From the Steeples and the Mountains Excerpts from the sleeve notes

Scored for four sets of bells, trumpet and trombone, From the Steeples is one of Ives's most experimental works. The conception was so speculative for its period that Ives never had the chance to hear it and it was not performed or published until 1965.

Ives was fascinated by church bells and as a child he remembered his father trying to imitate the sound of them with clusters on the piano. From the Steeples is polytonal in that the sets of bells play in the keys of C, D flat, B, and C an octave lower. Their parts individually are familiar enough to bell-ringers but become clangorously confused when superimposed - and then the two brass parts are atonal. At the end of the score Ives wrote: 'From the Steeples - the Bells! - then the Rocks on the Mountain begin to shout!' The bells reach a climax of rapid activity in the middle of the piece wheras the brass players, with stunts of octave displacement and glissando unknown in Ives's day, do so at the end. Then, as a final irony, three of the sets of bells superimpose plagal ('Amen') cadences in their own keys whilst the other set, and the brass players, agree on C as the tonic - with a top D for an extra trumpeter if he happens to be around!

The spacious nobility of this work, scored for four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba and timpani, reflects Barber's admiration for Bach. The Mutations approach the plainsong melody 'Christe, du Lamm Gottes' historically, apart from hearing it unaccompanied. First it is heard at the outset in the chorale harmonisation by Joachim Decker (c1575-1611), an early treatment for congregational singing published in 1604; then, when the trumpets first appear, Barber scores Bach's harmonisation of the melody taken from Cantata No 23, 'Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn'; this is followed - descending bell motifs - with an instrumentation of Bach's chorale prelude on the same tune, taken from the Orgelbüchlein, where Barber even adds an extra, dissonant modal contradiction in an early ascending scale, which could be a mistake; then the ornate horn melody against the trumpet cantus firmus comes from a recitative in the Cantata and Barber returns to the Decker harmonisation to end with. Both Decker and Bach had some difficulty in adapting the plainsong mode to modern tonality, which is why the Decker harmonisation starts in E flat and ends in F.

Throughout the Mutations Barber writes the words of the hymn, which is a version of the Agnus Dei, in German above the appropriate music. In the same year he made an arrangement for voices of his most popular composition, the Adagio for Strings, using the Agnus Dei as its text.

Bach was also a formative influence in the style of Roy Harris, as this Chorale for organ, two trumpets, horn and three trombones, shows. Like so many American composers, Harris studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. His tutelage lasted from 1926 to 1929 and he returned to America to write symphonies which caused him to be regarded as the Sibelius of the Mid-West. This spaciousness is a feature of the Chorale which evolves slowly by a melodic process he called 'autogenesis' with each phrase developing from the preceding one. The work opens with an organ solo in a predominantly consonant, chordal style. An accompanied horn solo follows and then a trumpet is introduced. At first their phrases alternate, then combine, and then they are joined by a solo trombone against quaver figuration in the organ. A second trumpet enters before the brass leave the stage for the organ to introduce a final, more homophonic section. Here the organ is mostly in two-part counterpoint in quavers and its brief solo leads to the brass treating the opening horn phrase as a chorale and alternating with the trombone's first phrase. Eventually the organ takes over the stately hymn texture with an increasingly active pedal part, including a short pedal solo. The brass decorate, often in alternation with the organ, to create a peroration which is utterly characteristic of Harris in its smooth, controlled organic growth.

Virgil Thomson, apart from being a pioneer in film music, a versatile composer generally and a distinguished critic, was a brilliant musical portrait artist. In this respect he regarded himself as working in the tradition established by Couperin, Schumann and Elgar, although he was probably more influenced by the verbal portraits of Gertrude Stein. But Thomson, with over 150 examples, was the most assiduous and he usually composed his portraits in front of the sitter, like a painter. The portraits were often for piano, but this set dates from 1972 and he scored them mostly in Jerusalem two years later for the American Brass Quintet - two trumpets, horn and two trombones. The family connection of the title comes through Priscilla Rea, the daughter of a friend from Thomson's Kansas City childhood. Howard Rea is her third husband and Robin Smith and Annie Barnard are children of previous marriages: Willy Eisenhart, who wrote a book about the American miniature painter Donald Evans, is a stranger who might have been visiting. So the composer finds family resemblances between the first four portraits but not the last one, which is in a different musical style. Thomson said he deliberately avoided writing easy music, since his commissioners were virtuosi, and used some less common instruments. Thus he requires trumpets in D for No 2 and No 4 and an alto trombone, accompanied by a D trumpet, opens No 4.

