Randall Thompson – American Masterpieces: Choral Music
The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces: Choral Music initiative is designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and their works of the past 250 years. Stanton’s Sheet Music is proud to present this series highlighting the composers and their works featured in this groundbreaking project.
(from NEA.gov)
Randall Thompson (1899-1984) was the pre-eminent American choral composer of an earlier generation. His music, though grounded in traditional European rules, always seems very much of its time and place, perhaps because he frequently drew upon the early folk music of New England and the Appalachian region.
He was a Yankee by heritage, born in New York City to a New England family. His father was an English teacher, and sent him to Harvard University where he studied choral music and composition. After graduation he had some private lessons with Ernest Bloch. He won the Prix de Rome in 1922. After studying abroad he returned to the U.S. and spent the rest of his career teaching at various universities, most notably at his alma mater Harvard from 1948 to 1965. Among his most famous students were Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss.
Although Thompson wrote piano music and songs, chamber music and symphonies, and even a Biblical opera, it is for his exceptionally apt choral music that he has remained most admired. His “Alleluia,” written in 1940, quickly became a staple of church choirs in towns big and small and was recorded over a dozen times in the next few decades. Thompson seemed to understand by the 1950s that his style was no longer in vogue in academia; from then on he concentrated his efforts upon community, church, and college choir ensembles – and with enthusiasm, not regret.
Among his most famous larger works are The Peaceable Kingdom, The Testament of Freedom, and Frostiana, each of which evokes stirring elements of the American experience, whether in sound, structure or textual inspiration.
Selected Works:
Alleluia
Americana
The Best of Rooms
Frostiana
The Last Words of David
The Peaceable Kingdom
The Testament of Freedom
For more distinguished choral repertoire suggestions, please contact us.
Save the Date – Sacred Choral Reading Session!
Stanton’s is pleased to welcome back Lloyd Larson as our clinician for the August Church Choral Music reading session! His compositions and arrangements include well over 1,000 published works—including choral anthems, numerous extended Christmas, Easter and non-seasonal works, keyboard collections, vocal solo and duet collections, instrumental works for solo and ensembles, orchestrations, and handbell settings. The resulting notoriety has placed him in constant demand as a clinician throughout North America.
Your registration includes a packet of over 40 new choral anthems that are hand-picked from the hundreds published each year. We look forward to seeing you on August 11th for a wonderful morning of singing with one of the nation’s most sought after church music experts.
Sacred Choral Reading Session
Saturday 8/11/2012, 9:00 am-12:30 pm
Battelle Fine Arts Center, Otterbein University
195 West Park St., Westerville OH 43081
Cost: $20.00 (There is no pre-registration; you may register the day of the clinic beginning at 8:30.)
email our choral department for more details
Sacred Piano Reading Session
- Also featuring Lloyd Larson
Saturday 8/11/2012, 2:00 pm-4:30 pm
Stanton’s Sheet Music,
330 South 4th St., Columbus OH 43215
Cost: Free!
email our keyboard department for more details
Mark Your Calendar for “Stanton’s Super Session!”
Stanton’s Sheet Music is pleased to invite you to the 2012 “Stanton’s Super Session,” a day-long choral reading session of new music from a variety of publishers! Pre-registration is now open – register online, or call us at 1.800.426.8742. Check out our video below for a “sneak peek” at what we have in store!
Virgil Thomson – American Masterpieces: Choral Music
The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces: Choral Music initiative is designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and their works of the past 250 years. Stanton’s Sheet Music is proud to present this series highlighting the composers and their works featured in this groundbreaking project.
(from NEA.gov)
Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was one of America’s most stimulating, thoughtful, original, and long-lived composers and critics. He created one of the first really distinctive American operas (Four Saints in Three Acts), he composed distinguished film scores (The Louisiana Story won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949), he wrote witty and perceptive critiques of the American musical scene for many years, and he was still active into his 90s.
He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, into a morally strict family. He gravitated to music and was composing piano pieces with names like “The Chicago Fire” at age four. During study in France he came under the spell of Erik Satie and the Group of Six who overturned Romantic orthodoxy by mixing jazz and dance-hall tunes with serious compositional techniques. It was a perfect fit for Thomson, who found a unique style by blending this with his heritage of nostalgic middle-Americana.
