Morton Gould
Morton Gould was born in New York City on December 10, 1913. He received a comprehensive musical education at the Institute of Musical Art in New York, at New York University, and privately (piano) with Abby Whiteside. After completing these studies, he played the piano in motion-picture theaters and vaudeville houses and served as the staff pianist for the Radio City Music Hall. He was only eighteen when the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski introduced his Chorale and Fugue in Jazz, his first successful effort to combine classical forms and techniques with modern popular American idioms. In his twenty-first year he started conducting an orchestra for radio, and making brilliant transcriptions of popular and semi-classical favorites for these broadcasts. During the next two decades he was one of radio’s outstanding musical personalities, his programs enjoying important sponsorship. During this period he wrote many works for orchestra which have been performed by America’s foremost symphony orchestras. He also wrote the scores for several successful ballets (including Interplay and Fall River Legend), as well as music for Broadway musical comedies and motion pictures.
Like Gershwin, Gould has been a major figure in helping make serious music popular by writing ambitious concert works which make a skilful blend of serious and popular musical elements. Gershwin came to the writing of serious concert works after apprenticeship in Tin Pan Alley; Gould, on the other hand, came to popular writing after an intensive career in serious music. Thus he brings to his more popular efforts an extraordinary technique in composition, advanced thinking in orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, and rhythm. Yet there is nothing pedantic about his writing. Many of his works are such consistent favorites with audiences because they are the creations of a consummate musician without losing popular appeal. Few have been more successful than Gould in achieving such a synthesis between concert and popular music.
American Salute (1942) is a brilliant orchestral adaptation of the famous American popular song by Patrick Gilmore, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Though written during the Civil War, this robust marching song became most popular during the Spanish American War with which it is today most often associated. Gould prepared this composition during World War II for an all-American music concert broadcast over the Mutual radio network on February 12, 1942. “I have attempted,” Gould explained, “a very simple and direct translation in orchestral idiom of this vital tune. There is nothing much that can be said about the structure or the treatment because I think it is what you might call ‘self-auditory.’”
The American Symphonette No. 2 is one of several works for orchestra in the sinfonietta form in which Gould made a conscious effort to fuse classical structure with elements of popular music. The composer’s purpose, as he explained, was “entertainment, in the better sense of the term.” The most famous movement is the middle one, a “Pavane,” often played independently of the other movements. It is particularly favored by school orchestras, and has also been adapted for jazz band. The old and stately classical dance of the Pavane is here married to a spicy jazz tune jauntily presented by the trumpet; there are here overtones of a gentle sadness. The first and last movements of this Symphonette abound with jazz rhythms and melodies, respectively marked “Moderately Fast, With Vigor” and “Racy.”
The Cowboy Rhapsody (1944) started out as a composition for brass band, but was later adapted by the composer for orchestra. This is a rhapsodic treatment of several familiar and less familiar cowboy tunes including “Old Paint,” “Home on the Range,” “Trail to Mexico” and “Little Old Sod Shanty.” The composer here attempted “a program work that would effectively utilize the marvelous vigor and sentiment of these unusual songs.”
Family Album (1951) is one of two suites in which Gould evokes nostalgic pictures of the American scene and holidays through atmospheric melodies. (The other suite is Holiday Music, written in 1947.) The composer explains that the music of both these suites is so simple and direct in its pictorial appeal that it requires no program other than the titles of the respective movements to be understood and appreciated; nor is any analysis of the music itself called for. Family Album, for brass band, is made up of five brief movements: “Outing in the Park,” “Porch Swing on a Summer Evening,” “Nickelodeon,” “Old Romance” and “Horseless Carriage Gallop.” Holiday Music, for orchestra, also has five movements: “Home for Christmas,” “Fourth of July,” “Easter Morning,” “The First Thanksgiving,” and “Halloween.”
Interplay is a ballet with choreography by Jerome Robbins introduced in New York in 1945. The score is an adaptation of the composer’s American Concertette, for piano and orchestra, written for the piano virtuoso, José Iturbi. The text of the ballet contrasts classic and present-day dances; Gould’s music is a delightful contrast between old forms and styles, and modern or popular ones. Interplay, as the concert work is now called, has four movements, each of popular appeal. The first, “With Drive and Vigor,” was described by the composer as “brash.” It has two sprightly main themes and a brief development. This is followed by a “Gavotte” in which the composer directs “a sly glance to the classical mode.” The third movement is a “Blues,” “a very simple and, in spots, ‘dirty’ type of slow, nostalgic mood.” The finale, “Very Fast” brings the composition to a breathless conclusion through unrelenting motor energy.
Latin-American Symphonette, for orchestra (1941) is the fourth of Gould’s sinfoniettas using popular idioms. The three earlier ones exploit jazz, while the fourth consists of ideas and idioms indigenous to Latin America. Each of the four movements consists of a stylized Latin-American dance form: “Rumba,” “Tango,” “Guaracha,” and “Conga.”
In Minstrel Show (1946) Gould tried to bring to orchestral music some of the flavor of old time minstrel-show tunes and styles. There are no borrowings from actual minstrel shows. All the melodies are the composer’s own, but they incorporate some of the stylistic elements of the original product. “The composition,” Gould goes on to say, “alternates between gay and nostalgic passages. There are characteristic sliding trombone and banjo effects, and in the middle of the piece the sandpaper blocks and other percussion convey the sounds and tempo of a soft-shoe dance. The score ends on a jubilant note.”
Yankee Doodle Went to Town, like the American Salute, is the presentation of a popular American tune in modern orchestration and harmony. The tune in this case is, to be sure, “Yankee Doodle,” probably of English origin which made its first appearance in this country in 1755. The general belief is that it was used by a certain Richard Shuchburg, a British Army soldier, to poke fun at the decrepit colonial troops. For two decades after that the tune was frequently heard in the Colonies as the means by which British soldiers could taunt Colonials. Once the Revolution broke out, however, the colonists used “Yankee Doodle” as its favorite war song, and it was sung lustily by them when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Gould’s orchestration emphasizes some of the humorous elements in the song, while giving it some freshness and vitality through his fine sense for orchestral color and striking harmonizations.