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HERRMANN
Bernard PostClassical Ensemble

(1911–1975)

Whitman (1944 Norman Corwin radio play, reconstructed 2019) 31:05

(restored and edited by Christopher Husted, b. 1964)
(Text: Walt Whitman, 1819–1892)
(The radio play Whitman is based on Walt Whitman’s
collection Leaves of Grass and scripted by Norman Corwin, 1910–2011)
Introduction: I, Walt Whitman, heard that you asked for something
to prove this puzzle the New World (Whitman) 0:45
1

Welcome: You! Whoever you are! (Whitman) 1:27

Perpetual Journey: I tramp a perpetual journey (Whitman) 4:10
2

Listen: Listen: when the psalm sings instead of the singer (Whitman, Stranger, Cynic) 2:07
3

Cosmos: A cosmos, of Manhattan, the son! (Whitman, Stranger) 1:15

4

Song: A simple separate person (Whitman, Cynic) 2:19

5

Oath: I celebrate myself, and sing myself (Whitman, Child) 3:05

6

Miracles: I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars
7

(Whitman, Child) 2:05

8

Battle: Of life immense in passion, pulse and power, I sing (Whitman) 1:22
War: I will acknowledge contemporary lands (Whitman, Radio Voice) 6:08
9

Ships: Flaunt out, O sea, your separate flags of nations! (Whitman) 2:08
0

Divinity: Listener out there! (Whitman) 1:40

!

Finale: I see not America only (Whitman) 2:26

@
#

Souvenirs de voyage (1967) 24:34

I. Lento: Molto tranquillo 9:57 Photo: Tom Wolff

II. Berceuse: Andante 6:56

$

III. Andantino: Canto amoroso 7:33 PostClassical Ensemble was founded in 2003 by Angel Gil-Ordóñez and Joseph Horowitz as an experimental
%

orchestral laboratory based in Washington, D.C. All PCE programming is thematic and cross-disciplinary, frequently
^

Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra (1968, reconstructed 1999)
(reconstructed by John Mauceri, b. 1945)
&
Recorded: 17 April 2016 at the National Gallery of Art (live performances) $–& and 30 May 2019
at the Washington National Cathedral 1–#, Washington, D.C., USA
Publishers: Bernard Herrmann Music 1–^, G. Schirmer, Inc. &
15:49 incorporating art, film, dance, or theater. Of its previous Naxos releases conducted by Gil-Ordóñez, Dvořák and
America (8.559777), featuring the world premiere recording of the PCE-created Hiawatha Melodrama, was named
one of the best albums of the year by Minnesota Public Radio. PCE’s series of Naxos DVDs presents classic films
from the 1930s – The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River (2.110521), The City (2.110231) and Redes
(2.110372) – with the scores newly recorded. During the COVID-19 pandemic, PCE has turned to film-making; see
postclassical.com.

