Notes for: July 23, 2024
The British musicologist Wilfred Mellers described Lukas Foss’s body of work as “a pocket history of American music during the 20th century.” He was referring to Foss’s strikingly eclectic style. In compositions that ranged from folksy evocations of America to neoclassical works to wildly avant-garde pieces, Foss wonderfully reflected the spirit of American music in all its variety and complexity.
Foss’s love affair with America began soon after his arrival in Philadelphia in 1937. A prodigy who with his family had fled Hitler’s Germany, he enrolled at 15 at the Curtis Institute. There he met Leonard Bernstein, who became a lifelong friend, and Aaron Copland, who had a decisive impact: “I had fallen in love with America because of people like Aaron,” he would say. Foss’s enthusiasm for his new country – by the early 1940s he had become a citizen – inspired two early works that brim with Copland-inspired Americana: the award-winning cantata The Prairie, based on a Carl Sandburg poem, and Three American Pieces, a joyful and optimistic work that Foss first wrote for violin and piano and later arranged both for flute and piano and for violin and orchestra.
Folk tunes, ragtime, blues – you can hear strains of all of them in Three American Pieces. From the opening song, the pieces have that open-air quality that Foss said he learned from Copland. Alternating moods, Foss begins “Early Song” with an expansive, lullaby-like melody, shifts to an infectious Allegro that brims with nervous energy and flute pyrotechnics, then repeats the two sections. Near the end he overlaps the contrasting themes from these two parts in a final vibrant romp (shades of Ives?). In “Dedication,” two blues-tinged, soulful outer sections surround a more animated and jazzy middle. “Composer’s Holiday” is an old-fashioned hoedown, packed with flute and piano razzle-dazzle. In 2022 the conductor Joann Falletta led the Buffalo Symphony in a Carnegie Hall tribute to Foss. Of Three American Pieces she said, “How wonderfully strange it is that it’s immigrants that gave us our country’s sound. Foss had no direct connection to the frontier. But there’s a mixture of folk sounds in there, blues, ragtime. I think it’s so delightful — that Americana style, the affection he had.”
Foss went on to have a storied career as a composer, conductor, and pianist. As a composer he tried out serialism, minimalism, electronic music, improvisation. As a conductor he was an energetic programmer of new music. But he never lost his zeal for Americana. Throughout his long life – in works like American Cantata (1976), which included texts by Whitman and Thoreau, and Central Park Reel (1987), which Foss described as “a country fiddle piece” – he continued to compose in the style that Aaron Copland inspired.