Bryan Symphony Orchestra

Tickets

Directions and Parking

The Bryan Symphony Orchestra performs all regular subscription and education concerts in Wattenbarger Auditorium, the concert hall of the Bryan Fine Arts Building on the Tennessee Tech University campus. The Bryan Fine Arts Building is located on the corner of 12th Street and North Dixie Avenue in Cookeville.

From Interstate 40, take Exit 286 (Willow Avenue). Turn north on Willow and travel approximately two miles to 12th Street and turn right.

Free parking on concert Sundays is available anywhere on campus. The nearest large parking lots are across Dixie Avenue from the Bryan Fine Arts Building, between Tucker Stadium and the Volpe Library, behind the Roaden University Center and at the former Prescott Middle School, two blocks away on 10th Street.

Concert Events

Crossville Preview Luncheon: 11 a.m., Wednesday, Oct. 5, Palace Theater on Main Street.
These catered lunch gatherings feature insightful presentations by BSO Music Director Dan Allcott and news and announcements from Executive Director Gail Luna. Reservations required by Monday, Oct. 3; call 931-484-6133.

Music Lovers' Dinner at Mauricio's: Follow up your concert experience with an early Sunday dinner at Mauricio's, a fine-dining experience in Italian cuisine located in a beautifully restored Victorian-style home at 232 North Peachtree Avenue, just a few blocks from the TTU campus. Reservations are necessary; call 931-525-2633.

Program Notes

PROGRAM NOTES

October 9, 2011

STRAUSS: Overture to Die Fledermaus

BRYAN: Andante from White Spiritual Symphony

DELIUS: Two Pieces for Small Orchestra: “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring” and “Summer Night on the River”

SIBELIUS: Symphony no. 1

When art is inspired by a specific idea, and created and delivered with sincerity, we tend to respond enthusiastically. The composers who are unabashed in their declarations of love or reverence – who are eager to display where the inspiration for a piece of music came from – often capture our imaginations.

The music on today’s program comes from the heart. It’s translated onto the concert stage the way loose leaves drift across the lazy current of a river; it expresses the uncomplicated yearning for a transcendent spiritual experience; it conveys the intensity of spring after a seemingly endless dark and frozen winter.

Above all else, this is music rich in its sense of place – places that mattered to these composers and, by extension, to us.

OVERTURE to DIE FLEDERMAUS (1874)

By Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825-1899)

The waltz was to Vienna what jazz and gospel would be to the New World; it was the sound of the people -- popular music that didn’t have to be as serious-minded as classical or sacred music. And no one – before or since -- ruled the realm of the waltz like Johann Strauss, Jr.

The origins of the waltz lie in folk music, the Austrian landler, a dance set to the oom-pa-pa beat. Waltzes were the music of the people—all the people. From its beginnings in the German countryside, it spread like wildfire to the cities – and then past the continent to America, where it is said that 100,000 people heard Strauss conduct 10,000 musicians in a Boston performance of On the Beautiful, Blue Danube.

The Waltz King’s first theatrical triumph was the operetta Die Fledermaus, and its Overture contains the quintessential waltz concept -- the main waltz from the second act -- a melody as recognizable even today as the main theme of the Blue Danube.

Even today, we think of the waltz as Viennese; this is a case of how the music molds the landscape, becoming one of a place’s defining characteristics.

ANDANTE, from the WHITE SPIRITUAL SYMPHONY (1937)

By Charles Faulkner Bryan (1911-1955)

A regrettably obscure composer of the American South, Charles Faulkner Bryan rarely strayed far from home. He studied at Yale, he made one research trip to Europe, and he worked for a short while in both Atlanta and a small town in Alabama, but for most of his too-short life, he lived in Middle Tennessee. Born in McMinnville to a working class family, Bryan’s early musical interests were encouraged, and the family helped with tuition while he worked his way through the Nashville Conservatory of Music. Despite the fact that he graduated in the midst of the Depression, he found a full-time position as head of the music division here at Tennessee Tech, where he taught, performed and indulged his passion for the music of Appalachia from 1935 to 1939.

Even as a child, Bryan felt a strong attraction to the simple melodies of both sacred and secular folk music: the spirituals sung in small country churches and at revivals; the ballads, work songs and children’s ditties sung on front porches and in the fields. It was the music of his life; it surrounded him.

Little wonder, then, that he felt compelled to make this music his own. Folk music, Bryan said, was “the backbone of our great musical structure,” and by that, he meant American folk music of both races: white and black.