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Philippe Chao
Violist Philippe Chao is acting assistant principal violist with the Kennedy
Center Opera House Orchestra and was previously assistant principal
violist of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. He is a longstanding member
of PostClassical Ensemble.
Photo: Danielle Cho Photography
Benjamin Capps
Benjamin Capps, principal cellist of PostClassical Ensemble, frequently
performs with PCE as a chamber musician and solo cellist. His recordings
include the sonatas of Chopin and Rachmaninov.
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Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975)
Whitman • Souvenirs de voyage • Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra
Why Bernard Herrmann?
With the waning of modernism, and of the high value once
placed on complexity and originality, the topography of
20th-century music is rapidly changing. One of the chief
American beneficiaries is certain to be Bernard Herrmann.
Everyone appreciates Herrmann for his singular
achievements as a film composer. Without him, there
would be no Psycho, North by Northwest, or Vertigo, and
Citizen Kane would be a far lesser film. But Herrmann
also produced a substantial catalog of concert works in
the same style. He was as well a great figure in the
forgotten history of radio. Though he clung to tonality, he
created a palette of mood and sonority that is instantly
recognizable and wholly his own. Defining himself in
opposition to contemporary tastemakers, he once wrote:
“Musically I count myself an individualist. I believe that
only music which springs out of genuine personal emotion
is alive and important. I hate all cults, fads, and circles.”
Bernard Herrmann was born in New York in 1911 and
died in Los Angeles in 1975. He joined CBS as a radio
conductor, arranger, and composer in 1933 and there
promoted a remarkable variety of important music; his
studio guests included Bartók and Stravinsky. As an
innovative composer for radio, he was the most important
musical collaborator with Orson Welles and – the most
honored practitioner of American radio drama – Norman
Corwin. In Hollywood, Herrmann was especially linked
with Alfred Hitchcock. Herrmann’s movie scores – 51 in
all, of which The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), with its
daring “Liebestod”, was his personal favorite – are among
the most honored ever created. But Herrmann sought
wider recognition as a conductor and concert composer.
Of the three Herrmann concert works here recorded,
the Psycho symphonic narrative is not the Psycho Suite
more commonly performed. That is: it is not a
compendium of excerpts from Hitchcock’s 1960 film, but
a concert work composed by Herrmann in 1968 in which
excerpts from the film score are re-ordered and re-
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composed. The conductor John Mauceri, who is
responsible for rescuing this score from oblivion, writes:
“It is not a suite, nor is it a sequence of short cues to
accompany film clips; it is intended to free the music from
the visual elements of the film. In this sense it is not
unlike Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata and Vaughan
Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica – musical material from a
film score had been adapted into a concert work.”
In Vertigo (1958) – arguably Herrmann’s highest
achievement with Hitchcock – the musical pièce de
résistance is a seven-minute Scène d’amour. “[When] we
go into the love scene we should let all traffic noises fade
because Mr. Herrmann may have something to say
here,” reads a Hitchcock production note. Mr. Herrmann’s
something, with its shuddering tremolos and tender four-
note melodic turn, secures his stature as a major
American composer as potently as anything could.
Kindred to this cinematic love scene is the music that
may be Herrmann’s supreme achievement for the
concert hall – the 1967 clarinet quintet Souvenirs de
voyage. It is a stubbornly inward work, suffused with
nostalgia and melancholy. I cannot think of a more
seductive, more finished chamber work by an American.
The long first movement is to my ears a formidable
compositional achievement by any standard. It also
furnishes an irresistible vehicle for the ranginess and
seamless legato of the clarinet. The liquid ebb and flow of
sound, the lapping waves of song, the interpolated valse
triste acquire a barely perceptible cumulative momentum,
an intensification of multiplying eddies and ripples. When
the movement’s hypnotic Molto tranquillo beginning
returns at the close, we feel we have journeyed
somewhere even if that makes no ultimate difference in a
world of sadness and remembrance.
The quintet’s second movement is a rocking
Berceuse whose disturbing existential undertow is of
course a Herrmann signature. The final Canto amoroso
begins with the violins singing a love duet in thirds. Soon
the thirds accelerate as romantic zephyrs. A Venetian
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carnival is heard across the water. From Steven Smith’s
superb Herrmann biography, A Heart at Fire’s Center
(2002), we learn that J.M.W. Turner’s Venetian canvases
were here a point of inspiration. Equally pertinent is the
quintet’s dedication to Norma Shepherd, who became
Herrmann’s third wife the same year this music was
composed. In the turbulent world of Bernard Herrmann,
Souvenirs de voyage is a balm.
When PostClassical Ensemble produced a month-
long Herrmann festival in 2016, the big discovery –
thanks to the Herrmann authority Christopher Husted –
was a 1944 radio play he scored for Norman Corwin. This
was Whitman. Like so many of Corwin’s radio plays, its
wartime purpose was to rally the home front. The text
comprises verbatim Whitman, selected and choreographed
by Corwin. The music is scored for strings, harp, piano,
and percussion. The combination is hypnotic. The
present world premiere recording is undertaken in the
conviction that this 25-minute radio drama – a genre now
long forgotten – deserves revival as an American concert
work for actors and orchestra.
Walt Whitman was one of three writers who most
influenced Corwin’s distinctive free-verse style, the
others being Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe. That the
Whitman idiom anchored the once-famous radio dramas
of the Forties is an aspect of his influence insufficiently
known. Corwin was on a train to California when he
learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on
7 December 1941. He quickly sent a telegram to
Washington asking if the Office of Facts and Figures still
wanted the show he was planning to air. By the time he
got to New Mexico, a telegram was waiting for him: “The
President says, ‘now more than ever.’” Invoking Whitman,
and his ideals of American democracy, Corwin was
heeding Franklin Roosevelt’s call.
Joseph Horowitz
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Norman Corwin and Bernard Herrmann: Netanel Draiblate
A Partnership in Sound
Netanel Draiblate is concertmaster of PostClassical Ensemble – a
While both Norman Corwin and Bernard Herrmann had position he also holds with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra. A native
experienced significant triumphs in their radio careers of Israel, he was principal second violin of Daniel Barenboim’s
prior to working together, and would both go on to do West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.
great things with others, their respective gifts truly
bloomed when they began collaborating in 1939.
Herrmann was hired by CBS in 1933 as a staff
conductor, a role in which he thrived. He eventually became
chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra and
programed innovative concert series such as Invitation to
Music and Exploring Music. In 1934, he took over the task
of composing for David Ross’ weekly series in which poetry
was set to music. He coined a unique term to describe
these programs of poetry and music— “melodrams.”
One of Herrmann’s many tasks at CBS was music
director of the Columbia Workshop – CBS’s weekly
anthology of experimental radio works, which debuted in Photo: Frantisek Renza
1936 under the guidance of Irving Reis. Alas, what began
as an exciting experiment was in danger of becoming
ordinary by 1939. The series needed a new leader, Eva Cappelletti Chao
someone who could provide the Workshop with a valid
reason for its continued existence, and the possibility of Violinist Eva Cappelletti Chao is a long-time member of PostClassical
recapturing some of its former experimental panache. All Ensemble. She also plays with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the
these qualities, and more, were found in Norman Corwin. Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, the National Symphony
Corwin began working at CBS in the spring of 1938, Orchestra, and participates in the Grand Teton Music Festival.
hired away from a local New York station where he had
produced and directed a weekly poetry program. CBS
engaged him to recreate his poetry program for a national
audience as Norman Corwin’s Words Without Music. He
was also asked to produce and/or direct many other
programs, from soap operas to the prestigious Columbia
Workshop – for which he was tasked with adapting such
works as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.
Although he had not been hired as a writer,
beginning in late 1938 Corwin began authoring original
scripts, starting with a rhymed fantasy called The Plot to
Overthrow Christmas. It became a huge success and
was repeated each Christmas for several years on CBS.
Next came They Fly Through the Air, an angry reaction to Photo: Danielle Cho Photography
atrocities committed by Italian fascists when they
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Murray Horwitz
Murray Horwitz is a playwright and broadcaster who currently hosts The
Big Broadcast on WAMU. He is the recipient of three Peabody Awards,
and is the co-author of the Broadway musical, Ain’t Misbehavin’.
David Jones
PostClassical Ensemble principal clarinetist David Jones is a founding
member of the ensemble. He has also served as principal clarinet for the
Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra since 1998. He has performed
extensively with the National, Chicago and Baltimore Symphony
Orchestras and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Photo: Danielle Cho Photography
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bombed Ethiopia. It, too, was a success, and led to CBS
commissioning Corwin to commemorate the 25th
anniversary of Marconi’s first radio transmission. For this,
Corwin asked for the first time to use music (his previous
two plays had employed sound effects only). And he
specifically requested the services of CBS’s premier
composer and conductor, Bernard Herrmann.
The two men had much in common. Both were in
their late 20s, descended from Eastern European Jews.
Though one was raised in New York (Herrmann) and one
in Boston (Corwin), they shared a passion for music and
an unquenchable thirst for learning more about it. Corwin
himself aspired to be a composer. Unlike Herrmann, who
studied at both New York University and The Juilliard
School, Corwin never attended college and had little
formal musical instruction. But he did take violin lessons
in his youth and was musically literate.
In all his radio plays, Corwin treated both the words
he wrote and the sound effects he designed as musical
elements – the words like poetic lyrics, the sound effects
like percussion. In Whitman, he produced an amalgam of
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these elements that I believe attain the threshold of great
art music. Indeed, Corwin wrote the libretti for several
operas, oratorios, and cantatas over the course of his
long career, collaborating with the likes of Roy Harris,
Bernard Rogers, his CBS colleague Lyn Murray, and
another gifted film composer, Franz Waxman. And in the
published script of one of their foremost collaborations,
the VE Day ode On a Note of Triumph, Corwin had this to
say about Herrmann’s crucial contribution: “It is
inaccurate to call Herrmann’s scores ‘background music,’
for they play a far more active part in the productions for
which he chooses to compose.”
I think one can say with absolute impunity that the 21
original radio plays on which Corwin and Herrmann
collaborated represent a high-water mark for both artists
in terms of the fusion of words, sounds, and music.
Dan Gediman
Dan Gediman is a radio producer
who worked with Norman Corwin.
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Whitman Joseph Horowitz

