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Article Excerpt
Of the considerable number of accomplished American composers of the twentieth century, Jerome Moross (1 August 1913-25 July 1983, fig. 1) is one of the less familiar names, but he left an important legacy of music for stage, screen, and theater, and some of it is finding a new audience. Those who do recognize the composer's name generally know Moross's once notorious ballet Frankie and Johnny (1938), his cabaret standard "Lazy Afternoon" (from The Golden Apple, 1950, with lyrics by John Latouche), or his scores to such films as The Big Country (1958), and The Cardinal (1963). Some listeners familiar with all this music do not realize that it is the work of the same man, and that each piece represents only one aspect of a multifaceted composer. A new assessment of Moross's place in American music is overdue, and what follows is an attempt to place this body of work, which has fallen into relative and undeserved obscurity, in historical perspective, to make details known to potential listeners and performers, and to stimulate further research. The annotations in the worklist relate important biographical details to the relevant music, and this brief introduction attempts only to provide an overview of the career of Jerome Moross and a survey of his musical activities.
The second of three sons born in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Jerome Moross (1) studied piano at any early age with his mother. He was a precocious child who graduated from high school several years ahead of schedule and from New York University at the age of eighteen. During the academic year 1931-32 (his final year at NYU), he also held a fellowship in conducting at Juilliard. (2) Initially, Moross wrote in a dissonant, modernistic style (e.g., Paeans for chamber orchestra, 1931), but it was not long before he began to mix a more conservative, tonal approach with jazz, popular, and folk idioms. Moross said of his early influences,
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... all my life I heard popular music. I heard folk music. It was the kind of thing we sang when I was a child, and even while I was going to Juilliard I was working at jobs in jazz bands. I worked in theater pits. Popular music was all around me and it seemed absolutely right to use it. As a matter of fact, two people encouraged me in it. One was Charles Ives, with whom I was quite friendly in my late teens.... Ives was very kind and very helpful. He once told me that he thought it was a good thing that I was mixing up real popular music in my style, which at that time was still quite Schoenbergian/Webernesque. I was intent upon quarter-tones and all the rest ... then I suddenly felt it was a dead end, a wall, and I left it.... I should have said three people because it was [also] Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland.... (3)
Moross was an active member of Copland's Young Composers' Group, (4) and was a frequent performer in concerts of new music given in New York City throughout the 1930s, playing both his own music and that of others. Among the more interesting pieces in his repertoire were the First Piano Sonata of Charles Ives and the Second Piano Sonata ("The Airplane") of George Antheil. (5) Large-ensemble pieces on these concerts were conducted by Arthur Berger, future lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky, or Bernard Herrmann, who would become a celebrated composer of film scores. (6) In 1936 Aaron Copland expressed both high expectations and frank criticism of a number of America's most promising young composers in an important article, writing
Moross is probably the most talented of these men [writing collectively of Moross, Elie Siegmeister, Irwin Heilner, and Andrew Cazden]. He writes music that has a quality of sheer physicalness, music "without a mind," as it were. It is regrettable that we cannot yet point to any finished, extended work. What he seems to lack is a sense of artistic discipline and integrity, which his talent needs for development. (7)
Both Moross and Bernard Herrmann were strong advocates for the music of Charles Ives, (8) and Moross was also active in performing or promoting performance of works by Ives, George Antheil, Henry Cowell, and the (then) little-known nineteenth-century American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. (9) Two of Moross's early orchestral pieces, Paeans and Biguine [sic] were published in 1933 and 1935, respectively, in Cowell's important New Music Orchestra Series (New Music Editions, San Francisco). It was Copland who recommended Moross to dancer Ruth Page, for whom Moross was to write several ballets, the most important of which was Frankie and Johnny (1938). (10) Through Oscar Levant, Moross met George Gershwin, who in 1937 invited the young composer to be vocal coach and pianist for the touring production of Porgy and Bess. This he did; Moross was only twenty-three years old at the time.