At the time he was writing his first mature work, scholarship in folk music was in its infancy. The genre was literally being defined and categorized; academics and professional music educators and performers – including Bryan – were trying to establish the lineage of this music. One very evident clue came from hymnbooks: the music sung by white congregations wasn’t always the same music sung by black congregants. So-called “white spirituals,” it appeared, were often based on European hymns, while “negro spirituals” incorporated a wider range of influences that included those European melodies but also the folk hymns that evolved during camp meetings and revivals. This music took on characteristics of field songs, with their emphasis on a reliance on God to see black Americans through the oppression of slavery and poverty and discrimination. By the mid-1900s, black spirituals had rematerialized as gospel.

In his only symphony, which he called White Spiritual Symphony, Bryan’s purpose was twofold: He wanted spirituals to be exhibited to a wider audience – maybe even, one day, beyond America’s shores. It wasn’t his intention to elevate them to a higher status; they already were works of art. What he wanted to hear was what they sounded like when re-imagined through a symphony orchestra.

The second movement, Andante, emerged as the stand-out section of the piece. In 1942, Bryan became the first Tennessee composer whose work was premiered by a large professional symphony – in this case, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. The composition’s first melody, a piece of “Goin’ Over Jordan” (or “Wayfaring Stranger”), was considered the penultimate white spiritual; it’s followed in the second movement by the hymn written by English slave-trader and clergyman John Newton, “Amazing Grace.” Excerpts of both songs are quoted verbatim with scant embellishment – a measure of Bryan’s reverence for the two hymns.

Bryan reshaped the vernacular with the classical in much of his work. When he sang folk music, he employed formal diction and intonation -- in the style of the increasingly popular singers Burl Ives and newcomer Pete Seeger. When he wrote orchestral music, he did the same – finding a new way to tell an old story. Bryan would spend most of his adult life collecting these songs and promoting them through publication, performance, recordings and by folding them into original compositions.

Bryan’s symphony and several of his other compositions received critical and academic acclaim, being performed in Carnegie Hall, gaining him entrance to Yale and private studies with German composer Paul Hindemith, winning a Guggenheim fellowship. But none outlived Bryan himself -- not as part of any regularly performed work, that is. The spiritual itself, especially in its incarnation as gospel, quickly went on to gain a worldwide audience; it was often the first genuinely American music heard by European audiences, a phenomenon that, happily, Bryan lived to see. The hymn “Amazing Grace,” meanwhile, eclipsed all others by becoming the most popular piece of sacred music in black and white churches alike.

ON HEARING THE FIRST CUCKOO IN SPRING

SUMMER NIGHT ON THE RIVER (1912)

By Frederick Delius (1862-1934)

An Englishman by birth and deeply revered by the British, Frederick Delius nevertheless spent little time in his native land after childhood, living most of his life across the Channel in France. The son of German immigrants, he wasn’t meant to be a musician; although as a boy he learned to play violin and piano, he was meant to follow his father into the wool business. But in his early 20s, Fritz crossed the Atlantic for Florida, to a plantation in Solano Grove, about 40 miles south of Jacksonville on the St. John’s River, where the citrus industry was on the ascent.

The orange groves of Solano Grove suffered under Delius’s management. Almost immediately upon arriving in Florida, the would-be musician/composer bought a piano and found a tutor in Jacksonville, spending the majority of his time in sight of the St. John’s, a major thoroughfare brimming with traffic, including barges and steamboats worked by a mostly black crew, whose voices carried across the water as their crafts drifted past Solano Grove. For the rest of his life, Frederick Delius would be influenced by those voices and the beauty of the rural environment.

“In Florida, through sitting and gazing at nature, I gradually learnt the way in which I should eventually find myself,” the composer wrote. “Hearing singing in such romantic surroundings, it was then and there that I first felt the urge to express myself in music.”

Delius was a pastoral miniaturist, a composer of shorter pieces extolling rural settings. In 1912, he wrote the two tone poems that would endear him forever to classical music lovers: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River.

After a slow three-bar sequence in the beginning of On Hearing the First Cuckoo comes the call and response of two cuckoos, the first for oboe, then for divided strings. This first theme is followed by one for first violins; before ending, the cuckoo calls have returned, this time uttered by the clarinet. On Hearing the First Cuckoo has been called a “little masterpiece of musical impressionism, tinged with melancholy.”

Its natural companion is Summer Night on the River, which while possessed of an air of contemplation is generally lighter, shimmering like sunlight on water. This is a quiet river embodied by gentle woodwind and a solo cello theme lapping at the bank like the wake from a passing pleasure boat.

Audiences and critics alike often believe they hear a specific place chronicled in the music. But which place? Does the pastoral quality of Delius’s writing bring to mind the lush greenways of England, especially to the English? Or is it the steamy riverfront of the St. John’s – a clearly American perspective?