Text: Walt Whitman (1819–1892), based on Leaves of Grass and scripted by Norman Corwin (1910–2011)
PostClassical Ensemble executive producer Joseph Horowitz has long
Whitman: been a pioneer in classical music programming. As executive director of the
1 I, Walt Whitman, heard that you asked for something to prove this puzzle the New World. And to define America, Brooklyn Philharmonic, he received national attention for festivals exploring
her athletic Democracy. Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted. the folk roots of concert works. He subsequently directed a National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded symphonic consortium, Music
2 You whoever you are!... Unwound, which produced festivals in collaboration with universities. He is
You daughter or son of England! the award-winning author of ten books mainly dealing with the history of
You of the mighty Slavic tribes! classical music in the United States. Both his Classical Music in America: A
You dim-descended black, divine-soul’d African, History of Its Rise and Fall (W.W. Norton, 2005) and Artists in Exile (Harper
You Norwegian, Swede, Dane, Icelander, Collins, 2008) were named best books of the year by The Economist.
You Roman! Neapolitan! You Greek! artsjournal.com/uq
You Chinaman of China!
You foot-worn pilgrim welcoming the far-away sparkle of the minarets of Mecca!
All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent of place!
All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea! Photo: Maggie Horowitz
And you of centuries hence when you listen to me!
And you each and everywhere whom I specify not, but include just the same!
Health to you! Good will to you all, from me and America sent!

3 I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) William Sharp

My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, William Sharp, one of America’s pre-eminent concert singers, is a frequent
I have no chair, guest of PostClassical Ensemble (PCE). He most recently appeared with
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, PCE in Native American Inspirations at the Washington National
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, Cathedral – a series of concerts that will generate a Naxos release with
My left hand hooking you round the waist. songs, piano, choral, and chamber works by Arthur Farwell.
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

These States are the amplest poem.

Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the day and night.
I announce the Union more and more compact; indissoluble,
I announce splendors and majesties to make all previous politics of the earth insignificant.
This America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
The officers, capitols, armies, ships, are you and me,
The war is you and me.
Past, present, future, are you and me.

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I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I swear I begin to see the meaning of things,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, The American compact is altogether with individuals!
Leaving it to you to prove and define it, The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single
Expecting the main things from you. individual – namely, to You.
The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are!
# I see not America only, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him;
not only Liberty’s nation but other nations preparing, The Congress convenes every twelfth-month for you;
I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity of races, Laws, courts, the going and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you;
I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world’s stage, Sculpture and monuments and anything inscribed anywhere are tallied in you;
I see Freedom, completely arm’d and victorious and very haughty, All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.
with Law on one side and Peace on the other, All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.
A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste.
What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach? 4 Listen:
I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions, When the psalm sings instead of the singer,
I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken, When the script preaches instead of the preacher,
I see the landmarks of European kings removed; When I can touch the body of books by night or by day, and whey they touch my body back again,
Never were such sharp questions ask’d as this day. When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and child convince,
Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God, When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night-watchman’s daughter,
When warrantee deeds load in chairs opposite and are my friendly companions,
His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes, Then I intend to reach them by hand, and make as much of them as I do of men and women like you.
With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,
With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all geography, all lands: Stranger:
What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas? Uh – May I speak to you for a moment?
Are all nations communing?
Is there going to be but one heart to the globe? Whitman:
Is humanity forming en-masse? Stranger, if you, passing, meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?
For lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim, And why should I not speak to you?
The earth, restive, confronts a new era.
Stranger:
Seems to me you’re pretty sure of yourself.
“Whitman” by Norman Corwin
Copyright © Norman Corwin Whitman:
Reproduced with permission of the Norman Corwin Estate. I know perfectly well my own egotism
Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.
I am Walt Whitman.
I exist as I am, that is enough.

Stranger:
You like the sound of your own name, don’t you?

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Whitman: Communique:
What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? Repeating it over and over; Combined Allied Naval Forces are planning extensive campaigns in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters...
I stand apart to hear – it never tires me.
To you, your name also; Whitman:
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name? Of ships sailing the seas,
Of unnamed heroes in the ships – of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach,
Stranger: Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing,
Just who do you think you are, anyway? And out of these; A chant for the sailors of all nations!