In 1939, Moross married Hazel Abrams, whom he had met in Los Angeles. The young couple settled in Manhattan, enjoying the rich cultural life of the city and rearing their only child Susanna, born the following year. A career highlight of another sort occurred on 18 October 1943 when Sir Thomas Beecham conducted Moross's Symphony with the Seattle Symphony (figs. 2-3); three more performances of the Symphony were given the following year with Alfred Wallenstein conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (11) On 21 January 1945, an article in the New York Times announced that Moross was among several young composers to receive commissions from CBS to write new works "in whatever form they please," (12) and on 14 April 1947, a New York Herald Tribune article revealed that Moross had been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in composition. (13) In his concert music, Moross was an important successor to Gershwin in that he was a classically trained musician who broke away from European models and incorporated folk song, jazz, blues, ragtime, and other popular styles in concert music as part of his compositional vocabulary rather than as novelty or diversion.
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By 1940, Moross had also begun to work intermittently in Hollywood as a film score orchestrator. Significantly, the first of these assignments was Copland's score to Our Town. (14) In 1948, having had what amounted to a long apprenticeship as a staff orchestrator for Warner Brothers, Moross received his first offer to compose original film music. Over the next twenty years he accepted such work from time to time (primarily to finance his composition in other forms), but did not desire to become known primarily as a composer for motion pictures. His scores were always well crafted, nicely complementing the action on screen (perhaps a valuable lesson learned from working with Copland), and earned him a high degree of respect. It is clear that Moross was required to devote a great deal of his creative energy, more than he would have liked, to commercial music. Indeed, table 1 shows the extent to which his efforts in the 1940s and 1950s were dominated by work in film and television.
Moross was at his most inventive in the world of musical theater, and he is historically important for introducing a number of hybrid forms. In the ballet Frankie and Johnny (1938), for example, three Salvation Army "Salvation Susies" wander around on stage playing percussion instruments and commenting on the action in a manner both Greek and Brechtian; in Ballet Ballads (1948), several characters are represented both by singers and dancers; and in The Golden Apple (1950) there is no spoken dialogue whatsoever, a feature unprecedented for a musical of its day. This last-named work received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1954 for Best Musical of the Year. His musical Underworld (1962), although containing some fine music, was never produced because of bitter disagreement between producers and authors. Moross was plagued by ill health in his later years, and these were largely spent revising earlier music and composing a series of pedagogical pieces of modest difficulty (Sonatinas for Divers Instruments). His last work for the stage was the one-act opera Sorry, Wrong Number (1977). Jerome Moross died in 1983 of congestive heart failure, a few days before his seventieth birthday and a few months after the death of his beloved wife of over forty years.
Characteristics of Moross's music include syncopation, gapped scales (often pentatonic, showing the influence of folk song), "blue" notes, modal harmony, melodic sequence, a pronounced symmetry of phrasing, rhythmic ostinato, and occasional dissonance, even bitonality. (15) His orchestration, progressive for its time, included exotic percussion instruments, trap set, muted brass (cup, harmon, and wah-wah mutes), vibraphone, etc., but his harmonic language is often closer to musical theater than to concert repertoire. Moross was neither a major innovator, responsible for significant change in the musical direction of his time, nor a mere practitioner satisfied to uncritically follow the musical traditions which preceded him. In spite of his early and thorough musical training, Moross never studied composition per se with a private teacher but developed a style that was personal, idiosyncratic, and essentially self-taught. His style embraced popular musical aesthetics, and was perhaps shaped as much by his own experience performing in nightclubs and pit orchestras as by his youthful academic study.
The young American composers active in New York City primarily in the 1930s and 1940s are often considered and evaluated as a group. (16) Yet this was a bright galaxy, and there were several lesser stars whose substantial legacy awaits rediscovery. Though touched only occasionally or even rarely by what may be called the muse of genius, the music of Jerome Moross is distinguished by a passion for American history, dance, and popular culture, a high level of technical competence, musical and literary sensitivity, and the essential but elusive combination of taste and imagination.