SYMPHONY NO. 1 (1899)

By Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

There was a disagreement famous in some circles between Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius. Mahler believed in the freewheeling vastness of the symphonic form, while Sibelius believed in small, tight organization and concentration. Mahler wrote a little about a lot, while Sibelius wrote a lot about a little.

The “little” he was writing about was his homeland of Finland, far removed from the big players on the world stage. This slice of Scandinavia, sandwiched between huge and voracious Russia to the east and Sweden to the west, had nearly lost its identity by the time Sibelius was born; like most people of his generation, Sibelius learned Swedish before Finnish. It wasn’t until he was a young man, in fact, that he turned his attention to Finnish culture – and when he did, he never looked back.

Sibelius emerged as a composer of significance in 1892 on the strength of his nationalistic music, most notably the symphonic poem Kullervo, which was based on the national folk epic Kalevala. This collection of runes mixed creation stories with warring Finnish gods and heroes; the poems were meant to be recited repetitively, like incantations, resulting in a rhythm that Sibelius found “extraordinarily modern.” Within five years, he was awarded a state pension to continue composing – an income that would last the rest of his very long life. In 1899, he wrote the anthemic Finlandia, just as his first symphony was premiered, and the convergence of the two sealed his reputation as a composer of merit -- but with the qualification of “Finnish.” This was both a blessing and a curse to the ambitious composer; while nationalism was popular among the people, it could be poison to critics.

The First Symphony began a series of seven symphonies written over a period of 25 years that convinced critics of his mastery of the orchestra, despite his disagreement with the more well-known Mahler. What Europe and America alike found to love about the Sibelius sound was unabashed devotion to place – to describing what it meant to be Finnish – not only through an exploration of folklore and national identity, but through a depiction of a landscape foreign to most other cultures. He wrote:

“Nature is coming to life: that life which I so love, now and always, whose essence shall pervade everything which I compose.”

With its oppressive winters, its long dark nights, its severe rocky crags, its ice and snow, Finland is nevertheless a land of extremes, for the long dark nights of that longitude are followed by long summery nights when the sun never sets. The contrast is so striking that it can’t fail to make an impression on the people who live there -- who, far from the stoic Danish/Swedish Viking Norse stereotype, are equal parts joyous and exuberant. It is said by the Finnish, for instance, that they are second only to Argentinians in their love of the hot sensuous tango – and the knife fight.

Sibelius’s music is like that. It’s as mighty and hard and cold as the towering walls of granite shimmering behind a curtain of ice, but it’s also as full of light and relative warmth as a day in summer when the polar night is still months away. His music is a microcosm of his austere yet ruggedly beautiful homeland. It’s abstract and pleasantly tuneful in equal measure.

Listen to the opening clarinet solo atop the soft timpani roll, and imagine the start of a journey across a wintry landscape – and at just under the two-minute mark, when the strings burst onto the scene in a violent tremolo, it’s clear that we’re embarking on a hero’s journey. It’s this reference back to heroism that helped firm up his reputation as a nationalist, a niche he rubbed uncomfortably against for much of his life as being too provincial, because he wanted his music to appeal on a more cerebral level to a wider audience than the people of his beloved Finland.

Which it now does. Over the years, when his critics have dismissed Sibelius as too small, too charming in his folklore or too earnest in his nationalism, they have missed the point. They’ve been blind to the sincerity of a creative genius. To the Western ear, Sibelius didn’t sound like anyone else, and that was likely because there had never been a major Finnish composer before. By filtering the cadence and rhythm of Finnish culture and landscape through the orchestra, stepping aside from the accepted symphonic language of the time, he was writing something new; he was making a significant contribution. Why would he write any differently? He was of that place; if he had not seen it, he would have been blind.

The solo clarinet theme from the beginning echoes throughout the First, with a last brief appearance in the finale before the last repeat of the timpani, now as a climax but drifting into a murmur – an unusual ending among symphonies, but one completely in keeping with the tight logical arc of this Sibelian drama.

Charles Faulkner Bryan wasn’t going to write music that reflected glaciers and towering walls of granite. He was going to write music remarking on the American South. There is no irony in Bryan, just as there’s little irony in Delius or Sibelius or Strauss. These works are sincere expressions of composers showing the audience what they revered about the places they had been and the culture they inhabited. To have composed otherwise would have been insincere. That’s the genius of composers able to convey a sense of place: they give the rest of us their impressions – but in such a way as to allow our impressions of what they wrote to matter, too.

-- By Laura Clemons and Dan Allcott