Sony’s Fromm Collection: Choral Music

The second CD in Sony Classical’s ten-CD box set of the Twentieth Century Composers Series recordings, supported by the Fromm Music Foundation, was curated by Margaret Hillis. The CD presents two decidedly different settings of the text of the Mass ordinary performed by the New York Concert Choir and Orchestra (the latter only in the second setting). The Choir was initially known as the Tanglewood Alumni Chorus, which Hillis founded in 1950. These days she is better known as the founder of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, which she founded in September of 1957, giving its first performance the following March.

The two settings on this recording are refreshingly different. The a cappella version is by Wilhelm Killmayer, born in Bavaria in 1927. Killmayer wrote that he composed this piece with “the purpose of liberating the music of the Mass from its formal liturgical ties;” and it is unlikely that one would ever mistake his efforts for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Nevertheless, my own sense of music history kicked in almost immediately, responding to his opening “Kyrie” setting as if it were melismatic organum on a bad acid trip. (Note to the reader: That description is decidedly not pejorative. It was inspired by my own experiences of Sixties culture; and, as they say, you had to be there. Furthermore, since Killmayer’s setting was written between 1953 and 1954, I have at least a few doubts that Pérotin was foremost in the mind of the composer.) As the setting proceeds, all vestiges of the past are shed; but the composer is as committed to elaborate polyphony as the early Notre Dame composers had been.

Lou Harrison on the cover of his biography written by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell (from the Amazon.com Web page for the book)

The other setting is by Lou Harrison, originally composed in 1939 and revised in 1952. Harrison’s original idea was to imagine the sort of plainsong that might have been sung by converted Native Americans in Spanish California. He described his revised version as “Europeanized;” and the original conception of plainsong gave way to those same medieval approaches to polyphony that may have inspired Killmayer. Nevertheless, Harrison’s compositional style is definitely his own; and the expansiveness of his instrumental writing brings its own unique variations on past treatments of the Latin text.

I think it would be fair to say that Harrison’s focus on modality makes him somewhat of an outlier in the entire Fromm collection. Like Leon Kirchner, Harrison studied with Arnold Schoenberg and took an interest in “twelve-tone” techniques. However, his approaches had less to do with Schoenberg and more to do with another Schoenberg student, John Cage; and, around the same time, both Harrison and Cage were influenced by Henry Cowell (who probably provided the primary inspiration to work with modal foundations). Cage’s only encounter with Paul Fromm, whose foundation financed the Twentieth Century Composers Series, seems to have taken place at Tanglewood in 1960. Aaron Copland introduced the two of them; and, on  the basis of one of Cage’s letters to David Tudor, the encounter was not a pleasant one!