The Music of Jerome Moross: An Annotated Worklist
I. Concert and Theater Music
II. Music for Film (1948-1969)
III. Orchestrations of Film Scores by Other Composers (1940-1952)
IV. Music for Television (1955-1968)
Arrangement of the Worklist
Section I is organized as follows:
Concert and theater music titles (i.e., all works not for film or television) are entered in a single alphabetical sequence, with each title followed parenthetically by the year of completion and by a genre classification. Following section I is a classified list of the same titles arranged by genre; these are based on Library of Congress subject headings for music, but do not follow them in all details. Because of its historical interest, even non-extant music is mentioned in a few cases. Particulars of the annotations are in the following sequence:
* Individual sections (songs from musicals, sonata movements, ballet sections)
* Instrumentation, listed in score order and abbreviated as follows: flute, fl; piccolo, pic; oboe, ob; English horn, Eng hrn; clarinet, cl; alto clarinet, alt cl; bass clarinet, b cl; soprano saxophone, sop sax; alto saxophone, alt sax; tenor saxophone, ten sax; baritone saxophone, bari sax; bassoon, bsn; contrabassoon, cbsn; horn, hrn; trumpet, trp; cornet, cnt; trombone, trb; bass trombone, b trb; tuba, tu; doubles/doubling, doub; timpani, timp; snare drum, sn dr; bass drum, b dr; tenor drum, t dr; side drum, s dr; cymbals, cym; suspended cymbals, sus cym; glockenspiel, glock; xylophone, xyl; vibraphone, vib; marimba, marim; gong, g; chimes, ch; bells, b; tom-tom, tom; castanets, cast; maracas, marac; triangle, tri; woodblocks, wb, cowbells, cowb; bongos, bon; piano, p; celesta, cel; harp, h; violin, vln; viola, vla; cello, vc; double bass, db; strings, str.
* Approximate duration
* First performance (date, conductor, director, cast, etc.)
* Additional performances
* Publisher of music
* Location of MS sources. The essential repository of material relating to Moross is the Jerome Moross Papers at Columbia University. Most of the composer's works, copied in his own hand, are found here, some in different stages or versions, and most references to MS sources in the worklist are to this collection, abbreviated JMP.
* Recordings (both commercially available and out-of-print)
* Comments (historical background, commissions, awards, bibliography, etc.)
Sections II-IV of the worklist are arranged more loosely. One does not normally speak of a "first performance" of a film score, for example, and it is unusual for such music to be available in printed form. Most of Moross's music in this medium (like that of other composers) is accessible primarily through the films themselves or the occasional soundtrack recording. There are, however, a growing number of modern digital recordings devoted to classic film music, and symphony orchestras have shown that live concerts, sometimes in conjunction with large screen images, are an important and satisfying programming possibility. (Two suites of such music designed for concert performance are described in section I under The Big Country and Music for the Flicks.)
I. Concert and Theater Music
Adam and Eve in Eden
See comments to The Last Judgement
An American Pattern (1936)
BALLET Introduction / The Office / The Old Women / Party Scene / The Gigolo / The Old Women / Dance of the Revolutionary / Duet / Finale.
Instrumentation: 2 fl (2d doub pic), ob (doub Eng hrn), 2 cl (2d doub b cl), bsn / 2 hrn, 2 trp in B[??], trb / 2 timp, sn dr, sus cym, glock, ch, Chinese blocks (temple blocks) / h / p /str.
Approximate duration: 20 minutes.
First performance: 1937. Chicago, Great Northern Theatre (other details unknown). Choreography by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone.
Later performances:
1) 20 June 1938. Great Northern Theatre, Chicago, under the joint auspices of the Chicago Opera Ballet and the Works Progress Administration Federal Theatre. Choreography by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone. Other works on program: Behind This Mask by David Sheinfeld and Frankie and Johnny by Moross.
2) 8 June 2000. Hot Springs Music Festival Symphony Orchestra; Richard Rosenberg, cond. Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Music published: Sorom Editions (distr. Theodore Presser).
Location of MS sources: New York Public Library, Dance Collection, Ruth Page Collection. Contains both full score and piano score.
Comments: Ballet in one act. Commissioned by Ruth Page; scenario by Ruth Page and Nicholas Remisoff. Composer's MS reads "New York-Chicago-Albuquerque-Los Angeles" and, below, "April-Dec 1936" [?--lower half cut off]. Moross himself believed this music to be lost.
An American Saga
See Paul Bunyon: An American Saga (1934)
Ballet Ballads
See Susanna and the Elders, Willie the Weeper, The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett, and Riding Hood Revisited
The Banjo (composed L. M. Gottschalk, 1854-55; arr. J. Moross, 1934)
PIANO MUSIC, ARRANGED (2 PIANOS)
Instrumentation: 2 p.