Whitman: ! Flaunt out O sea

5 Walt Whitman! A cosmos, of Manhattan, the son! your separate flags of nations!
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, Flaunt out the various ship-signals!
No sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, But: Reserve especially for yourself and for the
No more modest than immodest. Soul of Man one flag above all the rest:
No dainty dolce affetuoso I. A spiritual woven signal for all nations,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived emblem of man elate above death,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe! I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. Token of all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates,
I give the sign of Democracy! And all that went down doing their duty;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of, on the same terms. Reminiscent of them:
A pennant universal, subtly waving all the time, o’er all brave sailors,
Stranger: All seas, all ships!
And what good do you suppose sharing everything is going to do you?
I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth.
Whitman: I see the male and female everywhere.
As if it harmed me giving others the same rights and chance as myself – I see the serene brotherhood of philosophs.
As if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same! I see the results of perseverance and industry.
I see ranks, colors, civilizations, I go among them, I mix indiscriminately.
Stranger: And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.
Hold on a second – what are you trying to say? Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless – each of us with his or her right upon the earth.
Whitman: Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
6 One’s self I sing, This is what I have learnt from America
a simple separate person,
Yet – @ Listener out there! I stay only a minute longer,
Utter the word Democratic, the word “en-masse.” The past and present wilt –
Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power, I have filled them, emptied them,
The Modern Man I sing! And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself. Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come!
I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me, Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for,
You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will enfold you. But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean, Arouse! For you must justify me.

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in its turn to bear seed, On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
Which winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish. And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.
Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of the tyrants let loose, O despairer, here is my neck.
But it stalks invisibly over the earth, By God, you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me!
whispering, counseling, cautioning! I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force!
Communique:
A major counter-attack impends in the area south of Cherbourg. Stranger:
Look: I don’t follow you – you’re over my head.
Whitman: Anyway, why don’t you calm down, there’s nothing to get excited about. Take it easy.
The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine,
On the night before the pending battle many seek me and I do not fail them. Whitman:
On this solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me. Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you seek the civilians’ peaceful and languishing rhymes?
Communique: Did you find what I sang so hard to follow?
Resistance of the French underground in support of the Allied invaders in increasing hourly . . . Why I was not singing for you to follow, to understand – nor am I now;
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? Therefore leave my works,
Whitman: And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
O star of France, For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me!
The brightness of your hope and strength and fame,
Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long, 7 I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
Seems today a wreck driven by the gale, a mastless hulk, And what I assume you shall assume,
And ’mid its teeming madden’d half-drown’d crowds, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Nor helm nor helmsman. I loaf and invite my soul,
Dim smitten star. I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of grass.
Star crucified – by traitors sold, Once a child said, fetching the grass to me with full hands.
Star panting o’er a land of death, heroic land,
Miserable! Yet for your errors, vanities, sins, I will not now rebuke you, Child:
Your unexampled woes and pangs have quell’d them all, What is the grass?
And left you sacred.
O ship of France, beat back and baffled long! Whitman:
Bear up! Continue on! How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than she.
Sure as the ship of all, the Earth itself, I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Onward beneath the sun following its course, Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
So you O ship France! A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Finished the days, the clouds dispel’d, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say whose?
The travail o’er, the long-sought extrication, Or I guess the grass is the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Reborn, high O’er the European world, Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
Again your star O France, fair lustrous star, It may be you are from old people,
In heavenly peace, clearer, more bright than ever This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
She beam immortal. Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women.

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And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year
What do you think has become of the young and old men? Not you as
And what do you think has become of the women and children? Some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,
They are alive and well somewhere, But as a strong man erect, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder!
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, I know that the past was great and the future will be great and I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time
And if ever there was, it led forward life. For the sake of him I typify, for the common average man’s sake, if you are he.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. 0 I will acknowledge contemporary lands,
I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously every city large and small,
Child: I will put in my poems heroism upon land and sea, and I will report all heroism from an American point of view.
Tell me more about the grass.
Communique:
Whitman: Distinguished Service stars today were conferred upon the following men...
8 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, Whitman:
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, Brave, brave were the soldiers (high named today) who lived throughout the fight;
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, But the bravest press’d to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown.
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue.
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. Communique:
Allied losses on land, sea and air to date number more than fifteen million killed...
Child:
Are there a lot of miracles? Whitman:
I beat and pound for the dead,
Whitman: I blow my loudest for them.
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Vivas to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
Or stand under trees in the woods, And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, Communique:
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, Washington confirms the execution by Japanese authorities of American prisoners.
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, Berlin admits Nazi mobs have lynched at least five American flyers.
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Whitman:
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright. The corpses lie in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men,
What stranger miracles are there? The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes fly, the creatures of power laugh aloud.
Those corpses of young men,
9 Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power, Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets, those hearts
I sing. But I too sing War — pierc’d by the gray lead, cold and motionless . . .
I too am come, chanting the chant of battle! They live in other young men, O’ kings!
This year! They live in brothers again ready to defy you,
Sending itself ahead countless years to come! They were purified by death, they were exalted.
Arm’d year – year of the struggle, Not a grave of the murder’d for freedom but grows seed for freedom,

