Dello Joio's Variations, Chaconne and Finale
Meditations on music that successfully fused disparate styles
Jun 24, 2009
Variations, Chaconne and Finale, the winner of the New York Critics' Circle Award for 1948-49, is the music that started it all for Norman Dello Joio as an eminent American composer. It was originally given the rather pedestrian title Three Symphonic Dances at its Chicago Symphony premiere on January 30, 1948, with Fritz Reiner conducting. Dello Joio renamed it when his home orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, played it the same year on December 9. Another titan at the podium, Bruno Walter, conducted that performance.
What Dello Joio manages to do here and in each subsequent work is deftly weave elements of the church music he knew intrinsically with his love for jazz. It seems quirky on the surface, but it was an ideal blend, and it came to define his style. He embraced tonality, only incorporating dissonances when necessary. And he was especially at ease in variation form.
A Recurring Theme: Dello Joio and his Gregorian Companion
The Gregorian melody Dello Joio employs as the backbone of the piece is ubiquitous in his catalog. It just keeps popping up, from his sweeping Air Power suite to again in full with his string work Meditations on Ecclesiastes. Bits and pieces of the theme make veiled appearances in his Triumph of St. Joan symphony, Homage to Haydn and the band staple Variants on a Medieval Tune. For the composer, it was rather like reuniting with an old friend over a period of years.
An oboe introduces the theme in the first movement. The first of six variations soon follows, a sort of pastoral fly-over. The second variation, marked Andante religioso, reveals Dello Joio's penchant for densely-scored strings, ocean waves of painfully beautiful sound that movingly shroud a succession of solo instruments.
One of Dello Joio's finest orchestral moments, the very soul of the opening movement resides here. Perky piccolos then immediately set up an impish, jocular third variation. A theatrical fourth variation, with driving eighth notes that bring to mind "bad guy" motifs from silent film scores, leads to the waltz-like fifth. Two jazz chords in the horns are the backdrop for the final variation, and it's in these closing bars that the jazz influence is in plain view, as the treatment of the theme invites similarities to a big-band ballad.
The chaconne movement is perhaps the strongest of the three. Constructed in a nearly-perfect arch form, barely-audible lower strings play the first notes of the Gregorian theme and then build from there as the motive undergoes several transformations. The music grows increasingly urgent in the brass until it hits its apex in the form of a cathartic release in the strings, again in rich, glowing chords.
After the drama of the chaconne, the short, blissful finale offers a reprieve, with echoes of popular song and jazz rhythms throughout. A majestic restatement of the original theme closes the work, punctuated by a flourish of trumpets in the final measures.
Beyond Variations: A Pulitzer, an Emmy and a Long Career
With the success of Variations, Chaconne and Finale, the projects poured in. Dello Joio composed music for dancer Martha Graham in three productions. Meditations on Ecclesiastes would win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1957. And in 1965 he was awarded an Emmy for his music featured on the NBC special "The Louvre."
He continued to compose well into his 90s. And when he died last July at 95, the nation lost another towering figure in the grand generation of American composers born in the early 20th century. Very few of them remain. Some critics assert that his music is too simple and not cerebral enough. That sells Dello Joio short. It's up to America's orchestras to add superb, audience-friendly music like Variations, Chaconne and Finale to the concert repertory.