His music is elegantly crafted, yet warm and human. It is richly evocative of an America half real, half imagined, but vividly recreated out of nostalgia and sincere affection. The range of Thomson’s choral music is wide. His 1934 Mass for two-part chorus and percussion is a dissonant, minimalist piece that seems avant-garde even today. Also in the 1930s he wrote incidental music for productions at John Houseman’s Phoenix Theater in New York. A planned staging of one Greek tragedy never came off, but Thomson saved his choral music as the concert piece Seven Choruses from the Medea of Euripides.
Four Songs to Poems of Thomas Campion pays tribute to music techniques of Elizabethan England. More characteristic of the Thomson most of us know are the straightforwardly simple Hymns from the Old South, Variations on Sunday School Tunes, and “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need.”
Selected Works:
Capital Capitals
Four Southern Hymns
Mass
Saints Procession
Scenes from the Holy Infancy
For more distinguished choral repertoire suggestions, please contact us.
William Schuman – American Masterpieces: Choral Music
The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces: Choral Music initiative is designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and their works of the past 250 years. Stanton’s Sheet Music is proud to present this series highlighting the composers and their works featured in this groundbreaking project.
(from NEA.gov)
William Schuman (1910-1992) ranks among the most honored and distinguished American composers, although most of his works are less well-known among the general public than those of his contemporaries Copland, Bernstein, and Barber. An exception to this is his New England Triptych, an orchestral work often paired on programs with the similarly conceived (but very different sounding) Three Places in New England by Charles Ives.
In 1943 he won the first Pulitzer Prize for music ever given. He was the first composer ever commissioned to write a work by the U.S. government. He was president of The Juilliard School for 18 years, and president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for its first eight years. He was granted more than 20 honorary degrees in a lifetime as an educator, administrator, and composer, and had an enormous impact through his teaching and his tireless efforts to incorporate classical music into the lives of the American public.
Schuman’s catalogue is particularly rich in choral works. He was an acknowledged master of accompanied and a cappella choral music both complex and simple in scope (some pieces are written specifically for amateur singers). He made a point of emphasizing American poetry for his texts. His Carols of Death are settings of three powerful verses by Walt Whitman. On a lighter note, the choruses from Casey at the Bat (a 1976 “baseball cantata” adapted in turn from his 1953 opera The Mighty Casey) revel in the rollicking humorous verse of Ernest Lawrence Thayer, reflecting Schuman’s lifelong passion for baseball.
Selected Works:
A Free Song
Casey at the Bat
The Lord Has a Child
Te Deum
This Is Our Time
For more distinguished choral repertoire suggestions, please contact us.
2012 OMEA Professional Conference Instrumental Highlights
The 2012 OMEA Professional Conference is just around the corner. In addition to being a great way to recharge during this long period of the school year and the camaraderie of being around friends and colleagues, it is also a great place to discover new music, learn new teaching techniques, and discover new tools to enhance teaching and learning in your classroom. The instrumental staff at Stanton’s is pleased to highlight some of the items being featured at this year’s conference.
Composer and co-author of the Sound Innovations band method, Robert Sheldon will be presenting sessions including Fix It Now: Techniques for Creating Immediate and Significant Improvement in Your Rehearsal, Writing Music for Winds and Percussion, and Preparing Your Ensemble for Expressive Performance.
Composer and co-author of the Tradition of Excellence band method, Ryan Nowlin will highlight approaches for starting beginners, lesson planning, and using the technology and enrichment features of the T.O.E. book during his session, Teaching Band with Excellence: Achieving the Most in Every Lesson.
Conducting takes center stage in Practical Score Preparation Strategies for the Harried Instrumental Conductor by Gary Stith (author of Score Rehearsal Preparation), and Be the Music: Non-Verbal Gestures, Pedagogical and Musical Thoughts and Ideas for the Conductor by Stephen Gage combining the pedagogical approaches of Laban, Green, and Lisk (Conductor, Teacher, Leader; The Musical Mind of the Creative Director).
