One of Our Most Scholarly Musicians
Another Boston musician and composer, teacher of piano and composition is Arthur Whiting (1861), nephew of the organist and composer George Whiting. He has made a specialty of harpsichord music, and plays charmingly on the little old instrument. Since 1895, he has lived in New York City.
Charles Martin Loeffler—First Impressionist in America
Charles Martin Loeffler is a composer belonging to a different class from any of the Boston group just mentioned. Loeffler is French by birth, as he was born in Alsace in 1861, French in his musical training and in his musical sympathies. For forty-two years he has lived in Boston, twenty of them at the second desk (next to the concertmaster) of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He was the first composer to write in this country, the kind of music that existed at the end of the 19th century in France,—the music of Fauré, Dukas, Chausson and Debussy. The seed he planted did not fall on fertile soil, for all his fellow musicians as well as the orchestral conductors, from whose hands the public received its music, were Germans and German trained. They knew their “three B’s,” their Wagner and even the French Berlioz, but Loeffler brought something different, something disturbing, and was not easy to place. His music belonged neither to the classical nor to the romantic school.
Not only in America did this new French music have a fight, but on its own ground in France was it misunderstood! But you have seen from Monteverde to Wagner that the path of true innovation never ran smooth!
Loeffler’s work is original, the work of a musician completely master of the modern orchestra and of modern harmony with its colorful and expressive effects. Besides this there was a spirit that never before had come into art. This was given the name of Impressionism, the getting of effects from objects, painted, or described in literature, without elaborate details. In music, composers who try to suggest to the hearer an image existing in their own minds are called Impressionists. This image may be a thought, an emotion, a definite object, a poem, a picture, a beautiful tree, the grandeur of Niagara, any one of a thousand things that await the hand of the Alchemist-Musician to be transmuted into tone.
All Loeffler’s compositions reflect this impressionism, and he was the first, but not the last of these poetic tone impressionists in America. He is foremost a composer of symphonic poems: La Mort de Tintagiles (The Death of Tintagiles) after the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, A Pagan Poem after Virgil, La Bonne Chanson (The Good Song) after Verlaine, La Vilanelle du Diable, The Mystic Hour with male chorus, Psalm 137 with female chorus. He also wrote an eight part mixed chorus, For One who Fell in Battle. Other orchestral works include a suite in four movements for violin and orchestra called Les Veillées de l’Ukraine (Evening Tales of the Ukraine), concerto for ’cello and orchestra, first played by Alwyn Schroeder with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Divertissement for violin and orchestra, and Spanish Divertissement for saxophone and orchestra. There are also important works for chamber music: two rhapsodies for clarinet, viola and piano, an octet for strings and two clarinets, a quintet and a quartet built on Gregorian modes; and he has written a group of songs for medium voice and viola obligato with French texts by Verlaine and Beaudelaire, two impressionist poets.
The Red Man Attracts Composers
The next composer, Henry F. Gilbert, born in Somerville, Massachusetts (1868), brings us into an interesting field, the study of Negro and Indian folk music. After working with Edward MacDowell, Gilbert turned his attention to a thorough investigation of Negro music, resulting in orchestral works based on Negro themes such as, American Humoresque, Comedy Overture on Negro Themes, American Dances, Negro Rhapsody, and The Dance in Place Congo, a symphonic poem which was mounted as a ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House (1918).
Gilbert tells that the Comedy Overture was rescued from a wreck that was to have been a Negro Opera, based on Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus. What a pity he did not complete it!