Harl McDonald
Harl Mcdonald was born in Boulder, Colorado, on July 27, 1899. His music study took place in Redlands, California and at the University of Southern California. The winning of prizes from the American Federation of Music Clubs for two orchestral works enabled him to go to Europe and attend the Leipzig Conservatory. In Germany, his symphonic fantasy, Mojave, was successfully introduced by the Berlin State Opera Orchestra. After returning to the United States he was appointed in 1926 to the music faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he later became professor of music, and finally head of the music department. At the University he conducted various choral groups which appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra. From 1939 until his death he was manager of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which introduced many of his orchestral compositions. McDonald wrote four symphonies, a two-piano concerto, a violin concerto, and various suites and tone poems for orchestra. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, on March 30, 1955.
The Children’s Symphony was a work intended to teach children something about symphonic form through melodies they knew and loved. The form of the symphony is adhered to—in the presentation of two themes, their development, and recapitulation. Simple and unsophisticated, this symphony makes ideal listening for children, but there is enough charm here to provide considerable enjoyment to older people as well. In the first movement, McDonald uses for his two main themes, “London Bridge” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” In the second movement we hear “Little Bo Peep” and “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?”; in the third, “Farmer in the Dell” and “Jingle Bells”; and in the finale, “Honey Bee” and “Snow Is Falling On My Garden.”
Rhumba, for symphony orchestra, is the third movement of McDonald’s Symphony No. 2 (1935). But this movement (which in the symphony displaces the conventional scherzo) is so popular that it is often played apart from the rest of the work. The symphony itself was inspired by the turbulent 1930’s, with its labor conflicts, breadlines, unemployment, and depression. Rhumba injected a gay note into these somber proceedings, attempting to interpret “the passionate search after good times and diversions, and the restless pursuit of intoxicated pleasures,” as the composer explained. McDonald goes on to say that he here used the rumba rhythm because he liked it and because it seemed to him to be the pulse of those times.