There are many technology-related sessions featuring Finale notation software including Finale Top Ten; Using Finale and SmartMusic Together to Easily Maximize Your Results; Finale and SmartMusic in Action with HS Band Students; and Using Finale in Music Education, and the sessions/discussions with Sousa historian/Fillmore biographer and Columbus resident Paul Bierley (Hallelujah Trombone), Sam Pilafian (Breathing Gym Live for Band, Orchestra, and Chorus), and Tom Batiuk, cartoonist/creator of Funky Winkerbean, are sure to be both entertaining and informative.
For more information about the sessions, visit the searchable schedule on the OMEA website, and visit Stantons.com, Stanton’s OMEA booth, or stop by the store while you’re in Columbus to purchase any of the titles listed above. We look forward to seeing you February 16-18!
Gian Carlo Menotti – American Masterpieces: Choral Music
The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces: Choral Music initiative is designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and their works of the past 250 years. Stanton’s Sheet Music is proud to present this series highlighting the composers and their works featured in this groundbreaking project.
(from NEA.gov)
In America, especially after World War I, the popularity of opera was challenged by both the cinema and the Broadway musical show. All the more striking, then, has been the success of Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007), an Italian-American who has dared to center his career on writing operas, two of which (The Saint of Bleecker Street and The Consul) won the Pulitzer Prize for music among other awards.
Unashamedly conservative in technique, Menotti has always written in a traditional tonal language. His television Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, won him a mass audience and remains today one of the most frequently performed stage works in America.
Despite his concentration on opera, he has also composed a significant body of choral music. The largest has been the cantata The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi. The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore, designated a “madrigal-ballet,” is sung as well as danced. Missa O Pulchritudo is scored for soloists, chorus, and orchestra and was premiered at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, which Menotti founded in 1958.
Menotti showed extraordinary vigor at an age when most people have been long retired. He continued to compose, and to direct opera, well into his 90s. In his later years he became if anything even more prolific in the choral field. For the Death of Orpheus was first performed under the direction of Robert Shaw in 1990, a Gloria was written in 1995 as part of a composite Mass by various composers, and “Jacob’s Prayer” (1997) was commissioned by the American Choral Directors Association.
Selected Works:
Amahl and the Night Visitors
The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi
For the Death of Orpheus
Llama de amor viva
Missa O Pulchritudo
Muero porque no muero (Cantata for St. Teresa of Avila)
The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore
For more distinguished choral repertoire suggestions, please contact us.
We Remember: William Francis McBeth
The concert band world lost an icon over this past weekend. William Francis McBeth (March 9, 1933 – January 6, 2012) was a prolific American composer, whose wind band works are highly respected. Among the most popular of his nearly 60 band works were Chant and Jubilo, Of Sailors and Whales, Through Countless Halls of Air, Masque, Kaddish, Canto and Caccia. The popularity of his works in the United States during the last half of the twentieth century led to many invitations and appearances as a guest conductor, where he often conducted the premiere performances of some of his compositions, the majority of which were commissioned. His conducting activities have taken him to forty-eight states, three Canadian provinces, Japan, and Australia.
From 1957 until his retirement in 1996, McBeth taught at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. He had an early start to his musical training, studying piano with his mother and taking up the trumpet in the second grade. He attended Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. While an undergraduate at H-SU, McBeth played in the university band. From December 1952 to January 1953, the band traveled with U.S. Camp Shows to Europe. He also played string bass in a jazz combo, which was unusual for the time period due to widespread segregation throughout the South. He was initiated into the University of Texas Alpha Iota Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia in 1957. In 1962, McBeth conducted the Arkansas All-State Band, with future president Bill Clinton playing in the tenor saxophone section. He served as the third conductor of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra from 1970 until 1973. He died aged 78 in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.
McBeth’s most outstanding awards have been the Presley Award at Hardin-Simmons University, the Howard Hanson Prize at the Eastman School of Music for his Third Symphony in 1963, recipient of an ASCAP Special Award each consecutive year from 1965 to present, the American School Band Directors Association’s Edwin Franko Goldman Award in 1983, elected Fellow of the American Wind and Percussion Artists by the National Band Association in 1984, National Citation from Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia fraternity in 1985, in 1988 Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia’s Charles E. Lutton Man of Music Award for his achievement and continued contribution to American music, Kappa Kappa Psi’s National Service to Music Award in 1989, Mid-West International Band and Orchestra Clinic’s Medal of Honor in 1993 and Past President of the American Bandmasters Association. In 1975 McBeth was appointed Composer Laureate of the State of Arkansas by the Governor, the first Composer Laureate named in the United States.
