Notes for: July 26, 2022
Boston in the late 19th century was a flourishing classical music scene, where a group of gifted composers known as the Boston Six were bringing American music to a new level of craftsmanship and sophistication. Steeped in German Romanticism, The Six were writing music that held its own against much of the late Romantic music coming out of Europe. One of that group was Arthur Foote, a distinguished teacher, an accomplished organist (for 34 years he was the organist of Boston’s First Unitarian Church), and a composer whose music won applause from audiences here and in Europe. The Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered several of his compositions, and Serge Koussevitsky was one of his champions.
Born in Salem to a prominent family – his father was publisher of the Salem Gazette – Foote didn’t develop an interest in music until his early teens, and didn’t take his first piano lesson until he was 14. A few years later, though, he was ready to enter Harvard as a music major. After he graduated he earned a master’s degree from Harvard – the first Masters of Arts degree in music awarded by an American university. Under the tutelage of Harvard professor John Knowles Paine, another of the Boston Six, Foote became steeped in the music of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Wagner. He was greatly influenced by a trip to the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 1876, which turned him into a lifelong Wagner admirer.
Foote composed steadily for more than 45 years. His chamber music in particular was widely admired and performed. The musicologist David Ewen described his music as “always thoroughly lyrical, with broad and stately melodies, romantic in rhapsodic moods, and classical in structure.” You can hear all this in the Nocturne and Scherzo for Flute and String Quartet. Foote wrote it in 1918; a few years later the Nocturne was published separately as “A Night Piece for Flute and Strings” and thereafter became his most performed work.
The Nocturne begins and ends with the flute playing a melodious, dreamy song. Throughout the movement, flute and strings pass melodies back and forth – sometimes the flute alone, sometimes the strings alone, sometimes together. The tonal combinations are beautiful, the harmonies rich, the rhythms varied. The languid mood is interrupted occasionally by brief, tempestuous surges, especially in the more dramatic middle section. But tranquility is the prevailing mood. The Scherzo that follows is nimble, witty, and light-hearted – a charming change of pace.