April 1, 2021 marks the centennial of composer Douglas Allanbrook. I have to say that he may be remembered the most by the older faculty and alumni at St. John’s College, Annapolis MD, where he taught for just over 50 years (1952-2003), and his fellow artists at Yaddo, the artist retreat at Saratoga Springs, NY. Most of his musical colleagues are now deceased, but the surviving members of the Annapolis Brass Quintet are doing much to keep his brass legacy heard (see more below).
From 1989 until his death in 2003, I worked with Douglas in sorting his manuscripts for the archives at the St. John’s College Library, and in recovering his various sound recordings (most of them unpublished). One reason why I worked with him is that I wanted to see and hear for myself the music that was listed in his entry in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians but was seldom performed.
Douglas was among the New England composers who were trained by Nadia Boulanger and Walter Piston from the 1930s through the 1960s. He was lucky to have studied first with Boulanger in 1940-42 through the Longy School of Music. After combat service in Italy in World War II, he was referred by Boulanger to Piston at Harvard, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in 1948. Piston, Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok were formative influences. Irving Fine, Gordon Binkerd, Ned Rorem, Allen Sapp, Gerhard Samuel and Daniel Pinkham were among his colleagues. If you have heard any of their compositions, you will have a reasonable expectation of Douglas’s style. Even so, after attaining musical maturity, he did glean some tricks from scores by Dmitri Shostakovitch and Elliott Carter. Still, he never stopped studying – and performing – the classics by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Claude Debussy. A side-by-side comparison of the score of Douglas’ Night and Morning Music (1977, for brass quintet) to any of Mozart’s string quintets show what he learned from, and why he revered, that legendary composer.
For me, Douglas’s Third String Quartet (1956-1957) is a watershed
composition that began a stream of musical works for the next 30 years. It is as if
he wondered, “How would this style for string quartet sound on a piano? How
would it then sound if played by a brass quintet?” Some of the results of this
musical odyssey are the Forty Changes
for piano (1965), and the 25 Building
Blocks for horn and piano (1987).
Other works suggest a sense of irony. The middle song of Three Songs of Love and Death, a setting
of the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” is set to a funeral dirge. I
remarked to Douglas that it sounded creepy. “Of course,” he said, with his smile
of the cat still eating the canary, “it is meant to be.” Then again, the rhyme does
depict a post-mortem inquiry and funeral procession for a dead bird. The
Mapleshade commercial recording of that song, conducted by Douglas’s son John,
is one of the highlights of the composer’s discography.
There is much to be rediscovered among Douglas’s music and
writings. Sometimes I am pessimistic about how much more will be revived. If
the string quartets and symphonies of his master professor Walter Piston are still seldom
performed, the chances for those by Douglas are slimmer.
There is a great deal more about Douglas: I can only mention in passing his writings including his 1995 war memoir, See Naples; his performances on piano and harpsichord, his wide familiarity with Western culture, and his sharp wit.
For a lively introduction to him, I recommend his 1987 interview with Bruce Duffie, which is illustrated with the covers to Douglas’s LPs and CDs:
http://www.bruceduffie.com/allanbrook.html
For his music, the best recordings are those he made for
Pierre Sprey’s Mapleshade Records: his opera Ethan Frome; the Symphonies 2
and 3, The Majesty of the Horn
(which has 25 Building Blocks and Five Night Pieces for piano), and Songs of Love and Death (which has the
setting of “Who Killed Cock Robin?”). Online streaming access appears to be limited, but
the physical CDs may still be purchased.
Another website to sample his music is the webpage set up by
the Annapolis Brass Quintet, who had commissioned and premiered his brass works:
https://www.brassquintetforum.com/douglas-allanbrook.html
I suggest listening first to “Invitation to the Sideshow,”
and then the “Night and Morning Music.”
For its own celebration of Douglas's 100th, the Quintet has just made accessible its live recording of his choral work Two Tennyson Settings:
Edward Komara