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And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year
What do you think has become of the young and old men? Not you as
And what do you think has become of the women and children? Some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,
They are alive and well somewhere, But as a strong man erect, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder!
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, I know that the past was great and the future will be great and I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time
And if ever there was, it led forward life. For the sake of him I typify, for the common average man’s sake, if you are he.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. 0 I will acknowledge contemporary lands,
I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously every city large and small,
Child: I will put in my poems heroism upon land and sea, and I will report all heroism from an American point of view.
Tell me more about the grass.
Communique:
Whitman: Distinguished Service stars today were conferred upon the following men...
8 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, Whitman:
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, Brave, brave were the soldiers (high named today) who lived throughout the fight;
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, But the bravest press’d to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown.
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue.
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. Communique:
Allied losses on land, sea and air to date number more than fifteen million killed...
Child:
Are there a lot of miracles? Whitman:
I beat and pound for the dead,
Whitman: I blow my loudest for them.
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Vivas to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
Or stand under trees in the woods, And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, Communique:
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, Washington confirms the execution by Japanese authorities of American prisoners.
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, Berlin admits Nazi mobs have lynched at least five American flyers.
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Whitman:
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright. The corpses lie in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men,
What stranger miracles are there? The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes fly, the creatures of power laugh aloud.
Those corpses of young men,
9 Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power, Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets, those hearts
I sing. But I too sing War — pierc’d by the gray lead, cold and motionless . . .
I too am come, chanting the chant of battle! They live in other young men, O’ kings!
This year! They live in brothers again ready to defy you,
Sending itself ahead countless years to come! They were purified by death, they were exalted.
Arm’d year – year of the struggle, Not a grave of the murder’d for freedom but grows seed for freedom,

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in its turn to bear seed, On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
Which winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish. And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.
Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of the tyrants let loose, O despairer, here is my neck.
But it stalks invisibly over the earth, By God, you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me!
whispering, counseling, cautioning! I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force!
Communique:
A major counter-attack impends in the area south of Cherbourg. Stranger:
Look: I don’t follow you – you’re over my head.
Whitman: Anyway, why don’t you calm down, there’s nothing to get excited about. Take it easy.
The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine,
On the night before the pending battle many seek me and I do not fail them. Whitman:
On this solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me. Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you seek the civilians’ peaceful and languishing rhymes?
Communique: Did you find what I sang so hard to follow?
Resistance of the French underground in support of the Allied invaders in increasing hourly . . . Why I was not singing for you to follow, to understand – nor am I now;
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? Therefore leave my works,
Whitman: And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
O star of France, For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me!
The brightness of your hope and strength and fame,
Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long, 7 I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
Seems today a wreck driven by the gale, a mastless hulk, And what I assume you shall assume,
And ’mid its teeming madden’d half-drown’d crowds, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Nor helm nor helmsman. I loaf and invite my soul,
Dim smitten star. I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of grass.
Star crucified – by traitors sold, Once a child said, fetching the grass to me with full hands.
Star panting o’er a land of death, heroic land,
Miserable! Yet for your errors, vanities, sins, I will not now rebuke you, Child:
Your unexampled woes and pangs have quell’d them all, What is the grass?
And left you sacred.
O ship of France, beat back and baffled long! Whitman:
Bear up! Continue on! How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than she.
Sure as the ship of all, the Earth itself, I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Onward beneath the sun following its course, Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
So you O ship France! A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Finished the days, the clouds dispel’d, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say whose?
The travail o’er, the long-sought extrication, Or I guess the grass is the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Reborn, high O’er the European world, Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
Again your star O France, fair lustrous star, It may be you are from old people,
In heavenly peace, clearer, more bright than ever This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
She beam immortal. Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women.

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Whitman: Communique:
What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? Repeating it over and over; Combined Allied Naval Forces are planning extensive campaigns in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters...
I stand apart to hear – it never tires me.
To you, your name also; Whitman:
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name? Of ships sailing the seas,
Of unnamed heroes in the ships – of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach,
Stranger: Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing,
Just who do you think you are, anyway? And out of these; A chant for the sailors of all nations!

Whitman: ! Flaunt out O sea

5 Walt Whitman! A cosmos, of Manhattan, the son! your separate flags of nations!
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, Flaunt out the various ship-signals!
No sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, But: Reserve especially for yourself and for the
No more modest than immodest. Soul of Man one flag above all the rest:
No dainty dolce affetuoso I. A spiritual woven signal for all nations,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived emblem of man elate above death,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe! I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. Token of all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates,
I give the sign of Democracy! And all that went down doing their duty;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of, on the same terms. Reminiscent of them:
A pennant universal, subtly waving all the time, o’er all brave sailors,
Stranger: All seas, all ships!
And what good do you suppose sharing everything is going to do you?
I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth.
Whitman: I see the male and female everywhere.
As if it harmed me giving others the same rights and chance as myself – I see the serene brotherhood of philosophs.
As if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same! I see the results of perseverance and industry.
I see ranks, colors, civilizations, I go among them, I mix indiscriminately.
Stranger: And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.
Hold on a second – what are you trying to say? Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless – each of us with his or her right upon the earth.
Whitman: Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
6 One’s self I sing, This is what I have learnt from America
a simple separate person,
Yet – @ Listener out there! I stay only a minute longer,
Utter the word Democratic, the word “en-masse.” The past and present wilt –
Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power, I have filled them, emptied them,
The Modern Man I sing! And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself. Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come!
I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me, Not today is to justify me and answer what I am for,
You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will enfold you. But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean, Arouse! For you must justify me.

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I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I swear I begin to see the meaning of things,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, The American compact is altogether with individuals!
Leaving it to you to prove and define it, The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single
Expecting the main things from you. individual – namely, to You.
The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are!
# I see not America only, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him;
not only Liberty’s nation but other nations preparing, The Congress convenes every twelfth-month for you;
I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity of races, Laws, courts, the going and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you;
I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world’s stage, Sculpture and monuments and anything inscribed anywhere are tallied in you;
I see Freedom, completely arm’d and victorious and very haughty, All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.
with Law on one side and Peace on the other, All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.
A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste.
What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach? 4 Listen:
I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions, When the psalm sings instead of the singer,
I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken, When the script preaches instead of the preacher,
I see the landmarks of European kings removed; When I can touch the body of books by night or by day, and whey they touch my body back again,
Never were such sharp questions ask’d as this day. When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and child convince,
Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God, When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night-watchman’s daughter,
When warrantee deeds load in chairs opposite and are my friendly companions,
His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes, Then I intend to reach them by hand, and make as much of them as I do of men and women like you.
With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,
With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all geography, all lands: Stranger:
What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas? Uh – May I speak to you for a moment?
Are all nations communing?
Is there going to be but one heart to the globe? Whitman:
Is humanity forming en-masse? Stranger, if you, passing, meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?
For lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim, And why should I not speak to you?
The earth, restive, confronts a new era.
Stranger:
Seems to me you’re pretty sure of yourself.
“Whitman” by Norman Corwin
Copyright © Norman Corwin Whitman:
Reproduced with permission of the Norman Corwin Estate. I know perfectly well my own egotism
Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.
I am Walt Whitman.
I exist as I am, that is enough.

