Samuel Jones / Paul Cooper - Houston Symphony

 

Jones / Cooper - Houston Symphony

American Contemporary 

Houston Symphony

Jones - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Elegy

Cooper - Symphony No. 4 (Landscape)

Produced by Carter Harman

Cover Photo by Carter Herman

Art Direction: Judith Lemer

Recored by Bill Holford - November 25, 1975

CRI 347 STEREO

1976

From the back cover: Samuel Jones (b. Inverness, Miss., 1935) is Dean of The Shepard School of Music of Rice University and, in addition to his conducting and compositional activity, is much in demand as a lecturer and writer on musical subjects. His guest conducting career includes appearances with the Detroit Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Prague Symphony, the Iceland Symphony, as well as extensive conducting duties with the Rochester Philharmonic, the Flint Symphony, and the Saginaw Symphony. He has appeared on the Naumburg Series in New York and conducts each summer at the Shenandoah Valley Music Festival at Orkney Springs, Virginia.

An honor graduate of Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi, Dr. Jones received his MA and Oh. D degrees from the Eastman Schooo of Music, where as a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow he studied composition with Howard Hanson, Bernard Rogers and Wayne Barlow. His numerous compositions have been widely performed and are published by Carl Fischer, Inc. He has also served as composer-in-residence at Delta College and director of instrumental music at Alma College, both in Michigan, where he founded the Festival Orchestra and the Alma Symphony. 

Dr. Jones' work as a teacher of conducting at Orkney Springs with Richard Bert (with whom he studied conducting) has been noted by the American Symphony Orchestra League. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music to write a book about Dr. Lert's teaching.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, commissioned by the Shenandoah Valley Bicentennial Committee, received its first performance in Woodstock, Virginia, on August 12, 1972m by the orchestra of the Shenandoah Valley Music Festival, the composer conducting. This work translates into symphonic arms the spirit of the passage from the Apocrypha (Ecclesiasticus 44: 1-16) which begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us." The verses, however, eulogize not only great heroes from the past, but also the countless numbers of this unknown persons who lives provide the continuity and inheritance of the human race. In recognition of the importance of the Shenandoah Valley during the 1800's as a center of rural church music, the composer has based this work on seven folk-hymns taken from old hymnals published in that area, in shaped-note notation. One of the tunes, Murillo's Lesson, has seven variations; the number seven is further manifested by the seven notes of the descending major scale derived from this tune which refer to the seven fabled bends of the Shenandoah River. However, the music goes beyond the confines of a single place and reflects the universal adulates of struggle, joy, and devotion that characterize of forefathers.

The work, inspired by the James Agee/Walker Evans book, is scored for full orchestra with an offstage choir of flutes. It begins with solo viola intoning the tune Davisson's Retirement. Murillo's Lesson follows, an active tune, but here treated as something of a funeral march with the above minted variations. Then, over a sustained chord from the orchestra the offstage flutes make their appearance with the tune, Montgomery. The flute choir suggest voices heard from a distance; it is also symbolic of voices returning across the years. Faster and more lively music ensues, built from the tunes Leander, Mississippi, and Pisgah, with Virginia appearing as bass underpinning about midway through. The last motion is interrupted by Davisson' Retirement, sung this time by the bassoon, then the entire string section. The final poignant lines of Murillo's Lesson bring the work to a quiet conclusion.

Elegy For String Orchestra 

Elegy, composed in a short time during he dark days that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, was first performed on December 8, 1963, but the Saginaw Symphony, the composer conducting. Written for string orchestra, the work is a brief musical statement of the feelings of grief and shock which sweet the country and, indeed, the world, after the President's death. During the years since the Kennedy tragedy connectors have turned to this work on numerous occasions both for concert performances as well as to make the pacing of tables. (It was, for example, performed in memoriam Helen Thompson by Richard Lert at Orkney Springs in 1974.) The work is simply and deeply expressive of the anguish one feels at the loss of a loved one.

Paul Cooper

Symphony No. 4 (Landscape)

Concertino Soloists: James Austin, trumpet; Wayne Crouse, viola; Byron Hester, flute

Paul Cooper (b. Victoria, Illinois, 1926) is Composer-in-Residence and Professor of Music art The Shepherd school of Music of Rice University. His catalogue of works sonatinas over fifty compositions in all media except opera; his works are widely performed, both in the U.S. and abroad. He is a frequent guest composer at contemporary festival and has served as the cultural representative for the U.S. Stage Department in Yugoslavia.

Cooper was educated at the University of southern California and at the Sorbonne and Conservatory National in Paris. He was Chairman of the Theory Department of the University of Michigan School of Music until 1968, . From 1968-1974 he was Composer-in-Residence and Head of the Division of Composition, Theory, Literature, and Musicology at the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati. A former music critic for the Los Angeles Mirror and Ann Arbor News, Cooper has contributed to numerous journals, including the Musical Quarterly. His textbook, Perspectives in Music Theory ahas been adopted by more than 180 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada and is part of an historical-analytical series.

The composer has held both Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, and is the recipient of seven ASCAP awards as well as Rackham Research and Ford Foundation grants. In 1969 he was chosen Composer of the Year by the Music Teachers' National Association. In 1973 Cooper and five of his former students received the first National Endowment for the Arts awards for their contributions to American music.

Symphony No. 4 (Landscape) was begun in 1973 during the composer's second Guggenheim Fellowship year in London, and completed in Houston, in March, 1975. The work is dedicated to Samuel Jones, who conducted the Houston Symphony in its world premiere at the Inaugural Concert of The shepherd School of Music, September 19, 1975.

The first movement opens with massive string sonorities penetrated by a wedge-shaped melody in solo winds and brasses. A change of texture is marked by random rhythms in the strings and presages the appearance of the central generative chord-cell, basically centered on D. Amid the changing textures, contractual techniques of imitation are feared in the winds, bringing the movement to a climax of motion. Chordal sonorities reappear in a luminescent close.

Introduced with aleatoric repetitions of pre-determined pitches, the second movement is very fast and tumultuous. Dramatic defending gestures converge to clustered harmonies, a stylistic trademark of the composer. The vibraphone repeats the opening motive and a dose contra-point beginner in the strings. above it is sounded a chordal brass passage anticipatory of the third movement. The gestures of the introductory passage return, this time in reverse dynamic order, followed by a reflective coda with serves as a link to the last movement.

A plaintive motive and the sound of bells combine to form the melodic material for the third movement. Heard first in the bass clarinet, the motive appears immediately in the bells and is taken up by other instruments and subsequently becomes the basis of the dirge-like harmonic progression. The climax of the symphony is effected but the superimposition of the dirge, played by the brasses and percussion, on a circular canon in the strings and random textures in the winds. A pianissimo coda centered on B moves for its final measures to D as a culminating statement of quiet joy. The symphony takes its subtitle from a poem by C.E. Cooper. Both the poem and the symphony suggest a plurality of inner and outer conflicts, moods, and affirmations.

The Houston Symphony Orchestra

Lawrence Foster, Music Director

The Houston Symphony, founded in 1913, has established itself as one of the outstanding orchestras of the nation. It has been guided into prominence by such eminent music director as Efren Kurtz (1948-54), Sir Thomas Beecham (1954-55), :Leopold Stokowski (1955-61), Sir John Barbirolli (1961-67), and André Previn (1967 - 68). In 1972 Lawrence Foster was appointed music director, and under his tenure the Symphony has maintained and expanded its season and its reputation.