Morton Gould was born in New York City on December 10, 1913. He received
a comprehensive musical education at the Institute of Musical Art in New
York, at New York University, and privately (piano) with Abby Whiteside.
After completing these studies, he played the piano in motion-picture
theaters and vaudeville houses and served as the staff pianist for the
Radio City Music Hall. He was only eighteen when the Philadelphia
Orchestra under Stokowski introduced his _Chorale and Fugue in Jazz_,
his first successful effort to combine classical forms and techniques
with modern popular American idioms. In his twenty-first year he started
conducting an orchestra for radio, and making brilliant transcriptions
of popular and semi-classical favorites for these broadcasts. During the
next two decades he was one of radio’s outstanding musical
personalities, his programs enjoying important sponsorship. During this
period he wrote many works for orchestra which have been performed by
America’s foremost symphony orchestras. He also wrote the scores for
several successful ballets (including _Interplay_ and _Fall River
Legend_), as well as music for Broadway musical comedies and motion
pictures.
Like Gershwin, Gould has been a major figure in helping make serious
music popular by writing ambitious concert works which make a skilful
blend of serious and popular musical elements. Gershwin came to the
writing of serious concert works after apprenticeship in Tin Pan Alley;
Gould, on the other hand, came to popular writing after an intensive
career in serious music. Thus he brings to his more popular efforts an
extraordinary technique in composition, advanced thinking in
orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, and rhythm. Yet there is nothing
pedantic about his writing. Many of his works are such consistent
favorites with audiences because they are the creations of a consummate
musician without losing popular appeal. Few have been more successful
than Gould in achieving such a synthesis between concert and popular
music.
_American Salute_ (1942) is a brilliant orchestral adaptation of the
famous American popular song by Patrick Gilmore, “When Johnny Comes
Marching Home.” Though written during the Civil War, this robust
marching song became most popular during the Spanish American War with
which it is today most often associated. Gould prepared this composition
during World War II for an all-American music concert broadcast over the
Mutual radio network on February 12, 1942. “I have attempted,” Gould
explained, “a very simple and direct translation in orchestral idiom of
this vital tune. There is nothing much that can be said about the
structure or the treatment because I think it is what you might call
‘self-auditory.’”
The _American Symphonette No. 2_ is one of several works for orchestra
in the sinfonietta form in which Gould made a conscious effort to fuse
classical structure with elements of popular music. The composer’s
purpose, as he explained, was “entertainment, in the better sense of the
term.” The most famous movement is the middle one, a “Pavane,” often
played independently of the other movements. It is particularly favored
by school orchestras, and has also been adapted for jazz band. The old
and stately classical dance of the Pavane is here married to a spicy
jazz tune jauntily presented by the trumpet; there are here overtones of
a gentle sadness. The first and last movements of this Symphonette
abound with jazz rhythms and melodies, respectively marked “Moderately
Fast, With Vigor” and “Racy.”
The _Cowboy Rhapsody_ (1944) started out as a composition for brass
band, but was later adapted by the composer for orchestra. This is a
rhapsodic treatment of several familiar and less familiar cowboy tunes
including “Old Paint,” “Home on the Range,” “Trail to Mexico” and
“Little Old Sod Shanty.” The composer here attempted “a program work
that would effectively utilize the marvelous vigor and sentiment of
these unusual songs.”
_Family Album_ (1951) is one of two suites in which Gould evokes
nostalgic pictures of the American scene and holidays through
atmospheric melodies. (The other suite is _Holiday Music_, written in
1947.) The composer explains that the music of both these suites is so
simple and direct in its pictorial appeal that it requires no program
other than the titles of the respective movements to be understood and
appreciated; nor is any analysis of the music itself called for. _Family
Album_, for brass band, is made up of five brief movements: “Outing in
the Park,” “Porch Swing on a Summer Evening,” “Nickelodeon,” “Old
Romance” and “Horseless Carriage Gallop.” _Holiday Music_, for
orchestra, also has five movements: “Home for Christmas,” “Fourth of
July,” “Easter Morning,” “The First Thanksgiving,” and “Halloween.”
_Interplay_ is a ballet with choreography by Jerome Robbins introduced
in New York in 1945. The score is an adaptation of the composer’s
_American Concertette_, for piano and orchestra, written for the piano
virtuoso, José Iturbi. The text of the ballet contrasts classic and
present-day dances; Gould’s music is a delightful contrast between old
forms and styles, and modern or popular ones. _Interplay_, as the
concert work is now called, has four movements, each of popular appeal.
The first, “With Drive and Vigor,” was described by the composer as
“brash.” It has two sprightly main themes and a brief development. This
is followed by a “Gavotte” in which the composer directs “a sly glance
to the classical mode.” The third movement is a “Blues,” “a very simple
and, in spots, ‘dirty’ type of slow, nostalgic mood.” The finale, “Very
Fast” brings the composition to a breathless conclusion through
unrelenting motor energy.
_Latin-American Symphonette_, for orchestra (1941) is the fourth of
Gould’s sinfoniettas using popular idioms. The three earlier ones
exploit jazz, while the fourth consists of ideas and idioms indigenous
to Latin America. Each of the four movements consists of a stylized
Latin-American dance form: “Rumba,” “Tango,” “Guaracha,” and “Conga.”
In _Minstrel Show_ (1946) Gould tried to bring to orchestral music some
of the flavor of old time minstrel-show tunes and styles. There are no
borrowings from actual minstrel shows. All the melodies are the
composer’s own, but they incorporate some of the stylistic elements of
the original product. “The composition,” Gould goes on to say,
“alternates between gay and nostalgic passages. There are characteristic
sliding trombone and banjo effects, and in the middle of the piece the
sandpaper blocks and other percussion convey the sounds and tempo of a
soft-shoe dance. The score ends on a jubilant note.”
_Yankee Doodle Went to Town_, like the _American Salute_, is the
presentation of a popular American tune in modern orchestration and
harmony. The tune in this case is, to be sure, “Yankee Doodle,” probably
of English origin which made its first appearance in this country in
1755. The general belief is that it was used by a certain Richard
Shuchburg, a British Army soldier, to poke fun at the decrepit colonial
troops. For two decades after that the tune was frequently heard in the
Colonies as the means by which British soldiers could taunt Colonials.
Once the Revolution broke out, however, the colonists used “Yankee
Doodle” as its favorite war song, and it was sung lustily by them when
Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Gould’s orchestration emphasizes
some of the humorous elements in the song, while giving it some
freshness and vitality through his fine sense for orchestral color and
striking harmonizations.