April 19 & 20, 2026

April Concert

George Whitefield Chadwick
String Quartet No.4 in E minor

Samuel Barber
String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11

Florence Price
Piano Quintet in A minor

Sunday, April 19, 3 pm * Round Hill Community Church * 395 Round Hill Road, Greenwich, CT
Monday, April 20, 7:30 pm * Greenwich Historical Society * 47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob

Program Notes

“The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.” ― Virgil Thomson

Before the Civil War, people living in America called themselves Virginians or Vermonters and said “The United States are…” But after the Civil War, after Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address*, and after the adoption of the 14th Amendment†, people began to call themselves Americans and say, “The United States is…”

This evolution of the American self–image from a “loose collection of independent states,” to an identity that addressed national issues and character took many forms. In 1868, John William De Forest minted the term Great American Novel. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that “Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” And, starting in the 1920s, a cadre of Americans trained in Paris used the vernacular innovations of jazz to create a distinctive American art music. (If you have the time: Bernstein on American Music)

At least that is the narrative. While composers such as Copland, Thomson, Harris, and Piston, returning from France after studying with Nadia Boulanger, established a beachhead for the flood of Boulanger students that followed (Thomson again — "Every town in America has two things—a five–and–dime and a Boulanger pupil.”), that is only part of the story.

* “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation…”

† ”All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

In the 19th century, Boston Brahmins, despite their Anglo–American Puritan heritage, took a deep dive into German culture and institutions. After traveling to the “land of scholars”, on their return they applied what they absorbed to American society (speaking German was especially admired) and institutions (Harvard was their laboratory). This emphasis was unmistakable in art music. Five out of the first six music directors of the Boston Symphony were German or Austrian, the only name inscribed on the ceiling of Symphony Hall Boston was Beethoven, and most composers from the “Second New England School” (including Edward MacDowell, Amy Beach, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker) studied in Germany or with imported German pedagogues.

Another member of the group was George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931). Born in Lowell, MA, Chadwick left high school before graduating to work at his father’s business to pay for music classes at the New England Conservatory (NEC) in Boston. He decamped to (where else?) Germany in 1877 for further studies, returned to Boston in 1880, joined the faculty of NEC in 1881, and was appointed director from 1897-1930. As director, Chadwick reformed the school’s curriculum using German models and taught, among many others, Horatio Parker, William Grant Still, and Florence Price.

He also wrote lots of music, music that was dismissed by the “Boulangerie” as being too European to be truly American. Indeed, Bernstein promoted the idea that Chadwick’s music, while accomplished, was from the “kindergarten” period of American musical development. (Bernstein on Chadwick) And while it is true that Chadwick did not follow Dvořák’s advice that American music “must be founded upon what are called negro melodies,” or, as Bernstein advocated, jazz, that misses the point. Growing up in New England, Chadwick was “steeped in the vernacular of cracker-barrel humor, fiddle tunes, and minstrel songs,” and channeled them to write music with an authentic “Yankee drawl.”

For example, take String Quartet No. 4 in E minor (1896). Premiered by the Kneisel Quartet (German musicians from the Boston Symphony), its layout is typically European (fast-slow-dance-finale) yet sounds as if Chadwick is quoting genuine New England sources. While Chadwick did employ American musical devices (such as the extended use of the subdominant for second themes, if you care about such things), it is the character of his tunes — evoking hymns, ballads, and ditties — that most plainly shows how Chadwick composed “quotations of style” rather than “quotations of substance.”

Directing the film City Lights, Charlie Chaplin took 534 days to shoot 342 takes in trying to figure out how the blind flower girl mistakes the little tramp for a millionaire. (The Meeting. If you want to see Chaplin’s process: Chaplin at work) While Chaplin’s solution seems obvious, his struggle illustrates the challenge creators face. As E.L. Doctorow put it, “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”

One composer who struggled was Samuel Barber (1910-1981). A child prodigy, he was born in West Chester, PA, into a well–to–do family with deep musical roots (listen to his aunt and uncle, the contralto Louise Homer and the Chadwick–trained composer Sidney Homer, perform Sidney’s Mother Goose Songs). At age 14 Barber was admitted as a singer, pianist and composer in the inaugural class of the Curtis Institute of Music (listen to him sing his own music: Dover Beach, Op. 3).

