MCKAY: Violin Concerto / Sinfonietta No. 4 / Song Over the Great Plains
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George Frederick McKay (1899-1970) Violin Concerto Suite on Sixteenth Century Hymn Tunes Sinfonietta No.4 Song over the Great Plains George Frederick McKay,...
George Frederick McKay (1899-1970)
Violin Concerto Suite on Sixteenth Century Hymn Tunes
Sinfonietta No.4 Song over the Great Plains
George Frederick McKay, known as the Dean of
Northwest Composers and revered Professor of Music at
the University of Washington for 41 years, from 1927 to
1968, was born to a pioneering family in the small
wheat-farming community of Harrington, Washington
on 11th June, 1899. He spent most of his childhood in
Spokane where his father worked as a farmland surveyor
for a local bank, and began composing orchestral music
as early as his high school years. His father did not
approve of a career in music, and he was encouraged to
enroll at Washington State College at Pullman to earn a
business degree. In 1919, weary of this, he transferred to
the University of Washington, Seattle, where he began
seriously studying music and composition with Carl
Paige Wood. Two years later a scholarship allowed him
to study composition with Christian Sinding and Selim
Palmgren at the Eastman School of Music at Rochester,
New York, earning the first composition degree awarded
there. His first published compositions were written and
published during this time.
After his graduation from Eastman in 1923, McKay
embarked on a teaching career that included posts in
North Carolina, South Dakota, and Missouri and finally
at what became his permanent professorship at the
University of Washington, Seattle. There he became
recognized over the span of four decades as an
outstanding teacher, composer and leader in the
propagation of American music. His works were widely
performed and broadcast under some of the most
distinguished conductors. He was the recipient of many
honours during his lifetime, including his twice holding
the Alchin Chair at the University of Southern California
(1938-39). He received important commissions from
national orchestras, and was awarded national prizes for
harp, woodwind, piano, organ and symphonic
compositions. McKay was equally successful as a
teacher, with students including William Bolcom, Earl
Robinson, John Cage and Goddard Lieberson. He died
in 1970 at his home in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
In 1941 George Frederick McKay entered his
recently composed Violin Concerto in the Heifetz
Competition, newly established by Jascha Heifetz and
the music publisher Carl Fischer. By 1940, when he
wrote his Violin Concerto, McKay was an established
composer who could point to many performances and
broadcasts by some of the great musicians of the day.
His position at the University of Washington in Seattle,
however, far removed from the musical centres of the
northeast, meant that he was still seen as an artist of
largely local significance. McKay, like other competitors,
hoped that success would give his work the kind of
broad national exposure that only a world famous artist
could give it. Though McKay's work received an
honourable mention and was praised by Heifetz, it failed
to capture the top prize, which went to Gail Kubik's
Violin Concerto No. 2. McKay's concerto shares strong
formal affinities with Max Bruch's famous Violin
Concerto No. 1 in G minor, a rather operatic first
movement, an inward and poetic slow movement and
rhythmically vigorous finale, all written to lie well on
the instrument while sounding extremely virtuosic. Like
the Bruch, McKay's work is in one movement divided
into three sections that correspond to the standard fastslow-
fast scheme of romantic concerti. Unlike Bruch's
concerto, the first movement is actually a three-themed
sonata-arch form. The character is declamatory and lyrical.
It begins with a brief orchestral introduction of the first
theme, followed by the solo violin stating the second,
primary theme in double stops. After much recitativelike
interplay by orchestra and soloist, the ravishing
third theme is played by a soaring solo violin,
underpinned by undulating triplets in the winds. The
middle section is both development and cadenza, after
which the recapitulation reveals the movement's arch
form by returning the themes in reverse order. Another
cadenza serves as a bridge to the second movement. This
movement is the intimate heart of the concerto. A solo
oboe gives a four-bar introduction and the violin enters
with a soulful melody resembling a folk-tune.
Throughout, the violin spins an endless cantilena until
the winds restate the theme of the introduction. This is
followed by a striking passage scored only for solo flute
and solo violin, in which the composer's love of nature
is most evident. This passage is also a seamless bridge to
the finale. The third movement is a vehicle for pure
virtuoso enjoyment. Highly rhythmic in a mildly jazzy
way, the composer slightly offsets its flow with two
dance episodes in irregular metre. The movement ends
in triumph after a cyclical return of the first movement's
main theme combined with the irregular dance motive.
