CJ Replay: America’s National Poet

(An excerpt from the Choral Journal article, “The American Choral Tapestry, Part II,” by David DeVenny )

 

       If America has a national poet, it is certainly Walt Whitman (1819-92). He broke traditional rules of formal structure and rhyme in American verse, and in so doing, invented a poetic voice that captured the democratic essence of the American spirit. Whitman celebrated common people and everyday events in his work, deliberately setting our to "encompass all of America in his "songs," as David S. Reynolds points out in his biography of the poet. That Whitman accomplished this so brilliantly is clear from the continuing priority of place his poems enjoy in the national popular consciousness. Following is a brief survey of the more important and interesting choral works on Whitman's verse, written by American composers active predominantly during the Twentieth Century.

       Among the first American composers to set Whitman's work was William Wallace Gilchrist (1846-1916). Among Gilchrist's forty partsongs are settings of 0 Captain! My Captain! and Three Summer Songs (1914). Even the iconoclastic Charles Ives (1874-1954) set the poet in his eponymous Walt Whitman (1913). It was the American impressionist composer Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) who wrote the first lengthy choral work, Beat! Beat! Drums! (1917) for male voices, woodwinds, timpani, and two pianos. In a symmetrical structure, the grim F-minor opening gives way briefly in the middle of the work to the parallel major. A lively coda, also in F-major, surprises the listener with strong fortissimo dynamics, trills and accents in the piccolo, and complex rhythms. The work ends with trumpet flourishes.

 

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