FWCO Fall Concert

Peter Boyer (b. 1970)
Ellis Island: The Dream of America

Ellis Island: The Dream of America was born out of my fascination with the relationship between history and music. America is a nation of immigrants, and our immigrant history is a profound part of our American mythology. When I decided to create a work about Ellis Island, I knew that I wanted to combine spoken word with the orchestra. I learned of the existence of something which would come to define the nature of the piece: the Ellis Island Oral History Project. This is a collection of interviews, housed at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, with immigrants who were processed at Ellis Island during the years of its operation.

The decision to use texts from the Ellis Island Oral History Project meant that the work would require actors, [who] deliver their monologues in the first person. I examined over 100 interviews, and found many more stories than could be included in a 43-minute piece with 25 minutes of spoken word. Ultimately I settled on a structure which includes seven stories, four female and three male, of immigrants who came through Ellis Island from seven countries, between 1910 and 1940.

For the final text in the work, I knew from the beginning that I could not create a work about Ellis Island without making reference to the poem by Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, which is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. This poem is synonymous with the Statue, Ellis Island, and American immigration in the minds of many Americans. A number of immigrants interviewed for the project made reference to the poem, and the words of Katherine Beychok provided a natural bridge to a recitation of the poem, which serves as the work’s epilogue.

The orchestral music is continuous, framing, commenting on, and amplifying the spoken words. Following a six-minute orchestral prologue, the work’s structure alternates the individual immigrants’ stories with orchestral interludes. The prologue introduces much of the work’s principal thematic material. It is in two sections, slow and fast. In the first section, the work’s main theme, simple and somewhat folk-like in character, is introduced by a solo trumpet, then taken up by the strings and developed. The second section is quick and vigorous, and introduces a fast-moving theme in the trumpets, with pulsating accompaniment in the whole orchestra, which I think of as “traveling music.” These themes recur in many guises throughout the entire piece.

Of course I attempted to compose music which was appropriate for the nature and character of each of the stories. For Lazarus Salamon’s story of the military oppression in the Hungary of his youth, a menacing snare drum tattoo is significant. But when he speaks of arriving in New York and seeing the Statue of Liberty, a quiet, hymn-like theme for the strings is heard—which will recur at a later mention of the Statue. Lillian Galletta’s story is that of children’s reunion with their father—an emotional and heartwarming story which I attempted to reflect in a lyrical “reunion” theme. The story of Helen Rosenthal is one of escaping the Nazis to find freedom in America, though her entire family perished at Auschwitz. For this I chose a solo violin to play a lamenting theme with a kind of Jewish character. In stark contrast to this is the story of Manny Steen, an irrepressible Irish immigrant and delightful raconteur. His story cried out for a “Tin Pan Alley” treatment, markedly different in style from the rest of the music. Just as each immigrant is a strand in the American tapestry, so I attempted to reflect their tales with various musical styles.

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor

In popular culture, its musical themes have become symbols for love, loneliness and longing (All By Myself and Full Moon and Empty Arms). But the music itself was an eloquent expression of the power of friendship and compassion.

Young Rachmaninoff – Seryoshka to his friends – was a stellar talent clearly destined for great things. In his teens, he’d already written one gorgeous piano concerto; the one-act opera “Aleko”; and his Prelude in C-sharp minor, the iconic anthem of gloom that dogged him all his life. But the 1897 premiere of his First Symphony – poorly prepared, poorly conducted by Alexander Glazunov, poorly performed and poorly reviewed – was a soul-crushing defeat for the young composer. It took the intervention of his doctor and friend, Nikolai Dahl, to buoy his confidence with a course of daily hypnotherapy, and by the spring of 1900, Rachmaninoff was ready to compose again.

In May of that year, a fully recovered Seryoshka visited the Black Sea resort of Yalta with his friend, the operatic bass Fyodor Chaliapin. There, they found composer Vassily Kalinnikov living in shocking conditions of poverty. Consumptive and near death, he’d been unable to sell or publish his own music, so Rachmaninoff called on his own publisher and dictated the financial terms that brightened the final year of Kalinnikov’s life. “Thank God [my] symphonies will be brought into the world,” wrote a grateful Kalinnikov. “Rachmaninoff came at the right moment.”

A few weeks later, Rachmaninoff and Chaliapin went to Italy and rented a small house in Genoa. There, basking in the warmth of friendship and a Mediterranean summer, Rachmaninoff put down his initial sketches for this concerto as well as the Suite No. 2 for two pianos.