The concerto is dedicated to Moritz Rosen, a faculty
member of the University of Washington, and was first
performed in the fall of 1941 by his son Kensley Rosen
with the University of Washington Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by the composer. Rosen performed the
concerto again in 1946 with the Seattle Philharmonic, and
played it many times to other audiences with piano
accompaniment. It was not performed with orchestra
again until its triumphant revival by Ilka Talvi and the
Seattle Symphony in 2001.
The Suite on 16th Century Hymn Tunes is based
upon the music for psalms composed by the Frenchman
Louis Bourgeois (c.1510-1561). Bourgeois was a
follower of John Calvin, and in 1541 went to Geneva,
where he was charged with bringing order to the
Genevan Psalter (hymnal). Showing great flair for this
work, he introduced some unapproved changes to the
hymns, and was subsequently jailed briefly. He was
released through the intervention of Calvin, who saw the
value of Bourgeois' highly musical adaptations and had
them implemented for the Psalter's publication. After
the Psalter was published, he returned to France, where
nothing is heard of him after 1560.
McKay's homage to Bourgeois was composed for
organ in 1945 and shortly thereafter cast for string
orchestra, a version first performed in 1946 in a benefit
concert for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, featuring
six of McKay's works, all conducted by the composer.
In 1962 he transcribed the work for two string
orchestras, and it is this version that is here recorded.
The 1962 transcription differs in that the parts for the
second string orchestra are intended for younger players,
and a celeste is effectively added in the fourth
movement, Choeur Celeste. Vilem Sokol conducted the
Seattle Youth Symphony, using more than a hundred
string players, in the 1963 première of this version. The
score bears the dedication 'In Memory of Louis
Bourgeois - 1510'.
The Suite is in five movements, given with the
Genevan Psalter psalm numbers:
1 Meditation (Psalm 6: L'Accueil de Dieu)
2 Rondolet (Psalm 140 & 42:
Les Commandements de Dieu)
3 Air varie (Psalm 107: Donnez au Seigneur Gloire)
4 Choeur celeste (Psalm 12: Donne Secours)
5 Cortège joyeux (Psalm 118: Rendez à Dieu)
The titles of the individual movements, broadly
descriptive of the music, are McKay's own, given in
French to preserve the music's original identity.
Meditation is reflective, and Rondolet playful and courtly.
Air Varie offers four highly imaginative variations of a
simple theme, while Choeur Celeste evokes a heavenly
chorus. Cortège Joyeux is akin to a recessional, when all
worshipers arise in gladness at the end of a Mass.
McKay sometimes varies the original hymns, with an
occasional change of rhythm, or less frequently, a note.
The Suite is put together with the assurance of a master
craftsman, and the writing for strings is, as always, of a
high order.
McKay wrote five sinfoniettas, each preceding
some further stylistic development realised in a later
work. In the case of Sinfonietta No. 4 the work is most
certainly a conscious precursor of the true symphony
McKay planned to write one day, achieved with the
commission of his Evocation Symphony in 1951 (Naxos
8.559052). His study of contemporary European
compositional developments had a decisive impact upon
the evolution of his late style, and this can first be seen
clearly in his Sinfonietta No. 4. From its opening it is
apparent that McKay's expression has taken on a new
astringency. The motives are angular and are based upon
chords of the fourth or tritonal relationships. The overall
orchestral sound has taken on a steely, burnished quality
and a rough-hewn spareness that will be completely
realized in the Evocation Symphony. There is ceaseless
eighth-note (quaver) motion and the brass instruments
(muted throughout) are used as punctuation, a hallmark
of McKay's late style. The first movement is quite terse,
presenting two themes in the customary order, offering
no development, no longueurs and a straightforward
restatement. The second movement is a poem in the
Western style cultivated by McKay during the 1940s.
