Marching to a patriotic beat

The Spokane Symphony is bringing its own patriot act to the Opera House tonight with a concert titled “Made in America.”

Along with the world premiere of “Purple Prose,” a work the symphony commissioned from composer Conrad Pope, the program includes Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto – featuring America’s foremost clarinet virtuoso, Richard Stoltzman – and Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Weber.”

Stoltzman and the orchestra will also play George Gershwin’s “Promenade,” a work also known as “Walking the Dog.” Eckart Preu, the symphony’s music director, will conduct.

Exactly what is “American music”? Critics and commentators have fought over that question for a long time.

What almost everybody does agree on is that jazz and the movies are typically American. The music on tonight’s program borrows from both.

Stoltzman grew up playing jazz. His father, who worked for the railroad, was an avid tenor sax player, and young Stoltzman came into the music profession listening to his father’s jazz record collection and playing in jazz clubs.

“I went to public schools and a state university rather than a ‘proper conservatory,’ ” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Boston.

“The thing that really led me into classical music professionally was a concert by the Juilliard String Quartet where they played Berg’s ‘Lyric Suite.’ I had never heard anything like that! It was another world entirely from anything I’d ever heard before, let alone played.”

After lessons with the Cleveland Orchestra’s Robert Marcellus, Stoltzman went on to Yale and then to Rudolph Serkin’s summer music festival at Marlboro, Vt. He made his New York solo debut in 1974.

“When I was living in New York, I hung out a bit with Benny Goodman and played duets with him in his apartment,” Stoltzman said. “But, funny enough, I never heard him play live the Clarinet Concerto that Copland had written for him back in 1948.”

Stoltzman describes the concerto as going from a quiet opening movement to a brash, double-time finale.

“Copland connects them with a cadenza that uses chord changes and brash articulations of the syncopations he drew from the swing Benny was famous for,” he said. “The audience has been wrapped in that cocoon of peace in that first section, and then there is a little jolt as Copland shifts into music that borrows from swing and South American accents and some barroom piano.”

Unlike Stoltzman, Pope did attend a “proper conservatory” – the New England Conservatory in Boston – where he studied composition with Gunther Schuller (a frequent Spokane visitor) and Donald Martino.

He later attended Princeton, where he worked with Milton Babbitt, a composer known for his uncompromising, thorny, avant-garde style.

For the past 18 years, Pope has been one of Hollywood’s leading arrangers, orchestrators and conductors. His work on more than 80 films has included the last three of the “Star Wars” series, “War of the Worlds,” “King Kong,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Munich,” the “Harry Potter” films and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” collaborating with such composers as John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner.

But Pope’s film career has parallelled his work as a classical concert composer.

“It’s very rewarding to have the opportunity to put some of my own stuff forward and to be released from the tyranny of the screen,” he says in a symphony news release. “But my new musical life is probably oriented more to Leonard Bernstein’s ideas about music than Milton Babbitt’s.”

Preu had conducted Pope’s “Summer Sketches” at the Hart College of Music in Hartford, Conn., and found the work went over very well with audiences. So, after moving to Spokane, he decided to commission Pope to write something for the Spokane Symphony.

The work’s title, “Purple Prose,” came about though a misunderstanding, Pope says: “I gave Eckart a sample of the music and said, ‘Here’s an example of my “purple prose,” ‘ and Eckart took the title seriously!”

The presence of Pope, Copland and Gershwin on a “Made in America” bill is easy to explain. But what about Hindemith, who was born in and died in Germany?

Hindemith had taken a strong interest in American jazz from the time of World War I and used jazz elements in his music of the 1920s and ‘30s.

When he moved to the United States before World War II to teach at Yale, one of his first important orchestral works was “Symphonic Metamorphoses on Theme by Weber.” Its jazzy rhythms and overall high spirits are his witty tribute to the music of his new country.

Preu will discuss the music on tonight’s program as part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series in the Opera House auditorium at 7 p.m.