Approximate duration: 5 minutes.
First performance: 2 April 1935. Vera Brodsky and Harold Triggs, duopianists. Metropolitan Opera House, New York City (Concert of American Music).
Music published: J. Fischer, 1935; later Schirmer.
Location of MS sources: JMP box 10.
Recordings:
1) Classics in the Park. John Arpin, piano. Classical Heritage 1222 [1999], CD.
2) Gottschalk: Music for Two and Four Hands. Alan Marks, Nerine Barrett, pianos. Nimbus 7045 [2000], 2 CDs.
Comments: Moross's arrangement of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Le banjo, esquisse americaine, op. 15, RO 22. Moross had a life-long interest in both Gottschalk (1829-1869) and two-piano music (Moross's extensive collection of music for two pianos now resides in the music library of the Manhattan School of Music). With its idiomatic, extroverted technique and its quotation of American tunes (including the revival song Roll, Jordan Roll and Stephen Foster's Camptown Races), The Banjo achieves an arresting, rollicking, and quintessentially American effect. Moross had been introduced to several of Gottschalk's works by John Kirkpatrick in 1932. In a letter dated 11 May 1934, Moross asked Kirkpatrick to loan him "such pieces as O ma Charmante [O ma charmante, epargnez-moi, op. 44, RO 182], Reponds-moi [Reponds-moi (Di que si), op. 50, RO 225], and others that can't be bought" (Kirkpatrick Papers, 56/25/273). Although he could hardly have known it at the time, it might have been fruitful for Moross to have pursued his interest in Gottschalk. He wrote to Kirkpatrick that he had hopes of arranging some of Gottschalk's music as a short ballet, but this did not come to pass. Years later, Hershy Kay did precisely this with much success in his ballet Cakewalk (1951), and Kay's reconstruction (for pianist Eugene List) of Gottschalk's Grande tarantelle (1961) was choreographed by Balanchine and figured considerably in the Gottschalk revival of the 1960s. According to pre-concert newspaper publicity, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst specifically requested that Moross's arrangement of The Banjo be given at the performance cited above.
The Big Country (1958)
SUITE FOR ORCHESTRA Main Title / Waltz (Waltz from Major Terrill's Party) / Ballad (Raid on Blanco Canyon) / Scherzo (Old Thunder) / Finale (The Welcoming).
Instrumentation: 3 fl (2d & 3d doub pic), 2 ob (2d doub Eng hrn), 3 cl (3d doub b cl), 2 bsn (2d doub cbsn) / 4 hrn, 3 trp in B[??], 2 trb, b trb, tu / timp, sn dr, t dr, b dr, sus cym, cym, glock, vib, tri (4 percussionists) / h / p, cel / str.
Approximate duration: 16 minutes.
Selective list of performances:
1) 27 November 1966 (two performances, 6:00 and 8:45 p.m.). Mantovani Concert Orchestra; Mantovani, cond. Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City.
2) 22 October 1971. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Elmer Bernstein, cond. London, England.
3) 19 and 20 February 1982. Long Beach Symphony; John Green, cond. Long Beach, California.
4) 8 June 1996. Hot Springs Music Festival Symphony Orchestra; Richard Rosenberg, cond. Hot Springs, Arkansas. Main title only.
5) 16 February 2002. Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra; Richard Rosenberg, cond. Corpus Christi, Texas. Main title only.
6) 26 and 27 April 2002. Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra; Richard Rosenberg, cond. Waterloo, Iowa. Main title only.
7) 6 March 2004. Hartford Symphony Orchestra; Jeff Tyzik, cond. Mortensen Hall, Bushnell Performing Arts Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
8) 13 March 2004. Rapides Symphony Orchestra; Richard Rosenberg, cond. Rapides Parish, Louisiana. Main title only.
Music published: Sorom Editions (distr. Theodore Presser).
Recording: See The Big Country under section II, Music for Film.
Comments: Suite drawn from music composed for the motion picture. Orchestrations of the movements in the suite were revised by the composer and differ somewhat from those heard in the film soundtrack.
The Big Country was listed in the ASCAP Symphonic Catalog, 3d ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977), 325, as available from Chappell.
