“Sounds of the City: Music of Boston’s Past, Present, and Future,” The Orchestra Book Club  concert on Sunday May 18, 3 pm  [Details HERE] features three works: Chadwick’s symphonic poem Aphrodite, Hello, Tomorrow by Harvard Professor Yvette Janine Jackson, and Sonata No 1, Op. 25 (1986) by Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee in the world premiere of the orchestrated version by her son, conductor David Rahbee. Music Director Reuben Stern will conduct.

George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931) was proud of his old New England stock, traceable back to 1630. He felt no need to prove his national identity, yet he became the first composer of concert music whose works often show the snap, wit, and independence characteristic of Americans. Chadwick defied his puritanical father by studying music professionally, after he had been removed from school to work in his father’s insurance office. He studied on his own while functioning as a music teacher, developing a refined taste in literature and art.  He was able to study in Leipzig and Munich from 1877 to 1880.  His Leipzig professor noted in his transcript, “He possesses a quite extraordinary talent for composition.”

Chadwick settled in Boston for the remaining half century of his life. He modernized the New England Conservatory during his directorship (1897-1930), giving American musicians a place to pursue advanced studies in their own country. He taught several generations of American composers, and he was a pioneer in admitting women and minorities to composition classes (among them the greatly gifted African American Florence Price).

But most important, he composed in almost every medium from chamber music to symphonies and operas. His special gift in scherzos and light-hearted music was noticed from the beginning and strikes us as one of his most “American” characteristics. In 1882, the Boston Symphony performed a scherzo from his Second Symphony, which brought an audience demand for an immediate repetition. A critic wrote, “It positively winks at you.”

Despite his interrupted education, Chadwick became a welcome member of Boston’s cultural community. Many of his titles contain classical allusions, possibly out of a self-conscious awareness of having colleagues who were Harvard alums. All his life, Chadwick was the friend of artists and collected their work. He frequently sat all day with a painter friend, composing his music while the other painted. Twice he found inspiration for large compositions in works of sculpture.

The specific impetus for Aphrodite (composed in 1911 and premiered at the Norfolk (CT)  Festival, June 4, 1912 was a classical sculpture of the head of the goddess, originally found on the island of Knidos, in the Grecian archipelago and acquired by the Boston MFA in 1903. The music does not attempt to tell of the mythical adventures of Aphrodite. Chadwick notes in the score, “In ancient times, statues of Aphrodite, goddess of love and of sailors, were placed on or near the seashore. This Symphonic Fantasie or Tone Poem is an attempt to suggest in music the poetic and tragic scenes which may have passed before the sightless eyes of such a goddess.” 

Aphrodite is thus a panorama in music, a series of musical images linked by a theme related to the goddess: It begins and ends with moonlight on the sea, moving through varied moods—storm; requiem; the lovers (a delicious duet for solo violin and solo horn), children playing, the approach of a great army, and a hymn to Aphrodite. 

In just under a half hour, Chadwick illustrates these ideas with his characteristic warm melodies, rich harmonic colors, and an orchestration by turns evocative, lyrical, playful, and dramatic.

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997. He is writing a book on Chadwick.