Stranger:
You like the sound of your own name, don’t you?

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Whitman Joseph Horowitz

Text: Walt Whitman (1819–1892), based on Leaves of Grass and scripted by Norman Corwin (1910–2011)
PostClassical Ensemble executive producer Joseph Horowitz has long
Whitman: been a pioneer in classical music programming. As executive director of the
1 I, Walt Whitman, heard that you asked for something to prove this puzzle the New World. And to define America, Brooklyn Philharmonic, he received national attention for festivals exploring
her athletic Democracy. Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted. the folk roots of concert works. He subsequently directed a National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded symphonic consortium, Music
2 You whoever you are!... Unwound, which produced festivals in collaboration with universities. He is
You daughter or son of England! the award-winning author of ten books mainly dealing with the history of
You of the mighty Slavic tribes! classical music in the United States. Both his Classical Music in America: A
You dim-descended black, divine-soul’d African, History of Its Rise and Fall (W.W. Norton, 2005) and Artists in Exile (Harper
You Norwegian, Swede, Dane, Icelander, Collins, 2008) were named best books of the year by The Economist.
You Roman! Neapolitan! You Greek! artsjournal.com/uq
You Chinaman of China!
You foot-worn pilgrim welcoming the far-away sparkle of the minarets of Mecca!
All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent of place!
All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea! Photo: Maggie Horowitz
And you of centuries hence when you listen to me!
And you each and everywhere whom I specify not, but include just the same!
Health to you! Good will to you all, from me and America sent!

3 I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) William Sharp

My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, William Sharp, one of America’s pre-eminent concert singers, is a frequent
I have no chair, guest of PostClassical Ensemble (PCE). He most recently appeared with
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, PCE in Native American Inspirations at the Washington National
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, Cathedral – a series of concerts that will generate a Naxos release with
My left hand hooking you round the waist. songs, piano, choral, and chamber works by Arthur Farwell.
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

These States are the amplest poem.

Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the day and night.
I announce the Union more and more compact; indissoluble,
I announce splendors and majesties to make all previous politics of the earth insignificant.
This America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
The officers, capitols, armies, ships, are you and me,
The war is you and me.
Past, present, future, are you and me.

