Program Notes B

GrantParkMusicFestivalSeventy-fifth Season

Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, Principal ConductorChristopher Bell, Chorus Director

Tenth Program: Independence Day in Millennium ParkSaturday, July 4, 2009 at 1:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORChESTRAChristopher Bell, ConductorLane Alexander, Tap Dancer

SMITh The Star-Spangled Banner arr. TOSCANINI

COPLAND Fanfare for the Common Man

NELSON Savannah River holiday

WELLS Minor Reflection

GOULD Excerpts from Concerto for Tap Dancer and Orchestra

Toccata: Bright and Vigorous Minuet: Lyrically Moving Rondo: Very Fast and Driving

lAne AlexAnder

WARD America the Beautiful arr. DRAGON

attr. STEFFE Battle hymn of the Republic arr. WILhOUSKY

TChAIKOVSKY 1812, Overture Solennelle, Op. 49

SOUSA The Stars and Stripes Forever

This concert is generously sponsored by ComEd.

Program Notes B

Saturday, July 4, 2009 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

In the first volume of his autobiography (Copland, 00 through , St. Martins/Marek, 1984), Aaron Copland (1900-1990) recounted the genesis of his Fanfare for the Common Man: Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, had written to me at the end of August [1942] about an idea he wanted to put into action for the 1942-43 concert season. Dur-ing World War I, he had asked British composers for a fanfare to begin each orchestral concert. It had been so successful that he thought to repeat the procedure in World War II with American composers. [Goossens additional requests inspired a total of ten fanfares from such other notable musicians as Creston, Cowell, Piston, Thomson, Milhaud and Gould.] Goossens wrote: It is my idea to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort, so that I suggest you give your fanfare a title, as for instance, A Fanfare for Soldiers, or for Airmen or Sailors. I am asking this favor in a spirit of friendly comradeship, and I ask you to do it for the cause we all have at heart.... As with Lincoln Portrait, I was gratified to participate in a patriotic activity. Goos-sens, a composer himself, suggested the instrumentation of brass and percussion and a length of about two minutes. Since it was premiered on March 14, 1943, Fanfare for the Common Man has been played by many and varied ensembles, ranging from the U.S. Air Force Band to the popular Emerson, Lake, and Palmer group.... I confess that I prefer Fanfare in the original version, and I later used it in the final movement of my Third Symphony.

* * *Composer and conductor Ron Nelson, born in Joliet, Illinois in 1929, studied with howard

hanson, Bernard Rogers, Peter Mennin and Wayne Barlow at the Eastman School of Music, where he received his bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. Nelson additionally studied with Tony Auban at the cole Normale de Musique in Paris on a Fulbright grant in 1954-1955. Following his graduation from Eastman in 1956, Nelson joined the faculty of Brown University, where he taught until his retirement in 1993. his numerous honors include a Ford Foundation fellowship (1963), a howard Foundation grant (1965), grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979), an ASCAP Award (1989) and commissions from many universities and ensembles. In

ChRiSTOPheR Bells biography can be found on page B3.

lAne AlexAnDeR, Chicago human Rhythm Projects co-founder and director for 20 years, has a performing career spanning over 30 years that includes work on the concert stage, musical theater, television and film. He is one of the foremost experts on Morton Goulds Tap Dance Concerto which he has performed at Carnegie hall with the New York Pops as well as the London Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Illinois Philharmonic and Chicago Sinfonietta. He was the first artist to publish a recording of the Tap Dance Concerto since the original recording with Danny Daniels in

1952. Additional performances have included the Chautauqua Festival Orchestra and the Colorado, Greenville, Queens, Long Beach, Dallas and Czech National Symphony Orchestras. Lane regularly performs and teaches in Athens, Beijing, Brasilia, Caracas, helsinki, Munich, Paris, Prague, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Zurich and at numerous festivals around the North America, including the Third Coast Rhythm Project and New Yorks Tap City. he has appeared with such greats as Donald OConnor, Gregory hines, Maurice hines, the Nicholas Brothers, Buster Brown, Prince Spencer, Peg Leg Bates, Jimmy Slyde, Savion Glover and Luke Cresswell. Lane currently teaches at his own Tap Studio in Chicago, serves as a Senior Advisor to the Beijing Contemporary Music Academy as well as on the board of directors for the International Tap Association. he is the recipient of an NEA American Masterpieces grant through the Illinois Arts Council, two IAC Choreography Fellowships and the Ruth Page Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field.

