This week, we’re doing a special edition of Turntable ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.
As part of our ongoing coverage of this milestone, the songs we’ll be listening to today are all by American composers. Grammy-winning conductor Gil Rose, founder and conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, joined GBH’S All Things Considered host Arun Rath on the musical journey. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: Super excited for this exploration of American composers. We’re starting off with Steven Mackey’s Grammy-nominated “Dreamhouse.” We’ll hear a little bit about this. It’s amazing. And then have you talk about it a bit.
Establishes the dream right away. It goes a lot of different places from there, though. Tell us about this piece.
Gil Rose: Oh, ”Dreamhouse“ by Steven Mackey is one of our touchstone pieces. I was first contacted by Steve to conduct a new piece on the Holland Festival. He was commissioned to write a piece for big orchestra, four electric guitar soloists, and four close-miked singers, like the Swingle Singers, and narrator — basically narrator and singer — called Dreamhouse. And I thought, “What can that be about?”
And it was a 55-, 57-minute piece that journeys through texts about building a house, a blueprint for a house. Later I learned from Steven Mackey — because at one point I asked him, “Steve, what’s this about?” And he explained that it actually was a patriotic piece. That the “dream house,” of the architect building from the blueprints, was a metaphor for the safety of our form of government that has afforded people a dream house.
Now, it’s not just blind patriotism in the piece. It’s got some very dark sides and explores what it takes to keep a house safe — and some of those things are unsavory. But it was a surprise to me because I didn’t think that’s what it was about. But he explained, it was actually a patriotic piece.
Rath: This probably is because I’m a radio guy, but for me, it evoked for me some of the best aspects of radio theater, right? Like, had a theatrical quality of that theater of the mind.
Rose: Absolutely. It takes you through a journey through this central narrator singer called The Architect. And The Architect talks about how to build this house. It ends with a very over-the-top, rhythm-and-blues kind of groove to a fascinating tune and keeps atoning, ”I’ll build you a dream house where you can live, where you can be safe.“
All the players in [the Boston Modern Orchestra Project] remember that piece, they can even still sing that tune 20 years later. And for us, it was a kind of breakthrough album because it was nominated for like four different categories at the Grammys. It unfortunately didn’t win, but it was a big breakthrough moment with us. And I think back on it — always — fondly.
Rath: That’s brilliant. Next, we have Virgil Thomson. Quite a big work, Four Saints in Three Acts. Let’s hear a bit of that.
So this work, it does deliver us four Saints in three acts.
And I’ll just say to start us off, one of the things I like about this is that it’s a work about saints in all the languages I can understand, and part although it’s pretty compelling.
“I just love it. It’s so heartfelt and so sincere in its craziness.”Gil Rose, founder of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Rose: Well, yeah, “Four Saints in Three Acts” is a favorite piece of mine — and one of my favorite projects that we ever worked on.
I think it’s an incredibly misunderstood piece because it presents a very seemingly simple harmonic language. It sounds like church chorales and marching bands and very much Americana, like sort of early Aaron Copland. But the text is written by Gertrude Stein. And it’s basically just relishing the words that don’t really make any sense.
It goes about two hours, and there’s no real plot. There’s just wordplay set over this sort of Americana 1930s orchestra music. And people, I think, dismiss it a little bit because the musical language is not modernist or experimental. But the actual piece itself is incendiary because it broke a lot of molds. It really laid the groundwork for the minimalism movement that would come later, because it’s very stripped down and very abstract.
And there are four Saints and they have all sorts of conversations, but none of them make any sense — like most of Gertrude Stein’s texts.
It was written and performed in the ’30s with an all-Black cast, and it’s a work that just defies expectation or explanation. So I just love it. It’s so heartfelt and so sincere in its craziness.
Rath: And it’s not totally absurdist. I mean, there are coherent things that come up there. Dark themes, and political —
Rose: Absolutely. But they’re juxtaposed against something completely different the next moment.
Rath: And not things you’d expect St. Teresa to be saying.
Rose: Exactly. And the Saints come in and out, and they interact. And it’s sort of a little bit like a musical version of the — remember when “Laugh-In” had the set and the doors would pop open and somebody, Goldie Hawn, would sing like one line or say one joke? Or Groucho Marx would show up? Or, Richard Nixon was on “Laugh-In” in that same time?
Four Saints in Three Acts — people are popping up all over the place. It’s a little bit like musical whac-a-mole. And there’s some incredibly sublime moments, though, and combined with lots of humor and lots of jokes.
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Rath: “Sock it to me.” That’s a Richard Nixon joke for our older listeners.
Rose: Yes, for those who remember that type of thing. I think it was a question — I think it was “sock it to me?”
Rath: That’s right.
We have time for one more, and this is another just wonderful piece. This is a piece by David Del Tredici, Child Alice. Alice from “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Let’s hear a bit of that.
So that’s a beautiful song, but I should tell people it also gets out there almost as far as Dreamhouse in its sound qualities.
Rose: Yeah, that’s a deceptive clip to play.
The piece is almost two hours. Before we performed it and recorded it, there had only been one time there had ever been a complete performance.
It’s in four parts. The first part is about an hour, and the second, third and fourth parts total to about an hour. It had only been played once in its entirety. Sometimes it was broken up, and some of the parts were played.
The first part, called “In Memory of a Summer’s Day” — which we just heard — won the Pulitzer Prize. And then the second, third and fourth parts are basically extended variations on the music of the first part.
But it may be, like I said, the lovely little tune that the whole piece is based on, that’s what we had a sampling there. It goes into extreme worlds of variation. And I think it was the most exhausted that I ever came off the podium, having performed “Child Alice” live for the composer.
Rath: Wow. I was actually going to ask you, is this something you could only do in the recording studio, or could you pull it off live?
Rose: Well, we recorded it some before the performance, [we did] the performance, and then — I think — some after.
And the real challenge with the piece is it’s written for amplified soprano and massive orchestra. And when we performed it, the soprano was Courtenay Budd.
In the only other prior performance, the part is so demanding for the soprano that they actually divided it up among four sopranos. And Courtenay sang a heroic performance that just knocked everybody’s socks off. And she did it for the whole two hours. And I think — probably — no one will ever try that again.
Rath: Probably had to go right to bed after that.
Rose: I think she didn’t speak for several days after that, yeah.