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Murray Horwitz
Murray Horwitz is a playwright and broadcaster who currently hosts The
Big Broadcast on WAMU. He is the recipient of three Peabody Awards,
and is the co-author of the Broadway musical, Ain’t Misbehavin’.
David Jones
PostClassical Ensemble principal clarinetist David Jones is a founding
member of the ensemble. He has also served as principal clarinet for the
Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra since 1998. He has performed
extensively with the National, Chicago and Baltimore Symphony
Orchestras and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Photo: Danielle Cho Photography
8.559883 16
bombed Ethiopia. It, too, was a success, and led to CBS
commissioning Corwin to commemorate the 25th
anniversary of Marconi’s first radio transmission. For this,
Corwin asked for the first time to use music (his previous
two plays had employed sound effects only). And he
specifically requested the services of CBS’s premier
composer and conductor, Bernard Herrmann.
The two men had much in common. Both were in
their late 20s, descended from Eastern European Jews.
Though one was raised in New York (Herrmann) and one
in Boston (Corwin), they shared a passion for music and
an unquenchable thirst for learning more about it. Corwin
himself aspired to be a composer. Unlike Herrmann, who
studied at both New York University and The Juilliard
School, Corwin never attended college and had little
formal musical instruction. But he did take violin lessons
in his youth and was musically literate.
In all his radio plays, Corwin treated both the words
he wrote and the sound effects he designed as musical
elements – the words like poetic lyrics, the sound effects
like percussion. In Whitman, he produced an amalgam of
17
these elements that I believe attain the threshold of great
art music. Indeed, Corwin wrote the libretti for several
operas, oratorios, and cantatas over the course of his
long career, collaborating with the likes of Roy Harris,
Bernard Rogers, his CBS colleague Lyn Murray, and
another gifted film composer, Franz Waxman. And in the
published script of one of their foremost collaborations,
the VE Day ode On a Note of Triumph, Corwin had this to
say about Herrmann’s crucial contribution: “It is
inaccurate to call Herrmann’s scores ‘background music,’
for they play a far more active part in the productions for
which he chooses to compose.”
I think one can say with absolute impunity that the 21
original radio plays on which Corwin and Herrmann
collaborated represent a high-water mark for both artists
in terms of the fusion of words, sounds, and music.
Dan Gediman
Dan Gediman is a radio producer
who worked with Norman Corwin.
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carnival is heard across the water. From Steven Smith’s
superb Herrmann biography, A Heart at Fire’s Center
(2002), we learn that J.M.W. Turner’s Venetian canvases
were here a point of inspiration. Equally pertinent is the
quintet’s dedication to Norma Shepherd, who became
Herrmann’s third wife the same year this music was
composed. In the turbulent world of Bernard Herrmann,
Souvenirs de voyage is a balm.
When PostClassical Ensemble produced a month-
long Herrmann festival in 2016, the big discovery –
thanks to the Herrmann authority Christopher Husted –
was a 1944 radio play he scored for Norman Corwin. This
was Whitman. Like so many of Corwin’s radio plays, its
wartime purpose was to rally the home front. The text
comprises verbatim Whitman, selected and choreographed
by Corwin. The music is scored for strings, harp, piano,
and percussion. The combination is hypnotic. The
present world premiere recording is undertaken in the
conviction that this 25-minute radio drama – a genre now
long forgotten – deserves revival as an American concert
work for actors and orchestra.
Walt Whitman was one of three writers who most
influenced Corwin’s distinctive free-verse style, the
others being Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe. That the
Whitman idiom anchored the once-famous radio dramas
of the Forties is an aspect of his influence insufficiently
known. Corwin was on a train to California when he
learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on
7 December 1941. He quickly sent a telegram to
Washington asking if the Office of Facts and Figures still
wanted the show he was planning to air. By the time he
got to New Mexico, a telegram was waiting for him: “The
President says, ‘now more than ever.’” Invoking Whitman,
and his ideals of American democracy, Corwin was
heeding Franklin Roosevelt’s call.
Joseph Horowitz
8.559883
Norman Corwin and Bernard Herrmann: Netanel Draiblate
A Partnership in Sound
Netanel Draiblate is concertmaster of PostClassical Ensemble – a
While both Norman Corwin and Bernard Herrmann had position he also holds with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra. A native
experienced significant triumphs in their radio careers of Israel, he was principal second violin of Daniel Barenboim’s
prior to working together, and would both go on to do West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.
great things with others, their respective gifts truly
bloomed when they began collaborating in 1939.
Herrmann was hired by CBS in 1933 as a staff
conductor, a role in which he thrived. He eventually became
chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra and
programed innovative concert series such as Invitation to
Music and Exploring Music. In 1934, he took over the task
of composing for David Ross’ weekly series in which poetry
was set to music. He coined a unique term to describe
these programs of poetry and music— “melodrams.”
One of Herrmann’s many tasks at CBS was music
director of the Columbia Workshop – CBS’s weekly
anthology of experimental radio works, which debuted in Photo: Frantisek Renza
1936 under the guidance of Irving Reis. Alas, what began
as an exciting experiment was in danger of becoming
ordinary by 1939. The series needed a new leader, Eva Cappelletti Chao
someone who could provide the Workshop with a valid
reason for its continued existence, and the possibility of Violinist Eva Cappelletti Chao is a long-time member of PostClassical
recapturing some of its former experimental panache. All Ensemble. She also plays with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the
these qualities, and more, were found in Norman Corwin. Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, the National Symphony
Corwin began working at CBS in the spring of 1938, Orchestra, and participates in the Grand Teton Music Festival.
hired away from a local New York station where he had
produced and directed a weekly poetry program. CBS
engaged him to recreate his poetry program for a national
audience as Norman Corwin’s Words Without Music. He
was also asked to produce and/or direct many other
programs, from soap operas to the prestigious Columbia
Workshop – for which he was tasked with adapting such
works as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.
Although he had not been hired as a writer,
beginning in late 1938 Corwin began authoring original
scripts, starting with a rhymed fantasy called The Plot to
Overthrow Christmas. It became a huge success and
was repeated each Christmas for several years on CBS.
Next came They Fly Through the Air, an angry reaction to Photo: Danielle Cho Photography
atrocities committed by Italian fascists when they
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Philippe Chao
Violist Philippe Chao is acting assistant principal violist with the Kennedy
Center Opera House Orchestra and was previously assistant principal
violist of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. He is a longstanding member
of PostClassical Ensemble.
Photo: Danielle Cho Photography
Benjamin Capps
Benjamin Capps, principal cellist of PostClassical Ensemble, frequently
performs with PCE as a chamber musician and solo cellist. His recordings
include the sonatas of Chopin and Rachmaninov.
8.559883 18
Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975)
Whitman • Souvenirs de voyage • Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra
Why Bernard Herrmann?
With the waning of modernism, and of the high value once
placed on complexity and originality, the topography of
20th-century music is rapidly changing. One of the chief
American beneficiaries is certain to be Bernard Herrmann.
Everyone appreciates Herrmann for his singular
achievements as a film composer. Without him, there
would be no Psycho, North by Northwest, or Vertigo, and
Citizen Kane would be a far lesser film. But Herrmann
also produced a substantial catalog of concert works in
the same style. He was as well a great figure in the
forgotten history of radio. Though he clung to tonality, he
created a palette of mood and sonority that is instantly
recognizable and wholly his own. Defining himself in
opposition to contemporary tastemakers, he once wrote:
“Musically I count myself an individualist. I believe that
only music which springs out of genuine personal emotion
is alive and important. I hate all cults, fads, and circles.”
Bernard Herrmann was born in New York in 1911 and
died in Los Angeles in 1975. He joined CBS as a radio
conductor, arranger, and composer in 1933 and there
promoted a remarkable variety of important music; his
studio guests included Bartók and Stravinsky. As an
innovative composer for radio, he was the most important
musical collaborator with Orson Welles and – the most
honored practitioner of American radio drama – Norman
Corwin. In Hollywood, Herrmann was especially linked
with Alfred Hitchcock. Herrmann’s movie scores – 51 in
all, of which The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), with its
daring “Liebestod”, was his personal favorite – are among
the most honored ever created. But Herrmann sought
wider recognition as a conductor and concert composer.
Of the three Herrmann concert works here recorded,
the Psycho symphonic narrative is not the Psycho Suite
more commonly performed. That is: it is not a
compendium of excerpts from Hitchcock’s 1960 film, but
a concert work composed by Herrmann in 1968 in which
excerpts from the film score are re-ordered and re-
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composed. The conductor John Mauceri, who is
responsible for rescuing this score from oblivion, writes:
“It is not a suite, nor is it a sequence of short cues to
accompany film clips; it is intended to free the music from
the visual elements of the film. In this sense it is not
unlike Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata and Vaughan
Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica – musical material from a
film score had been adapted into a concert work.”
In Vertigo (1958) – arguably Herrmann’s highest
achievement with Hitchcock – the musical pièce de
résistance is a seven-minute Scène d’amour. “[When] we
go into the love scene we should let all traffic noises fade
because Mr. Herrmann may have something to say
here,” reads a Hitchcock production note. Mr. Herrmann’s
something, with its shuddering tremolos and tender four-
note melodic turn, secures his stature as a major
American composer as potently as anything could.
Kindred to this cinematic love scene is the music that
may be Herrmann’s supreme achievement for the
concert hall – the 1967 clarinet quintet Souvenirs de
voyage. It is a stubbornly inward work, suffused with
nostalgia and melancholy. I cannot think of a more
seductive, more finished chamber work by an American.
The long first movement is to my ears a formidable
compositional achievement by any standard. It also
furnishes an irresistible vehicle for the ranginess and
seamless legato of the clarinet. The liquid ebb and flow of
sound, the lapping waves of song, the interpolated valse
triste acquire a barely perceptible cumulative momentum,
an intensification of multiplying eddies and ripples. When
the movement’s hypnotic Molto tranquillo beginning
returns at the close, we feel we have journeyed
somewhere even if that makes no ultimate difference in a
world of sadness and remembrance.
The quintet’s second movement is a rocking
Berceuse whose disturbing existential undertow is of
course a Herrmann signature. The final Canto amoroso
begins with the violins singing a love duet in thirds. Soon
the thirds accelerate as romantic zephyrs. A Venetian
559883 bk Herrmann.qxp_559883 bk Herrmann 06/08/2020 07:38 Page 2

