(Title: Symphonic Sketches
Composer: George Whitefield Ch...)
Title: Symphonic Sketches
Composer: George Whitefield Chadwick
Original Publisher: Schirmer
The complete orchestral score to Chadwick's Symphonic Sketches, as originally published in the first edition by Schirmer in 1907.
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The House Of St. Botolph: XII Night Revel 1907 (1907)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
George Whitefield Chadwick was an American composer. Along with Horatio Parker, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, and Edward MacDowell, he was a representative composer of what is called the Second New England School of American composers of the late 19th century—the generation before Charles Ives. Chadwick's works are influenced by the Realist movement in the arts, characterized by a down-to-earth depiction of people's
Background
George Whitefield Chadwick was born on November 13, 1854 in Lowell, Massachusetts, United States. He was the second son and second child of Alonzo Calvin and Hannah Godfrey (Fitts) Chadwick. The father started life as a farmer in Boscawen where, in addition to following his calling, he gratified his love for music by teaching a singing class and organizing an amateur chorus and orchestra. It was in the singing class that he met his wife. The farm did not prosper, so the elder Chadwick moved to Lowell where he worked for a time in a machine shop. Hannah Chadwick died November 24, 1854, eleven days after George Chadwick was born, and the child was sent to relatives at Boscawen for three years. At the end of that time Alonzo Chadwick married again, and George was brought back to Lowell. In 1860 the father moved to Lawrence, Massachussets, where he founded a mutual insurance association. It is said that before long he had enrolled in it half the inhabitants of Lawrence, and that in 1872 the great fire of Boston so frightened the other half that the mutual became a most prosperous concern. George Chadwick received his first piano lessons from his brother, Fitz Henry, fourteen years older than himself. Together they played four-hand arrangements of Beethoven symphonies. Fitz Henry had a position as organist, and by the time George was fifteen he was able to substitute for his older brother. In addition, there was always music in the Chadwick home, and the family reunions at Thanksgiving and Christmas were miniature choral festivals.
Education
After graduation from high school, George studied piano in Boston with Carlyle Petersilea. His trips from Lawrence were also useful for business errands in behalf of the insurance firm. He became so familiar with its affairs that eventually he was given regular employment and remained in the business until he was twenty-one years old. Meanwhile, in 1872, he had entered the New England Conservatory of Music, in Boston, where he studied organ with George E. Whiting and harmony with Stephen A. Emery. In 1873 he had organ lessons with Dudley Buck and in 1874-75 with Eugene Thayer. In 1897 Yale University conferred on him the honorary degree of A. M.
Career
He was also beginning to give concerts and take pupils of his own. In the fall of 1876 he accepted a position as head of the music department at Olivet College and for a year taught piano, organ, and harmony at that institution, as well as leading the choir and glee club, giving weekly organ recitals, and lecturing on music history and esthetics. He was able to save a considerable part of his small salary, and with this money he determined to go abroad for further study. At this point he met parental opposition. The Chadwicks were intense music lovers but not professional musicians, and Alonzo Chadwick felt that his son would have greater security if he returned to the insurance business. The older son, Fitz Henry, was continuing his musical interests, but as an avocation, for he had entered the employ of a hardware firm in Boston, with which he remained until his death in 1917. George, however, disregarded his father's advice and sailed for Europe in the fall of 1877. He went first to Berlin, where he studied with Karl August Haupt. This association was a disappointment, however, for Chadwick wished training in orchestration, and Haupt told him he must go elsewhere for it. Accordingly Chadwick moved to Leipzig, where at first he studied privately with Salomon Jadassohn, and later with the same teacher at the Conservatory. From Jadassohn, Chadwick acquired a contrapuntal technique and a polyphonic freedom that was to affect all of his compositions. While studying with Jadassohn he composed his Rip van Winkle Overture and two string quartets. At the end of his second season with Jadassohn (spring of 1879) Chadwick went to Dresden, where he tried studying with Gustav Merkel. He was dissatisfied, however, so he debated going to Cesar Franck in Paris, or Josef Rheinberger in Munich. He decided on Rheinberger and started his lessons with that teacher in the autumn of 1879. These studies matured and ripened Chadwick's gifts and added a critical faculty to his creative power. They gave him what Engel has termed "an orderly idea of strict composition, " and caused "the process of musical expression" to become "a fully conscious and consciously controlled discipline". Chadwick returned to America in the spring of 1880 and settled in Boston, where he rented a studio and began taking pupils. Among them were Horatio Parker, Sidney Homer, and Arthur Whiting. His compositions were frequently performed in this period; the Rip van