Austin Symphonic Band Performing Spoon River
Austin Symphonic Band. February 14, 2023 concert at the Connally HS Performing Arts Center in Austin, TX. ASB performing Spoon River by Percy Aldridge Grainger (ed. William S. Carson and Alan Naylor). Dr. Cliff Croomes, Guest Conductor. "The Sun Never Sets" Concert.
Video and Sound Production: Eddie Jennings
From the program notes written by David Cross:
Spoon River (1922)
Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961), edited by William S. Carson and Alan Naylor
The Spoon River is an actual river in Illinois that inspired a collection of poems called the Spoon River Anthology written in 1915 by Edgar Lee Masters and representing fictitious characters from the perspective of the afterlife. This poetry was written to describe the citizenry of a rural town at the turn of the century. Here is an example entitled “Peleg Poague”:
“Horses and men are just alike.
There was my stallion, Billy Lee,
Black as a cat and trim as a deer,
With an eye of fire, keen to start,
And he could hit the fastest speed
Of any racer around Spoon River.
But just as you’d think he couldn’t lose,
With his lead of fifty yards or more,
He’d rear himself and throw the rider,
And fall back over, tangled up,
Completely gone to pieces.
You see he was a perfect fraud:
He couldn’t win, he couldn’t work,
He was too light to haul or plow with,
And no one wanted colts from him.
And when I tried to drive him–well,
He ran away and killed me.”
It was speculated that Masters based the imagined town of Spoon River on Lewistown, Illinois, whose residents quickly banned the popular book from schools and libraries.
The source musical material for Spoon River is a fiddle tune heard at a dance by Captain Charles H. Robinson and passed on to Grainger, who turned many fiddle tunes and reels into enduring band works.
If not for World War I, Grainger might never have embraced the medium of the concert band. An Australian-born concert pianist, he moved to the United States in 1914 and joined the U.S. Army in which he played the saxophone in an Army Band. A lifelong collector of folk music, he greatly admired the Nordic culture, to the point that his vocabulary represented the time before the Norman Conquest. In Spoon River, his “blue-eyed English” is reflected in the words “single” (rather than “solo”) and “louden bit by bit” (rather than crescendo). Even his dedication to Edgar Lee Masters, Poet of Pioneers, is rather clunkingly written as “sturdily, not too fast; with ‘pioneer’ keeping-on-ness.”
Listen for:
• Thickly scored “chord bombs” in the second and third measures.
• Pedal points to anchor the flighty fiddle tune.
• The fiddle tune is introduced first by the clarinets, who get the most intense workout in the piece.
• Liberal use of “tuneful percussion” (Grainger’s description of mallet instruments).
• Harmonization of the tune in waves of parallel voicings of chords.
• Some ’20s era Gershwin-inspired jazz voicings.