HERRMANN
Bernard PostClassical Ensemble

(1911–1975)

Whitman (1944 Norman Corwin radio play, reconstructed 2019) 31:05

(restored and edited by Christopher Husted, b. 1964)
(Text: Walt Whitman, 1819–1892)
(The radio play Whitman is based on Walt Whitman’s
collection Leaves of Grass and scripted by Norman Corwin, 1910–2011)
Introduction: I, Walt Whitman, heard that you asked for something
to prove this puzzle the New World (Whitman) 0:45
1

Welcome: You! Whoever you are! (Whitman) 1:27

Perpetual Journey: I tramp a perpetual journey (Whitman) 4:10
2

Listen: Listen: when the psalm sings instead of the singer (Whitman, Stranger, Cynic) 2:07
3

Cosmos: A cosmos, of Manhattan, the son! (Whitman, Stranger) 1:15

4

Song: A simple separate person (Whitman, Cynic) 2:19

5

Oath: I celebrate myself, and sing myself (Whitman, Child) 3:05

6

Miracles: I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars
7

(Whitman, Child) 2:05

8

Battle: Of life immense in passion, pulse and power, I sing (Whitman) 1:22
War: I will acknowledge contemporary lands (Whitman, Radio Voice) 6:08
9

Ships: Flaunt out, O sea, your separate flags of nations! (Whitman) 2:08
0

Divinity: Listener out there! (Whitman) 1:40

!

Finale: I see not America only (Whitman) 2:26

@
#

Souvenirs de voyage (1967) 24:34

I. Lento: Molto tranquillo 9:57 Photo: Tom Wolff

II. Berceuse: Andante 6:56

$

III. Andantino: Canto amoroso 7:33 PostClassical Ensemble was founded in 2003 by Angel Gil-Ordóñez and Joseph Horowitz as an experimental
%

orchestral laboratory based in Washington, D.C. All PCE programming is thematic and cross-disciplinary, frequently
^

Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra (1968, reconstructed 1999)
(reconstructed by John Mauceri, b. 1945)
&
Recorded: 17 April 2016 at the National Gallery of Art (live performances) $–& and 30 May 2019
at the Washington National Cathedral 1–#, Washington, D.C., USA
Publishers: Bernard Herrmann Music 1–^, G. Schirmer, Inc. &
15:49 incorporating art, film, dance, or theater. Of its previous Naxos releases conducted by Gil-Ordóñez, Dvořák and
America (8.559777), featuring the world premiere recording of the PCE-created Hiawatha Melodrama, was named
one of the best albums of the year by Minnesota Public Radio. PCE’s series of Naxos DVDs presents classic films
from the 1930s – The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River (2.110521), The City (2.110231) and Redes
(2.110372) – with the scores newly recorded. During the COVID-19 pandemic, PCE has turned to film-making; see
postclassical.com.

8.559883 2 19 8.559883
559883 bk Herrmann.qxp_559883 bk Herrmann 06/08/2020 07:38 Page 20

Angel Gil-Ordóñez
AMERICAN CLASSICS
BERNARD
Angel Gil-Ordóñez is the music director of
PostClassical Ensemble and Georgetown

HERRMANN
University Orchestra and principal guest
conductor of New York’s Perspectives Ensemble.
In León, Mexico, he serves as lead advisor for
Trinitate Philharmonia, modeled on Venezuela’s

Whitman
El Sistema. He regularly conducts at the Bowdoin
International Music Festival in Maine, and at the
Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana.
He has appeared as guest conductor with the
American Composers Orchestra, Opera

(Radio Drama by Norman Corwin)

Colorado, the Pacific Symphony, Hartford
Symphony Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic,

WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING

Orchestra of St. Luke’s and at the Brevard Music

Souvenirs de voyage
Festival. The former associate conductor of
Spain’s National Symphony Orchestra, he is the
recipient of the Royal Order of Queen Isabella,

Psycho: A Narrative
the country’s highest civilian decoration. This is
his ninth Naxos release.

for String Orchestra

www.gilordonez.com

William Sharp
Murray Horwitz
David Jones
Photo: André Chung

Netanel Draiblate
Eva Cappelletti Chao
Philippe Chao
Benjamin Capps
PostClassical Ensemble
8.559883 20
Angel Gil-Ordóñez