We are proud to support over arts and cultural organizations in the Chicago area.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation congratulates the Grant Park Music Festival

on its th season.

www.macfound.org

B0 Program Notes

1991, he became the first musician to receive the (Roy) Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts. Savannah River Holiday, composed in Rochester in 1952, the year that Nelson received his undergraduate degree from Eastman, follows traditional three-part form (ABA), in which the brilliantly scored outer sections are, according to the composer, gay and reckless, while the lyrical central episode is quiet and reflective.

* * * Katherine Gladney Wells was among the leaders of the St. Louis musical community. The

daughter of 7-Up founder Franklin Gladney, she was born in St. Louis in 1918, studied composi-tion with John Duke at Smith College, and returned home to marry Ben h. Wells, who went to work for 7-Up in 1938 and rose from advertising copywriter to CEO, a post he held from 1974 until his retirement in 1979. The Wells became important benefactors of the St. Louis Symphony Or-chestra, Ben serving as board president, Katherine writing a history of the ensemble (Symphony & Song: the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra: the First Hundred Years 0-0), and together endowing the Principal Viola chair. They were both recognized with the degree Doctor of humane Letters from the University of Missouri at St. Louis in 1983 and the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from the St. Louis Arts Awards in 1994. Katherine pursued her own creative musical interests as time allowed (the years when Schumann wrote 100 songs or when Schubert wrote as fast as black magic, she said, they were not worrying about shopping for food, cooking, caring for children, and answering the phone), composing and conducting the St. Louis Symphony annually from the 1970s to the 1990s in concerts arranged for her by her husband, often featuring premieres of her own works. She died in St. Louis in 2003. her poignant Minor Reflection originated in 1987 as the slow movement of a four-movement work for the St. Louis-based Laclede Quartet. She arranged the piece for string orchestra the following year, and Leonard Slatkin led the St. Louis Symphony in its first performance and recorded it for RCA Victor in March 1991.

* * * Danny Daniels first gained fame as a tap dancer with Broadway appearances in Billion Dollar

Baby (1945, with a score by Morton Gould [1913-1996] and lyrics by Comden and Green), Street Scene (1947, Kurt Weill and Langston hughes) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948, Cole Porter). he continued to dance during the 1950s, including a tour with the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre, but he turned more to teaching and choreographing after his initial Broadway successes, working both in hol-lywood (The Night They Raided Minskys, Pennies from Heaven, Zelig) and New York (four Tony nomina-tions, winning for the 1984 Tap Dance Kid). In 1952, during the transitional time in his career, Dan-iels approached Morton Gould about the possibility of collaborating on a new ballet. I was talking to him and he was looking at me, but eventually I realized he wasnt even listening, Daniels recalled years later. He said, How would you like to do a tap dance concerto with me? I was bowled over. So I said sure. Gould composed his Concerto for Tap Dancer and Orchestra during the follow-ing months and conducted its premiere with Daniels and the Rochester Pops on November 16, 1952; they recorded the work for Columbia two months later and Gould and Daniels subsequently performed it together more than forty times. (Quite improbably, Gould had composed a different tap dance concerto for Paul Drapers appearance at Carnegie hall in 1941. The work was never performed, however, and the score was lost.) The Tap Dance Concerto comprises character pieces in complementary music and dance styles, including Toccata, Minuet and Rondo.

* * * Katherine Lee Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College, was inspired to write the

words for America, the Beautiful by a visit to Pikes Peak in Colorado. Her poem was first pub-lished in the Boston magazine The Congregationalist on July 4, 1895. Lyricist and editor Thomas Bai-ley Aldrich encouraged Miss Bates to have music composed for the poem, but an existing melody titled Materna written by Samuel Augustus Ward in 1882 had become associated with the poem in some unknown way; the words and music for America, the Beautiful were first published together in Boston in 1913. The present arrangement is by Carmen Dragon, who scored over thirty mo-tion pictures, winning an Academy Award for Cover Girl in 1944. he also composed for television, variety shows and musicals, and gained a wide reputation th