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A TRIBUTE TO Oliver
Daniel (1911-1990)
All of the compositions on this disc have two things in
common. One:
they are all some of the first products of the yeasty
infatuation that
many American composers have felt for Eastern culture,
and, two: they
all exist, to some extent, because of the passionate
advocacy of
Oliver Daniel. An administrator, radio programmer, author
and
all-around advocate, he is one of the true unsung heroes
of 20th
Century American music. It is fitting that his memory be
honored by a
disc from CRI — a record label he helped to create.
Born in Wisconsin, in 1911, Oliver Daniel trained for a
career as a
concert pianist. He debuted in 1935 in Boston, to very
encou
raging reviews. After seven years of performing and
teaching, how
ever, Oliver gravitated towards his real calling when he
joined CBS
Radio as music director of that network’s
Educational Division. For
CBS, he produced and directed the weekly New York
Philharmonic
broadcasts, the concerts given by the CBS Symphony
(amazing to recall,
from today’s perspective, an era when commercial
networks sponsored
their own orchestras!), and a pair of innovative programs
(Invitation
to Music and New Voices in Song) that showcased off-beat
repertoire
and promising young artists.
In 1944, Oliver was lured to the ABC Network, where he
produced the
broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He returned
to CBS in
1947, and for the next eight years he labored
prodigiously, becoming
for that network’s cultural programming what Edward
R. Murrow was to
the news division. Oliver produced not only symphonic
concerts, but
also documentaries, interview programs, and public
service broadcasts
of all types.
It was during this enormously productive period that
Oliver joined
forces with another musical visionary, Leopold Stokowski,
to
inaugurate The Twentieth-Century Concert Hall, a program
that gave
valuable exposure to living composers of every stripe.
Oliver’s fierce
dedication to contemporary music led him to become the
coordinating
manager of the American Composers Alliance (ACA),a
co-founder (again
with Stokowski) of the Contemporary Music Society, in
1954, a
co-founder (with the composers Otto Luening and Douglas
Moore) of
Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI). Somehow, he also found
time to write
eloquently about music for such leading magazines as The
Saturday
Review, Stereo Review, and Musical America.
The same year that CRI was launched, Oliver joined
Broadcast Music,
Incorporated (BMI) as the first director of its new
Concert Music
Department. Thanks to him, composers as diverse as
Wallingford Riegger
and William Schuman enjoyed an unprecedented level of
support,
promotion, and financial compensation. He was one of the
founders of
the American Symphony Orchestra (1962), and he served on
the boards of
the National Music Council, the American Symphony
Orchestra League,
and, beginning in 1959, was active in the affairs of
UNESCO’s
International Music Council.
Perhaps Oliver’s greatest single accomplishment was
the world
premiere, in 1965, of Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony,
conducted by
Stokowski. It was Oliver who first brought this
masterpiece to the
conductor’s attention and who underwrote much of the
expense required
to bring it into the concert hall.His final venture,
before retirement, was to help
organize the American Composers Orchestra — an
enterprise still going
strong at the dawn of the new millennium. Even in
retirement, he made a great
contribution. This was the first time the BSO had played
any Hovhaness,
despite the fact that the composer was devoting seven
years to writing a
monumental and definitive biography of Stokowski
(Stokowski: A
Counterpoint of View, Dodd Mead, 1982). At the time of
his death, he
was working on a similarly ambitious biography of Dimitri
Mitropoulos.
Music is the poorer for his passing. The citation of his
1974
honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of
Music states
the matter plainly: “Oliver Daniel has rendered
incalculable service
to American composers of serious music…”
It is in great part thanks to him that the music on this
disc was
published, performed, and recorded. Enjoy. Oliver would
have wanted that.
Lou Harrison: Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small
Orchestra
Born in Oregon, in 1917, Lou Harrison could be regarded
as the
quintessential Pacific Coast composer — one of the
first American
musicians to seriously explore the nature of Far Eastern
musics. By
immersing himself in the traditions of Balinese gamelan
music, he
created a unique sound-world characterized by graceful
clarity,
elegant simplicity, and colorful, often spicy, timbres.
The Suite was commissioned by the Ajemian sisters in 1951
and
recorded by them shortly after Stokowski conducted it at
the Museum of
Modern Art, under the auspices of the Contemporary Music
Society. The
LP versions, RCA LM-1785 and CRI-114, have long been
prized
collectors’ items. Oliver Daniel mid-wifed
Stokowski’s performance and
recording through his work with the American Composers
Alliance.
The opening Allegro serves as a festive overture: the
violin projects
long, clean lines over the shimmering colors of the
gamelan-style
ensemble: piano, tack-piano, tam-tam, harp, celesta, and
assorted
gongs, in addition to the cello and doublebass. The five
succeeding
movements alternate between tranquil, elegiac material
and livelier
sections, identified as “gamelans,” which evoke
the spirit and
scintillating colors of the Indonesian styles that
inspired the
composer.
As Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote in her notes for the RCA
LP: “The
Harrision Suite is one of the most delicate and lovely
American works
of recent years…the sheer grace and joyousness of
its style…cannot
fail to charm all who hear it.”
Henry
Cowell: Homage to Iran
If compositional devices could be copyrighted, Henry
Cowell’s heirs
would be exceedingly rich. Long before they became
fashionable
elements in the contemporary composer’s vocabulary,
Cowell “invented”
tone clusters, aleatoric techniques, altered pianos,
harmonies based
on seconds instead of traditional thirds, and the
dramatic free-form
string glissandi so beloved of Symphony Orchestra under
guest
conductor Robert Shaw. This was the first time the BSO
had played any
Hovhaness, despite the fact that the composer was
Penderecki (among
others). Cowell was composing and performing with such
avant-garde
innovations decades before anyone else.
For all his fierce experimentation, though, Cowell was
basically a
warm-hearted humanist, fully capable of writing music
that was
intensely melodic, heroic, charming, and even spiritual.
Like the
other composers on this disc, he was deeply interested in
the music of
other cultures, although he did not travel extensively
until 1956,
when a Rockefeller Foundation grant (bestowed largely
through Oliver
Daniel’s efforts) allowed him to spend long periods
of time in Turkey,
Iran, India, and Japan.
Persian music especially fascinated Cowell. Homage to
Iran (premiered
in the Shah’s palace on July 3, 1959) does not
actually quote any
ethnic material, but rather seeks to pay tribute to
“the style and
spirit” of Persian music. The work is cast in two
pairs of movements,
and its prismatic mood-changes range from chant-like
incantations to
dance-variations. Note particularly the brilliant toccata
of the
second movement.
At several key points in the score, Cowell wanted the
pianist to lean
over and mute the piano strings with his fingers, to
imitate the
timbre of a Persian drum. For this recording, however,
violinist
Leopold Avakian obtained the services of a real Persian
drummer, a
serendipity that delighted the composer.
Colin
McPhee: Nocturne
This evocative work was commissioned by Oliver Daniel
through the
Contemporary Music Society and received its first
performance
(Stokowski conducting) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
on December
2, 1958 — on a program that also featured works by
Egyptian, Chinese,
Japanese, and Israeli composers!
Compact in form but lush in expression, the Nocturne
constitutes a
remembrance in distilled form of what the composer
absorbed during his
years of residence and study in Bali (1931-1939). It
might also be
thought of as a delightful pendant to McPhee’s
masterful symphonic
piece Tabu-Tabuhan (1936), a work generally acknowledged
to be the
finest product of his Balinese period. Only seven minutes
long, the
Nocturne’s modal impressionism is musical exoticism
of the most
appealing kind.
Alan
Hovhaness: Koke No Niwa,
The Holy City, and Triptych
Today of course, Alan Hovhaness is one of the most
beloved (and
probably the most prolific) of American composers. In the
early 1950s,
however, he was still struggling for recognition. The
1955 world
premiere of Mysterious Mountain (Stokowski and the
Houston Symphony)
certainly helped put Hovhaness’s music on the
cultural map, but even
more important was a subsequent performance by the Boston
Symphony
Orchestra under guest conductor Robert Shaw. This was the
first time
the BSO had played any Hovhaness, despite the fact that
the composer
was born and raised in the Boston area. It was Oliver
Daniel who
brought the score to Shaw’s attention.
Koke No Niwa:
“A garden of sounds and silences” is how the
composer described this
1960 composition, written on commission from a Tokyo
television
station (!). Inspired by the fabled Koke Dera (Moss
Temple) of Kyoto,
this brief yet highly effective piece is delicately but
tellingly
scored for English horn, harp, and a veritable chamber
orchestra of
percussion (timpani, tam-tam, glockenspiel, and marimba).
The Holy City:
This piece is another example of Hovhaness’s skill
at
creating a ceremonially powerful expression within very
compact form.
Commissioned by conductor Arthur Bennett Lipkin through
the Committee
to Further American Contemporary Music, it manifests an
otherwordly
beauty: eerie glissandi from the richly-subdivided
strings, over which
the solo trumpet (masterfully played here by the great
Elgar Howarth)
projects a bittersweet meditation of cantorial
eloquence.
Triptych:
Oliver Daniel was one of Hovhaness’s earliest
advocates. In 1952-53,
he commissioned two parts of the Triptych (Christmas Ode
and Easter
Cantata) for CBS broadcasts on those two holidays.
Although Hovhaness
had already composed a great many works, this was his
first commission
resulting in immediate performance, and he considers the
event to be a
major milestone in his career.
Interestingly, the work became a “triptych” at
Oliver’s suggestion
(with the addition of the Ave Maria), probably as a
result of the warm
response CBS enjoyed following a broadcast of the
then-unknown
Botticelli Triptych of Respighi.
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