Cowell was a remarkably prolific composer whose opus numbers reach 966 in William Lichtenwanger's catalogue. Many of the entries are short, occasional pieces, but there are twenty completed symphonies and many other large-scale works ranging in style from early experimental treatments of the piano to the inter-cultural music which Cowell increasingly favoured. Cowell said he wanted to live in "the whole world of music" and, like Virgil Thomson, he composed without disdaining the musical commonplace. The four works here show Cowell at his most approachable, with some aspects from his Irish ancestry fused in the American melting-pot.

The Grinnell Fanfare, for 3 trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba and organ, was commissioned by Grinnell College, Iowa, for the inauguration of their new organ on May 19, 1949.

Employing two trumpets, two horns, trombone and tuba, Tall Tale was written for college performers and included in the Mercury Wind Instrument Library, edited by Richard Franko Goldman. It starts a bit like an Irish jig, which is the main theme, but soon gives way to pentatonic figures thrown from one part of the group to another. The overall cheerfulness is a Cowell hallmark.

Cowell was particularly attracted to the paired form of the hymn and fuguing tune, and there are some fifty examples in his work. The fuguing-tune goes back to the American practice of William Billings (1746-1800) who felt that fuguing in his vocal music - 'when one part comes in after another' - was so effective that 'its beauties cannot be numbered'. Normally the hymn is broad and the fuguing tune contrapuntal, but in Cowell's example for three horns the Hymn is almost as contrapuntal as the Fuguing Tune itself.

Another breezy, diatonic piece, commissioned by C F Peters Corporation and scored for three trumpets, two horns and two trombones. The main theme in G major opens over pedal points in the low brass and rondo expectations are fulfilled as the form progresses.

This Sextet for two trumpets, two horns, trombone and tuba, is something of a curiosity. It was written when Philip Glass, after graduating from the Juilliard School of Music, was composer-in-residence with the Pittsburgh Public Schools on a Ford Foundation project. This was several years before he began to become known for the repetitive minimalist techniques which launched him to fame and have enabled him to enter some of the world's leading opera houses. The Sextet is not listed by Glass now, but it was actually published in England in 1966 by Novello & Co. in their Music for Today Series edited by Geoffrey Bush. The writing shifts rather uneasily from consonance to dissonance but there is plenty of American precedent behind the Hymn, Ballad and gently jazzy Finale.

Ruggles was a pioneering New England composer who, along with Ives and Varese, began to become known in New York in the 1920s. Dissonance was a kind of moral imperative for him and he took enormous trouble over his short list of works. Ives once caught him playing a chord over and over again. He said he was giving it the test of time! Angels was originally for six trumpets, but the 1938 version is for four trumpets and two trombones, all muted. The score is marked 'serene' and the work packs a remarkably concentrated intensity into its 47 bars.

Ever since his student days Elliott Carter, another Boulanger pupil, has been fascinated by Purcell's Fantasia upon One Note (c1680) where the fourth part of the polyphonic piece for five viols repeats middle C all through. The seventh of Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for woodwind quartet owes its single note to the Purcell connection. In 1974, as a Christmas present for the American Brass Quintet, Carter arranged the Purcell Fantasy for brass, transposing it down a tone. So, like the Barber Mutations, this is a composer's arrangement which is revealing. Carter felt that the repeated note had a dramatic meaning - 'a repeated, tolling, bell-like note sounding through musical episodes of contrasting character.'

Ives inscribed this short processional 'To the Choir of the Central Presbyterian Church, New York, Dec. 1901' but six months later he had left the post of organist there because he could not manage to reconcile the needs of church services with his own exploratory visions. The text by the Rev John Ellerton reads: 'This is the Day of Light: let there be Light Today.' The musical setting, with trombones as an alternative to voices, starts and ends with the rock of faith - an octave C enclosing piled-up clusters of notes. Strings can be added too. After an organ interlude the opening section is repeated at double speed. The record ends as it began with an ear-stretching example of Ives's extraordinary prophetic imagination.

PETER DICKINSON ©1999