A work of music is as much an historical record as a novel, poem, or historic artifact. Its place in time and space embedded in notes, rhythms, meter, key, and an infinite number of other pieces of information interpreted by the present.
Sometimes that information is transmitted in a “score”: a document that encodes how an entire symphony (or sonata, or suite, etc) should be performed. It tells a trained eye who, what, when, how (and sometimes why) to, once again, reveal in sound/performance a snapshot in time. It revives the composer’s imagination and intent: a resurrection of abstract neurons that fired years, decades, centuries ago. Abstract ideas that were carefully notated* and recorded for the future.
The third symphonies of Aaron Copland, Florence Beatrice Price, and Marcel Tyberg were all written within less than a decade of each other – from the mid 1930s through the mid 1940s – and each symphony has that composer’s life and circumstance etched in its score.
Copland’s Third Symphony was premiered by the Boston Symphony, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, on October 18th, 1946, a year after the surrender of Japan, marking the end of World War II. The composer's Fanfare for the Common Man from a few years before was a patriotic work that would find its way quoted in this Third Symphony, dispelling any doubt of its intentions to be a celebratory and “American” symphony, celebrating the end of tyranny. And then *snap* just a few years after the premiere, Copland’s patriotism was questioned by Joseph McCarthy during the “Red Scare.” A gay, Jewish composer from Brooklyn, whose father came through Ellis Island, whose music is often synonymous with being patriotic had his patriotism scrutinized.
All while Florence Beatrice Price, a Black woman from Arkansas living during legalized segregation, moved to Chicago escaping racial violence in the South. Her work as a composer skyrocketed within the first several years after arriving in Chicago, surrounded by like-minded, strong, Black women musicians like Margaret Bonds and Marian Anderson. She would receive a couple prizes, one for her first symphony and one for her piano sonata, that would help secure her life-changing commissions, such as the one from the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Music Project that funded her Symphony No. 3 which premiered in the fall of 1940. Price’s music would be ignored by the same Koussevitzky (see above), despite her remarkable success and notoriety.
All while Marcel Tyberg, an Austrian composer, Catholic of Jewish ancestry (through his great-grandfather), was living in Northern Italy, a region coming under threat of Nazi occupation. Tyberg gave his scores to Milan Mihic, a doctor whose son Enrico took piano lessons from the composer. The Nazi’s arrested and deported Tyberg to extermination camps, with his death being registered at Auschwitz on December 31, 1944. Composed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Tyberg never heard his Symphony No. 3 performed. It was one of the works that survived with Enrico Mihic all the way to Buffalo, New York, where it was “discovered,” performed and recorded by JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic in the early aughts.
Three third symphonies: each telling profoundly different stories of their creators living and breathing the same Earth air. Each story coded in the score like DNA, carrying information forward in time and space.
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* There are many musical traditions that do not involve notation. That’s another story for another time.
Correction: an earlier version listed the year of Copland's premiere as 1945, not 1946.