The lonely theme presented by clarinet and bassoon has
the contour of a Native American folk-song, the rolling
timpani suggesting clouds in the distance, a storm
coming. There are highly expressive solos for clarinet
and oboe leading into the restless middle section, which
rises to a full orchestral climax. The opening themes are
returned, albeit in reverse order, until the movement
stops precisely where it began. The Finale is written in
McKay's most playful and fun-loving mode. The strings
rustle in sixteenth notes (semi-quavers) beneath the
flutes and clarinets hopping and skipping. A more
serious element appears in a brass fanfare, punctuating
as in the first movement. There is a second, more lyrical
subject played by the winds and answered by violas and
cellos. The intervals of the two themes are combined
with a new theme and worked motivically for a short,
intense development. An abbreviated recapitulation
follows, hustling to a joyful coda capped by a humorous,
chordal tag. The work was first given by the Seattle
Symphony on 13th November, 1944, under Carl
Bricken, and revived in 1972 at the Seattle Center Opera
House as part of Seattle's Festival '72, on a day reserved
for the memory of the composer.
The Song Over the Great Plains is one of the first
works of McKay's maturity, the result of a commission
in 1953 by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for a
work featuring the piano to commemorate the centennial
of the Steinway Piano Company. McKay was one of
four composers commissioned for the occasion; the others
were Leo Sowerby, Nicolai Berezowsky and Henry
Cowell. One of McKay's early teaching assignments
during the 1920s was in the gold-mining town of Lead,
South Dakota. He later explained that the Song was
based on a meadowlark call he had noted down in the
Dakotas. He often added programmes to his works, and
on the autograph score of Song Over the Great Plains he
appended the following guide:
"It is early spring ... but the desolation of winter has
not yet given over to the new life lying dormant in young
buds and branches. Suddenly the song of the
meadowlark bursts forth over brooding landscape, and
for a moment all that is beautiful in life is held in the
mind and heart ... Sing on blithe spirit!... fill the skies
with your irrepressible joy!"
The spare atmosphere here suggested manifests
itself immediately, with craggy, dissonant brass
declamations over a pedal tone. Throughout the work,
the concertante piano plays mostly in its higher registers,
as the voice of the meadowlark, whose bitonal song
always soars above the other instruments. A magical
moment occurs when the flute gently tumbles down an
arpeggio leading to a gorgeous English horn theme,
played over shimmering string tremolos, as if revealing
the vast emptiness of the Plains for the first time. This is
the work's main theme, and though original, it has a
modality reminiscent of the Western folk-music that
often inspired McKay. The flutes and horns take this up
as the music rises from its dreaminess, agitating and
stirring awake. The brass plays a typical McKay fanfare,
announcing full day on the Plains. Harmonic instability
accompanies the winds recalling the opening motive, as
the meadowlark call leads to a comforting and hopeful
theme in D major. This tune is spun out until the full
orchestra arrives at a triumphant and grandiose
recapitulation of the main theme. The atmosphere suggests
the majesty of the plains, becoming more and more
ecstatic, until the orchestra spends its energy in a great
climax, then falls silent. A short bridge section leads to
an extended solo piano cadenza, and the work dies away
in pianissimo. Song Over the Great Plains enjoyed a
number of performances in the 1950s, but remained
unpublished.
George Frederick McKay's achievement as a
nationalist, neo-romantic composer cannot be underestimated.
He was able to resist the consuming influence
of native composers proselytizing the methods of
European composers as well as that of Aaron Copland
and his imitators in their establishment of what many
accepted by default as the "American Sound". By
remaining true to his Northwestern roots and drawing
upon the vast musical resources of the region's migrants
and indigenous peoples, McKay forged a style at once
wholly individual and completely American, one filled
with a striving and nobility that mirrors the
determination that led to the founding of America.
John McLaughlin Williams
Violin Concerto (more info)
-
I. Allegro molto ma risoluto - 14:00
-
II. Andante - quasi adagio - 7:36
-
III. Allegro vigoroso - 4:24
Suite on Sixteenth Century Hymn Tunes (more info)
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Meditation - 5:36
-
Rondolet - 2:33
-
Air varie - 4:36
-
Choeur celeste - 4:47
-
Cortege joyeux - 3:00
Sinfonietta No. 4 (more info)
-
I. Allegro con gaiezza e con brio - 3:45
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II. Moderato pastorale - 9:40
-
III. Allegro giocoso e ritmico molto - 4:21
Song Over the Great Plains (more info)
-
Song Over the Great Plains - 13:59
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