So began one of the most successful composing careers of the mid-20th century. Except for a brief stint teaching at Curtis, Barber never needed a day job. He won two Pulitzer Prizes. His music was performed by Vladimir Horowitz (who called Barber’s Piano Sonata “the first truly great native work in the form.”), Leontyne Price, Martha Graham, Serge Koussevitzky, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, et.al. And Arturo Toscanini’s premiere of the Adagio for Strings in 1938 made Barber famous. Performed by a full string orchestra, the Adagio’s slow burn leading to a cathartic climax has become a fixture in American culture, played at state funerals, heard in movies (Platoon) and TV (South Park) and arranged for chorus, organ, clarinet ensemble, brass ensemble, and electronic/modern remixes…

(Listen on YouTube if you dare. For Voices; For Organ; For Clarinet Choir; For electronic remix)

Then there is its original form as the second movement of the String Quartet, Op. 11.

Barber started work on the quartet in 1936 after learning that the Curtis Quartet was planning a European tour, telling Orlando Cole, the group’s cellist “I have vague quartettish rumblings in my innards.” Hunkering down in a remote cabin in the Tyrolean Mountains, Barber’s progress on the first two movements was slow but solid, and in September Barber wrote to Cole that “I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knockout! Now for a Finale.” Famous last words.

For whatever reason — writer’s block, perfectionism, depression — Barber often found it hard to finish a piece (Horowitz called him a “constipated composer.”) The quartet’s finale was not finished in time for the Curtis Quartet’s tour. Then Barber withdrew the completed finale after its first performance, eventually discarding it despite several revisions. Finally, Barber inserted the Adagio at a structural point in the first movement, making the end of the first movement a coda for the entire piece. The quartet now felt like a single gesture, and the Adagio, encased in the animated, bristly first movement, took on a new character — no longer a public, cathartic jeremiad, but now an intimate, intense, personal utterance.

In 1989, a man bought a painting at a flea market for $4.00 because he liked the frame and discovered, after removing the painting, an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. In 1799, soldiers from Napoleon’s army in Egypt were about to repair a wall with a granite slab they found on site, only to have their commander save it after seeing it was covered with inscriptions, thereby preserving the Rosetta Stone. And in 2009, a couple renovating a derelict house 70 miles south of Chicago came across piles of music manuscripts, and consequently rescued a trove of pieces by Florence Price (1887-1953).

Born in Little Rock into a mixed-race family, Price attended NEC from 1903 to 1906, majoring in piano and organ while studying composition privately with Chadwick. She returned to Little Rock in 1912 after she married, moving to Chicago in 1927 as part of the Great Migration to escape the Jim Crow South. In Chicago, she discovered the opportunities afforded by the Chicago Black Renaissance and made history in 1933 when her prize-winning Symphony (No. 1) in E minor was performed by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony at the Chicago World’s Fair.

While performers took up Price’s compositions (some of her music was included in Marian Anderson’s historic 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert: Hearst newsreel; Concert program), few of her compositions were published and her work was forgotten after her death. Much of that music, including the Piano Quintet in A minor (1936 ca., rev. 1952) was heard only after its discovery in Price’s abandoned summer home.

In four movements, the Quintet uses ideas from Price’s earlier music. The first movement employs motifs from her Sonata for Organ (1927) (compare the openings of the Sonata – Organ Sonata, mvt. 1 and the Quintet – Piano Quintet) and her song “Words for a Spiritual,” the second draws from her spirituals, the third is an African dance called a Juba, and the final movement is the Juba’s antithesis – Dvořák could have written it if he used funkier scales.

As a composer, Price wanted “…to cultivate and preserve a facility of expression in both idioms (classical and African–American), altho [sic] I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done.” The Piano Quintet shows how that was possible.