During a career that spanned over 50 years, George Whitefield Chadwick was prominent among American composers from the 1880s until the 1930s. He composed in nearly every genre, including operas (7), orchestral music (17 works), songs (100+), and many choral and chamber works. During his life, Chadwick’s reputation was secured by frequent performances of his music—particularly by the Boston Symphony Orchestra—but his music is now seldom performed. His obscurity in the past 60 years is likely due to the modesty of scale of much of his work as much as to the nostalgic imagery, which seems out-of-sync with contemporary sensibilities.
Chadwick’s piano works and string quartets, for example, are on a small scale like Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words or Grieg’s Lyric Pieces—they are nineteenth century romantic minatures. Chadwick’s chamber music is written in the style of the ‘Character Piece.’ Each is a brief sketch of one particular mood or image. We have representational essays, like The Frogs, In the Canoe, and The Rill. This may not be important music, but it’s characteristic americana. And, on a nostalgic day of celebration like Thanksgiving in the U.S., these pieces are suitable—nostalgic in a way, but expressing a sort of nostalgia and romanticism that still has its eyes wide open.
This brand of romanticism resembles Edward MacDowell’s—and others in the generation before Charles Ives. Chadwick’s writing has been associated with the Realist movement in painting and the graphic arts, characterized by a down-to-earth portrayal of ordinary occurrences in people’s lives. To me, his miniatures hark back to a time when the American scene was not overrun with hubris. These modest pieces evoke romantic images, yes, but images undistorted by rose-colored glasses. They propound specific ideas but without insisting upon a particular ideology or a desultory rhetorical stance—something for which we can be thankful and to which we can still reasonably aspire.
[Chadwick began at the New England Conservatory in Boston as a ‘special’ student in 1872. ‘Special’ meant he could study with NEC faculty members—Carlyle Petersilea (piano) and Stephen Emery (music theory and composition)—without meeting Concervatory entrance requirements and without committing to completing a degree. In 1876, Chadwick was appointed to a faculty position within the music program at Olivet College. While on faculty at Olivet, Chadwick was affiliated with the Music Teachers National Association, founded by Theodore Presser and more than 60 other men and women who met in Delaware, Ohio, on December 26, 1876. Later, Chadwick studied in Leipzig at the Royal Conservatory of Music under Carl Reinecke (1824-1910) and Salomon Jadassohn (1830-1902). Two of his string quartets were written during his years in Germany. In 1897, Chadwick returned to Boston and became Director of the New England Conservatory of Music.]
- New England Conservatory of Music
- Music Teachers' National Association website
- Betz M, ed. George Whitefield Chadwick String Quartets Nos. 4-5. A-R, 2007.
- Betz M, ed. George Whitefield Chadwick String Quartets Nos. 1-3. A-R, 2006.
- Faucett B. George Whitefield Chadwick: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood, 1998.
- Kairoff P. American Character: Piano Music of George Whitefield Chadwick. (Albany, 2005.)
- Kohon String Quartet. Early String Quartet in the U.S.A. (Vox, 1992.)
- Pollard F. The Literary Quest for an American National Character. Routledge, 2008.
- Portland String Quartet. Chadwick: String Quartets Nos. 4 & 5. (Northeastern, 1994.)
- Portland String Quartet. Chadwick: String Quartet No. 3. (Northeastern, 1995.)
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