{"id":642,"date":"2016-05-04T22:24:55","date_gmt":"2016-05-05T02:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=642"},"modified":"2016-05-08T22:14:38","modified_gmt":"2016-05-09T02:14:38","slug":"the-most-under-rated-composer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2016\/05\/the-most-under-rated-composer.html","title":{"rendered":"The Most Under-Rated Composer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"03-psycho-screen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Who is the most under-rated 20th<\/sup> century American composer? In the wake of the month-long Bernard Herrmann festival curated by DC\u2019s PostClassical Ensemble<\/a>, I have to believe Herrmann is the most likely candidate.<\/p>\n

The festival, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Georgetown University, and the AFI Silver Theatre, featured three world premieres and a DC premiere. A special focus was a genre now forgotten: the radio dramas of the thirties and forties, which during World War II were a bulwark for home-front morale. The twin creative geniuses were Orson Welles and Norman Corwin \u2013 and Herrmann, the supreme radio-drama composer, worked with both of them.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the Herrmann scholar Christopher Husted, we were able to revisit two classic 1944 Corwin\/Herrmann radio dramas in live performance: \u201cUntitled\u201d (about a dead American serviceman) and \u201cWhitman\u201d (in which a celebration of the iconic American poet morphs into a patriotic paean).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhitman\u201d proved the revelation of the festival. It unforgettably mates words and music. It peaks where it turns interior. \u201cI lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of grass,\u201d writes Whitman. \u00a0The grass may be \u201cthe flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.\u201d Or \u201cthe handkerchief of the Lord.\u201d Or \u201cthe beautiful uncut hair of graves\u201d \u2013 a memorial to dead young men. \u201cTenderly will I use you, curling grass.\u201d This exceptional passage, combining the transcendental with the erotic, inspires a musical epiphany for strings and harp surpassing many a comparable work mating poetry with words sung. The Herrmann\/Corwin \u201cWhitman,\u201d 25 minutes long, deserves wide concert performance as what in music is termed \u201cmelodrama\u201d \u2013 music underscoring speech. (Cf. PostClassical Ensemble\u2019s own\u00a0Hiawatha<\/em> Melodrama. Schoenberg\u2019s Ode to Napoleon<\/em> is a masterpiece of melodrama.) PostClassical Ensemble plans to revisit \u201cWhitman\u201d and to record it.<\/p>\n

In short: Herrmann\u2019s radio melodramas were a crucial step towards the melodramas he composed for Vertigo<\/em> and Psycho<\/em> \u2013 underscoring dialogue, sealing transitions, defining mood.<\/p>\n

Psycho<\/em> occupied us for two days. The film-music historian Neil Lerner explored Herrmann\u2019s debt to Bartok \u2013 who knew how to use strings alone to inspire terror and suspense. We performed \u2013 in its previously unheard original version \u2013 Herrmann\u2019s atonal Sinfonietta for Strings of 1935 \u2013 in some ways, a trial run for Psycho<\/em>. We watched Psycho<\/em> and talked about it. But most memorably we performed Herrmann\u2019s 1968 Psycho<\/em> \u201cNarrative for string orchestra.\u201d Orchestras that continue to perform the \u201cPsycho<\/em> Suite\u201d (as recorded, e.g., by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic) should shelve that collection of film cues in favor of Herrmann\u2019s own integrated Psycho<\/em> synthesis, invaluably recovered by John Mauceri in 1999. As conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez<\/a>, this 15-minute composition (featured by Simon Rattle on his opening concert of the current Berlin Philharmonic season) built ineluctably to a closing, climactic reprise the three-note motif that anchors Herrmann\u2019s famous film score.<\/p>\n

The festival also featured my favorite chamber work by any American: Herrmann\u2019s sublimely nostalgic 1967 clarinet quintet Souvenirs de Voyage<\/em>. In a program note, I wrote of the quintet\u2019s long, masterfully woven first movement: \u201cWe feel we have journeyed somewhere, even if that makes no ultimate difference in a world of sadness and remembrance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBernard Herrmann: Screen, Stage, and Radio\u201d was part of an all-American PostClassical Ensemble season, exploring an \u201calternative narrative<\/a>\u201d for American music outside the over-exposed Copland\/Boulanger axis.<\/p>\n

We are very far from taking the full measure of Bernard Herrmann.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Who is the most under-rated 20th century American composer? In the wake of the month-long Bernard Herrmann festival curated by DC\u2019s PostClassical Ensemble, I have to believe Herrmann is the most likely candidate. The festival, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Georgetown University, and the AFI Silver Theatre, featured three world premieres […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-642","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/03-psycho-screen.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-am","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions\/643"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}