Winkle Overture at the May Festival of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, with the composer conducting; the First Symphony by the Harvard Musical Association, February 23, 1882; a Thalia Overture by the Boston Symphony under Henschel in 1883; and a Scherzo in F by the same organization in 1886. For seventeen years he was active as a church organist; from 1883 to 1893 at the South Congregational Church in Boston, of which Edward Everett Hale was the pastor. From 1880 to 1899 he conducted the musical festivals at Springfield, Massachussets, and from 1897 to 1901 those at Worcester, Massachussets For the opening of the World's Fair in Chicago he was commissioned to set to music Harriet Monroe's Ode. In 1905 he visited Germany and conducted a number of his own works at a concert of the Concordia in Leipzig. Meanwhile Chadwick had become associated with the New England Conservatory of Music, where he had formerly been a pupil. He was appointed as a teacher there in 1882, two years after his return from Europe, and when the post of director became vacant, it was offered to him and he accepted. He held this position until his death in 1931 and lived to see his connection with the Conservatory cover almost a half-century. There was a fiftieth anniversary during his lifetime: a performance of his Rip van Winkle Overture by the Conservatory Orchestra, with Chadwick conducting, on May 6, 1930, just fifty years after its first Boston performance. Other works on the program were the Columbian Ode, a dramatic overture, Melpomene (first performed by the Boston Symphony under Gericke in 1887), a scene from the lyric drama Judith (first performed at the Worcester Festival in 1901); two movements from the Third Symphony (introduced by the Boston Symphony in 1894); and the male chorus Ecce Jam Noctis. The Conservatory Chorus and the Apollo Club of Boston, in addition to the Conservatory Orchestra, took part in the program. As a composer, Chadwick belongs to the so-called New England group. These musicians, including the elder John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, Horatio Parker, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, and others, were influenced by an academic tradition which reflected the classic-romantic German composers of the nineteenth century. Chadwick, however, more than any others of his Boston colleagues, put his own native Yankee humor into his works. Philip Hale, the Boston critic, once wrote of this quality as a "jaunty irreverence, a snapping of the fingers at Fate and the Universe, that we do not recognize in music of foreign composers, great or humble". As a teacher of composition, Chadwick exerted a wide and lasting influence. Besides the three pupils mentioned above, he taught, at one time or another, Frederick S. Converse, Henry Hadley, Daniel Gregory Mason, Edward Burlingame Hill, John Beach, and William Grant Still. His textbook on harmony was first published in 1897, and in twenty-five years it achieved fifty editions. He insisted on a thorough groundwork, but he was always flexible; he adapted his methods to the needs of the individual pupil and made sure that the pupil's natural gifts would not be checked by academic strictness. At the New England Conservatory Chadwick conducted a student orchestra. Many of its members later entered professional orchestras and some became conductors. He attracted a host of friends, for he was of a genial, witty disposition. For years he was known affectionately as "Chad" among his colleagues and by the pupils at the Conservatory. When Edward MacDowell died in 1908, Chadwick was elected to take his place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition to his works already mentioned, his major compositions include The Quiet Lodging, comic opera (1892); Tabasco, comic opera (1894); The Padrone, opera; Incidental music to Everywoman; Symphony No. 2, B Flat (1888); Symphony No. 3, F Major (1896); Sinfonietta, D Major (1906); Concert Overture, Euterpe (1906); Symphonic Sketches (1907); Suite Symphonique (1911); Symphonic Ballade, Tam o'Shanter (1917); Symphonic Fantasie, Aphrodite (1912); Quintet, for piano and strings (1890); Quartet in E Minor, No. 4 (1902); Quartet for strings in D Minor, No. 5 (1901); "Dedication Ode" (1886); Phoenix Expirans (1892); and Noel, a pastorale (1909). There are also numerous songs, instrumental pieces (many for organ), and shorter choruses and anthems.
Achievements
Although Chadwick was a master of choral writing, he was most outstanding as a symphonic composer and composed twenty major works for orchestra, eleven of which were published during his lifetime.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Views
Quotations:
"If the effect justifies the means, any rule may be disregarded. "
"The brain and the mind are one thing and technic is another. You may cultivate the fingers, the throat or whatever else is used, but without brain and heart there is no musical education. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Engel wrote of Chadwick: "He thinks and hears orchestrally. His instrumental methods are not mere borrowed devices. They are the outcome of a distinctive instrumental imagination. Persons, moods, actions are translated into orchestral sounds of contour, color, meaning. . His orchestra can sing, it can roister. It can be droll without being grotesque. It can be graphic and yet escape being flatly imitative.
Connections
Chadwick was married, on June 17, 1888, to Ida Brooks. She with two sons, Theodore and Noel, survived him.