Stephen Foster – American Masterpieces: Choral Music
The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces: Choral Music initiative is designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and their works of the past 250 years. Stanton’s Sheet Music is proud to present this series highlighting the composers and their works featured in this groundbreaking project.
(from NEA.gov)
Although he wrote a few solo piano pieces in his short life, Stephen Foster (1826-1864) produced songs almost exclusively – over 200 of them. His simple, moving melodies have the distinct flavor of a bygone day and yet seem to stay fresh forever. They have such a timeless quality that many have assumed they were folk songs. Years after his tragic story became known – how he wrote most of his best songs in a period of ten years and died at age 38 with 37 cents in his pocket – he became a figure of American myth.
He was not, as legend has it, an untutored genius who dashed off miracles of melody in flashes of divine inspiration. He came from a solid middle-class family in Pennsylvania where he was schooled in private academies, had some formal music study, and labored long hours over his scores, often agonizing over the minutest details. This is not to say he was not precocious: his first song, “Open Thy Lattice Love,” was published when he was 18. He was 20 when he had his first hit, “Oh! Susanna,” although he realized only $100 for it. The absence of enforceable copyright for his songs meant royalties were rare.
“Old Folks at Home” (also known as “Swanee River”) was the biggest success of his lifetime. It was felt that this was the definitive lyrical expression of longing for the Old South, and yet, Foster had been there only briefly, once, on his honeymoon. Scores of other heartfelt songs, including “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Hard Times Come Again No More,” “Camptown Races,” and “Beautiful Dreamer” continue to touch listeners in their original versions and in countless fine choral arrangements.
For more distinguished choral repertoire suggestions, please contact us.
Norman Luboff – American Masterpieces: Choral Music
The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces: Choral Music initiative is designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and their works of the past 250 years. Stanton’s Sheet Music is proud to present this series highlighting the composers and their works featured in this groundbreaking project.
(from NEA.gov)
The days are gone when association with Hollywood and popular culture was a mark against the “serious” musician: the great Wagnerian soprano Helen Traubel’s career at the Met in the 1950s, for example, was doomed after she dared to sing at a night club on an off night.
Perhaps something of the same was suffered by Norman Luboff (1917-1987), one of America’s great choral directors and arrangers, who dared to make much of his living working in the popular culture media of his era. And maybe that is why today he is being reassessed and newly appreciated for the sterling musician he was, and for his enormous contributions to American choral music.
Luboff was born in Chicago and studied at the University of Chicago and Central College, doing graduate work with Leo Sowerby. He put himself through school by singing and composing for local radio stations. He moved to New York City hoping to make a career in radio music, then was lured to Hollywood to direct choral music for a popular national radio show, The Railroad Hour.
Soon he was scoring for early television programs and for more than 80 Hollywood films. His Norman Luboff Choir recorded more than 75 albums over a period of 25 years, sometimes featuring solos by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and Jo Stafford. He took pains also to record classical choral music from the Renaissance to recent times as well; these recordings, however, did not receive the critical attention they deserved.
One of his most important legacies is his prolific output of engaging and accessible folk song arrangements, which helped preserve these beloved melodies from generation to generation. His vast and invaluable collection of scores and memorabilia was donated to the Library of Congress in 1993.
For more distinguished choral repertoire suggestions, please contact us.
About Us
Let the Stanton’s “Sheet Music Specialists” assist you with all of your print music needs. From Chopin to chromatic harmonica, Tchaikovsky to techno, Bach to balalaika, Ellington to electric guitar and everything in between!
Stanton’s Sheet Music has been serving musicians, music educators and music lovers for over 50 years from their location in the heart of the Midwest in downtown Columbus, Ohio. We continually update our featured products area to highlight the newest music and best picks made by our music staff.
330 S. 4th Street
Columbus, OH 43215
614-224-4257
800-42-MUSIC (Toll Free in US)
800-426-8742 (Toll Free in US)
Store Hours:
Monday through Friday 9:00am – 5:00pm
Saturday 9:00am – 4:00pm
Closed Sunday
