942), a student of Reger, was inspired by American popular music from the Ragtime, Novelty and early Jazz eras. He composed a diversity of works ranging from a setting of the original Communist Manifesto of 1848 to the Five Jazz Etudes from which the 'Toccata on the Shimmy 'Kitten on the Keys' is excerpted here. As a Communist and a Jew, he was arrested and died in a Nazi concentration camp. The inspiration for this works is Novelty composer Zez Confrey's 'Kitten on the Keys' written for the piano in the 1920's.
 
Paul Schoenfield (b. 1950)
Paul Schoenfield began studying piano at age six and wrote his first composition the following year. He received his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University, where he studied both music and mathematics. He has received numerous commissions and has been awarded grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller Fund, the Bush Foundation and Chamber Music America.

In Schoenfield's 'Improvisations on Hassidic Melodies', one hears the sounds of Eastern European Hasssdic Jews' niguns (sacred songs without words) and klezmer folk dances. These musical traditions, brought to the United States in the late 19th century by Russian Jews in particular, fused with the sounds of Ragtime and early Jazz to create the Broadway sound of American musical theater as defined by composers such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.
 

Early Broadway
The Broadway show emerged as an art form in the 1920's, a period of unbridled growth and optimism in America. New York was a vibrant clash of cultures, construction and intense pursuit of the American Dream for millions of recent immigrants. Perhaps no other American composer embodied this era better than George Gershwin whose music reflected Broadway's unique combination of European, African-American and Eastern European musical influences.

'The Songbook' has been referred to as the American 'Well-Tempered Clavier'. Featuring 18 concert arrangements of Gershwin's own Broadway hit songs, these compositions revel in the sound of the Roaring 20's on Broadway.
 

The Music of George Gershwin
In Gershwin, the public saw the breezy, party-going life of a successful Broadway composer, while his more serious and inquisitive side was little known. With the premiere of the Rhapsody in Blue, new vistas revealed themselves to Gershwin in the world of the concert hall. It was in this period, that the diverse threads of his background and youthful experiences on Broadway wove together to create a new sound in American music.

Written on a commission by the Paul Whiteman jazz band, The Rhapsody in Blue was an entirely new departure in the world of American concert music. Written as a concerto for piano and jazz orchestra, the Rhapsody was one of the first American works to successfully integrate the sounds of New Orleans and Harlem with the musical forms of Tchaikovsky and Liszt.

'Jassbo Brown Blues' functions as the overture to Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess.
While Jassbo Brown plays, the characters in the opera sway to the biting syncopations and quartal harmonies of this gem of the Gershwin piano repertoire.
 

The 20th Century - Contemporary American Piano Music
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

is widely regarded as the foremost American composer of this time. A student of Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1920's, upon his return to the United States he quickly established himself as the 'Dean of American Composers'. He is best known for his orchestral scores and ballet music such as 'Appalachian Spring'. He composed the 'Piano Blues' in the 1920's during the height of the vogue for bringing Jazz and the Blues into the concert hall. In a style influenced perhaps more by Stravinsky and European contemporaries than by fellow Americans, Copland creates a haunting Blues sound portrait.
 
Morton Gould (1913 - 1996)
 
Gould integrated jazz, blues, gospel, country-and-western, and folk elements into compositions which bear Gould's unequaled mastery of orchestration and imaginative formal structures. These instantly recognizable American sounds led to Gould's receiving three commissions for the US Bicentennial and being awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. His experience on Broadway and as staff pianist for Radio City Music Hall served as the inspiration for the Boogie Woogie Etude - a virtuoso showpiece based on a Blues-based style of piano playing that emerged in the South in the late 1930's.
Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960)
 
Aaron Jay Kernis, one of the youngest composers ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1998), has become among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation. Each work of Kernis bears the unmistakable stamp of a wildly fertile musical imagination and a distinctive voice forged out of the wide-ranging musical languages of the 1980s and 1990s. His music bursts with rich poetic imagery, brilliant instrumental color, distinctive musical wit, and infectious exuberance. His work is as likely to be inspired by the horrors of the Persian Gulf War (as in the much-talked about Symphony No.2) as the antics of a child (Before Sleep and Dreams). In the Lullaby Kernis draws upon the Nocturnes of Chopin for inspiration.
 
Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938)
 
Frederic Rzewski studied with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton Universities. His acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor strongly influenced his development in both composition and performance.

In Rome in the mid-sixties he formed the MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) group, which quickly became known for its pioneering work in live electronics and improvisation. Bringing together both classical and jazz avant-gardists (like Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton), MEV developed an esthetic of music as a spontaneous collective process, an esthetic which was shared with other experimental groups of the same period. The experience of MEV can be felt in Rzewski's compositions of the late sixties and early seventies, which combine elements derived equally from the worlds of written and improvised music.

The Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues is from his cycle of North American Ballads. Incorporating elements of Minimalism, improvisation and the Blues, the piece graphically depicts the deafening roar of a cotton mill and the singing of the workers who can barely be heard above the din.
 
William Bolcom (b. 1938)
 
The eclecticism at the heart of American music takes a vital new twist in the work of contemporary composer, William Bolcom, for whom non-specialization has become a raison d'être. A composer of songs, operas, and instrumental works, a pianist of distinction who frequently accompanies his wife mezzo-soprano Joan Morris in recital, an artist who has worked in a variety of idioms from classical to cabaret, Bolcom is a fresh voice on the American music scene. Bolcom studied at Stanford University, with Darius Milhaud in 1958 and with Olivier Messiaen in Paris afterwards before settling in New York in the 1960's, where he immersed himself for a time in the ragtime of Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake. Since 1973 Bolcom has taught at the University of Michigan.

The Serpent's Kiss is from a cycle of Ragtime-inspired piano pieces telling the story of Adam and Even in the garden of paradise. Bolcom incorporates the sounds of early Rock 'n Roll, Broadway (quotes from West Side Story and South Pacific), tap dancing music and silent film music into his own unique voice.