Chamber Music & Norman Dello Joio

I  n the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding
One of these days.
Rabelais, in red boards—
Walt Whitman in green,
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers:
Here they stand on shelves
In the cool of the night time
And there is nothing
To be said against them...”
  —  Carl Sandburg, ‘Cornhuskers’, 1918 (one of the texts/epigrams for Dello Joio’s 1940 ‘Suite for Piano’, premiered at Carnegie Hall on 09-MAR-1941).

The lyricism of Norman Dello Joio, who died last week at age 95 on 24-JUL, is treasured by all who have performed or listened to his works.

In 1939, he received a scholarship to Juilliard, where he studied composition with Bernard Wagenaar. And in 1941 he began studying with Paul Hindemith, who encouraged him to follow his own lyrical inclinations, instead of pursuing atonal or 12-tone systems. By the late 40s, he was highly-regarded among American composers and prolific in a variety of genres, especially choral music. He served on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 40s, and later at Mannes College of Music. He was professor and dean at Boston University until retiring in 1978, when he moved to Long Island. Throughout his career he was devoted to music education, and his ‘Comprehensive Musicianship’ pedagogical materials and advocacy helped to guide and calibrate subsequent generations of authors/composers of curricula, method books and etudes.

Here are some of his chamber music pieces.

• Piano Trio, 1937
  
• Suite for Piano (Sandburg’s Phrases), 1940
  
• Sextet for Three Recorders & String Trio, 1944
  
• Duo Concertato for Cello & Piano, 1945
  
• Sonata No. 1 for Piano, 1947
  
• Sonata No. 2 for Piano, 1948
  
• Sonata No. 3 for Piano, 1948
  
• Trio for Flute, Cello & Piano, 1948
  
• Fantasia on a Gregorian Theme for Violin & Piano, 1949
  
• Variations and Capriccio for Violin & Piano, 1949
  
• Nocturne in E for Piano, 1950
  
• Nocturne in F-sharp for Piano, 1950
  
• Aria and Toccata for Two Pianos, 1955
  
• Colloquies for Violin & Piano, 1964
  
• Bagatelles for Harp, 1969
  
• Capriccio on the Interval of a Second for piano, 1969
  
• Three Essays for Clarinet & Piano, 1974
  
• Lyric Fantasies for Viola and String Quintet, 1975
  
• Sonata for Trumpet and Piano, 1980
  
• Concert Variants for Piano, 1983

[Dello Joio, ‘Trio for Flute, Cello & Piano’, 1948]


Norman’s open harmonies and engaging writing style somehow fit well with the often-weighty subject matter of his compositions. It’s unfortunate that in recent years many of these pieces have not been more frequently performed and recorded. Although not warhorses for sheer technical virtuosic display, they present the performer with challenges of a different sort—conveying depth/complexity of emotion through phrasing and thoughtful gesture. These pieces have great expressive potential, and deserve to be included more often in the chamber music repertoire.





[Dello Joio, ‘Piano Sonata No. 3’, 1948]


Although sight-singing, keyboard harmony, theory, and so on, are part of development of musicianship, Dello Joio’s emphasis and major concern focused on those skills that are mainly cognitive—that is, music concepts and interpretive and analytical skills that are not predominantly developed through psychomotor (performance) drill. By nature he was opposed to performance-practice ‘tricks’, and he was impervious to the seductions of celebrity and technical virtuosity that have attained such popular cachet in recent years. Dello Joio’s traditional artistic values and teaching—and his compositions—are and will remain important guides for us going forward.

N  orman Dello Joio is outstanding for an outgoing directness of expression and simplicity of manner ... which have an intentionally broad appeal. A strong melodic vein; a rhythmic vitality; a relatively restrained harmonic vocabulary; an infectious brio and freshness of invention—these are among the earmarks of his style. Inseparable from this style is Dello Joio’s conviction—resembling almost an ethical attitude—that his music should communicate with a broad, contemporary public——not merely with an alert avant garde, not with a few fellow composers, not with some hypothetical future public.”
  —  Edward Downes, The music of Norman Dello Joio. The Musical Quarterly 1962; 48:149-72.

• Wakin D. Norman Dello Joio, prolific and popular composer, dead at 95. NY Times, 27-JUL-2008.
  
• Norman Dello Joio page at BU
  
• Norman Dello Joio page at Schirmer
  
• Whang U-Y. Analysis of Dello Joio’s Chamber Music for Piano and Strings with Performance Suggestions (PhD Dissertation, Columbia Univ). UMI Ann Arbor, 1986.
  
• Dello Joio N, Beglarian G, eds. Comprehensive Musicianship. Foundation for College Education in Music, Washington, D.C., 1965.
  
• International Society for Music Education (ISME)
  
• College Music Society
  
• National Association for Music Education (U.S.)
  
• VH1 SaveTheMusic program