Biguine (1934)
ORCHESTRAL MUSIC Instrumentation: 2 fl, pic, 2 ob, 2 cl in B[??], b cl, 2 bsn / 4 hrn, 4 trp in B[??], 3 trbs, tu / timp, sn dr, b dr, cym, xyl, marac / p / str.
Approximate duration: 5 minutes.
First broadcast performance: 21 November 1934. CBS Symphony Orchestra; John Green, cond. CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) broadcast, aired from New York City.
First concert performance: 25 August 1944. Los Angeles Philharmonic; Franz Waxman, cond. "Symphony Under the Stars at Hollywood Bowl," Los Angeles, California.
Music published: In New Music Orchestra Series, [no. 9] (subscription series, ed. Henry Cowell), 1935; Sorom Editions (distr. Theodore Presser).
Location of MS sources: JMP box 11.
Recording: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; JoAnn Falletta, cond. Koch International Classics 3-7367-2 H1 [1996], CD (rec. January 1996).
Comments: Biguine received its premiere performance some six months before the stage work Parade, although its thematic material is derived from the latter. The work was conceived as a dance vehicle for Charles Weidman. The theme and rhythmic accompaniment was later reused in music the composer provided for the 1956 film The Sharkfighters. The curious spelling of the title is the composer's own.
Blood Wedding (1949)
INCIDENTAL MUSIC Introduction (instrumental) / Lullaby (act 1, scene 2--"Oh lullaby, my baby") / End of Scene 2 (act 1, scene 2--"Carnation sleep and dream") / Interlude (act 1, scene 2, 3--instrumental) / Processional (act 1, between acts 3 and 4--"Awaken, O bride") / Exit to the Church (act 1, scene 4--instrumental) / Opening Song (act 2--"A turning the wheel") / Dance (act 2, scene 1--instrumental) / Song (act 2, scene 1--"With the back of her head") / End of the Wedding (act 2, scene 1--instrumental) / Red Wool (act 2, scene 3--"Wool, red wool, what would you make?").
Instrumentation: trp in B[??] / guitar / men's voices / women's voices.
Approximate duration: 10 minutes.
First performance: 1949 (specific date unknown). New Stages Theatre, New York.
Music published: Sorom Editions (distr. Theodore Presser).
Location of MS sources: JMP box 11.
Comments: Incidental music to the play by Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca poems were set by Moross in his ballet Guns and Castanets.
Concerto for Flute with String Quartet [or String Orchestra] (1978)
CONCERTO, FLUTE WITH STRING QUARTET
I. Allegro / II. Andante. Tune with 4 Improvisations. / III. Vivace.
Instrumentation: fl / 2 vln, vla, vc (db ad lib).
Approximate duration: 24 minutes.
Music published: Sorom Editions (distr. Theodore Presser).
Location of MS sources: JMP box 12.
Recordings:
1) Alexa Still, flute; New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; JoAnn Falletta, cond. Koch International Classics 3-7367-2 H1 [1996], CD (version for flute and string orchestra, rec. January 1996).
2) Frances Zlotkin, flute; Richard Sortomme, Benjamin Hudson, violins; Toby Appel, viola; Frederick Zlotkin, cello. Varese Sarabande VC 31101 [1979], LP (version for flute and string quartet, rec. 1979).
Comments: Conceived originally for clarinet; the composer's last completed work. Designed to be accompanied by either string quartet or string orchestra, for which a contrabass part was provided; the two recordings cited illustrate both versions.
The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett ("Ballet Ballad No. 3"; 1946 / orch. 1966)
MUSICAL Oh the Western Star Is Riding Low / I'm Ridin' on the Breeze / A Funny Kind of a Lad is Davy / Young Women, They Run Like Hares / Sally Ann Cyclone Thunderbird Crockett / Peace Be on This House of Logs/ Cherokee Choctaw Shawanoe / Fill the Snakeskin Quivers / You're My Yeller Flower of the Forest / I Swam Upstream This Morning / There's a Comet a-Comin' / To the Tail of a Comet I Have Clung / Oh Davy Would a-Huntin' Ride / Brave Hunter / Maybe I Should Cut Some Public Capers / Davy Journeyed to the Alamo.
Instrumentation: 2 fl (2d doub pic), ob, 2 cl in B[??] (2d doub b cl), bsn / 2 hrn, 2 trp in B[??],...
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