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Notes on the Program

A Sylvan Scene in Kentucky, or the Barbeque Divertimento for Piano

Anthony Philip Heinrich
Born March 11, 1781 in Schönbüchel, Bohemia [now Krásný Buk, Czech Republic]
Died May 3, 1861 in New York City

Published in 1825-1826.

When the 37 musicians and civic leaders who convened on April 2, 1842 at the Apollo Rooms, a concert hall and meeting house on the east side of Broadway between Walker and Canal Streets, for the purpose of founding “a complete orchestral band in the city capable of performing the grand instrumental compositions of the great masters,” they elected Anthony Philip Heinrich as chairman of the organizing committee of the Philharmonic Society of New York. Heinrich — “The Beethoven of America,” as he had been dubbed by John Rowe Parker’s Boston journal The Euterpeiad, or Musical Intelligencer in April 1822 — was one of this country’s musical pioneers, a self-taught composer, violinist, publisher, teacher, conductor (of theaters in Philadelphia, New York and London and one of the first American performances of a Beethoven symphony), the subject of grand music festivals in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, one of the first American musicians whose works were heard in Europe, and a performer of his own compositions at the White House.

Heinrich was born on March 11, 1781 in Schönbüchel, Bohemia (now Krásný Buk, Czech Republic, due north of Prague near the German border) into a merchant family that prospered from wholesaling wine, linen, thread and other commodities. He learned to play violin and piano as a child and developed an insatiable love of music, but he was drawn fully into commerce when he inherited the family business at age twenty. Heinrich first visited America briefly in 1805 to assess the business possibilities in the New World, but the financial reverses in Europe brought about by the Napoleonic Wars sent his firm into bankruptcy and him back to Philadelphia in 1810 with all of his remaining merchandise and little more than a hope of rebuilding his business. He succeeded for several months, during which he conducted, gratis, at the Southwark Theatre (it was his first formal music position) and married a girl from Boston (“abundantly rich in beauty, accomplishments and qualities of a noble heart,” as he described her), but by 1811 his business had collapsed. In 1813, he took his bride to Bohemia, where a daughter was born. The new mother became ill, the baby was left with relatives, and the couple returned to Philadelphia; Mrs. Heinrich died soon thereafter.

In 1816, Heinrich, 35 years old and having lost both fortune and family, set himself on a new career as a musician. He secured a position as conductor at a theater in Pittsburgh and trekked there by foot from Philadelphia, but only worked a short time before the venture folded. He got on a riverboat going down the Ohio, got off at Maysville, Kentucky, walked sixty miles to Lexington, and set himself up as a violinist, music teacher and conductor; on November 12, 1817 he presented a “Grand Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Music … assisted by Lexington’s principal professors and amateurs” that opened with a “Sinfonia con Minuetto” by Beethoven, probably the First Symphony; the only known earlier performances of a Beethoven symphony (also No. 1) in this country were in Nazareth, Pennsylvania (June 13, 1813) and Boston (October 10, 1817). The following spring Heinrich moved to a secluded log cabin in Bardstown, south of Lexington, and started to compose, “thrown, as it were, by discordant events, far from the emporiums of musical science, into the isolated wilds of nature, where I invoked my Muse, tutored only by Alma Mater.” He published his Op. 1, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or the Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature, a potpourri of songs, piano pieces and ensemble numbers remarkable for their diversity, complexity and ambition, at his own expense in Philadelphia in 1820; Op. 2, The Western Minstrel, a Collection of Original, Moral, Patriotic & Sentimental Songs, for the Voice and Piano Forte, Interspersed with Airs, Waltzes, &c., followed before the end of the year. Having established a reputation among East Coast musicians through his publications, Heinrich returned to Philadelphia for a performance of his melodrama Child of the Mountains in March 1821.

Heinrich lived a remarkably peripatetic existence for the next sixteen years, supporting himself with his music as he went: Boston (1823-1826), where he published his Op. 3, The Sylviad, or, Minstrelsy of Nature in the Wilds of North America and started composing for orchestra; London (1826-1831), where he played violin and conducted at the Drury Lane Theatre, had dinner with Mendelssohn, published several songs and wrote Pushmataha: A Venerable Chief of a Western Tribe of Indians; Boston (1831-1833), where he taught and became organist of Old South Church; and England, Hungary, Austria and Bohemia (1833-1837), where he produced concerts of his own music, recovered from persistent illnesses and tried to find his daughter (he just missed her when she went looking for him in America). In 1837, Heinrich settled in New York City, where he was finally reunited with his 24-year-old daughter. He continued to perform, conduct and compose, befriending many in the musical community, playing for President Tyler at the White House (Tyler said he’d rather hear a good reel), and giving occasional but elaborate concerts of his music in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, but finding little financial success. In 1856, he set out for one last European tour and gave three well-received concerts in Prague in 1857, but after four years abroad he came home to New York, where he died at age eighty in poverty and neglect on May 3, 1861.

In a review of Heinrich’s Boston concert of June 13, 1846, John S. Dwight, then America’s foremost music critic, wrote that the music “was swarming with ideas as beautiful and palpable as most modern music; that there were passages of very grand and impressive harmony; that there was nothing superficial, weak or false in the manner in which the themes were wrought out; that it was thorough, artist-like and learned composition; and entitled to respect as a whole, while here and there in passages, the effect on the mind was as of glimpses of something truly great.” Heinrich was among the first American musicians to quote traditional and Indian melodies in his compositions, to be recognized in Europe (he was cited in the estimable 1830s music dictionaries by Schilling and Fétis), to write for large-scale symphony orchestra, and to incorporate American themes in his works (_The Ornithological Combat of Kings, or, The Condor of the Andes and the eagle of the Cordilleras; The Treaty of William Penn with the Indians; Pocahontas: The Royal Maid and Heroine of Virginia; The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons; The Wild-wood Spirit’s Chant or Scintillations of “Yankee Doodle_”). “Heinrich produced a work unique in American music annals,” summarized William Treat Upton in his 1939 biography of the composer.

The two volumes of songs, choruses and piano pieces comprising Heinrich’s Op. 3 — The Sylviad: or, Minstrelsy of Nature in the Wilds of North America — were published at his own expense in Boston in 1823 and 1825-1826. Among the most ambitious numbers in the second set is A Sylvan Scene in Kentucky, or the Barbeque Divertimento, Comprising the Ploughman’s Grand March and the Negro’s Banjo Quickstep, Respectfully Dedicated as a light fancy sketch characteristic of the Western Woodlanders to the Patrons of the Royal Academy of Music in Gt. Britain and all friends of harmony by the natural harmonist, A.P. Heinrich. Heinrich outlined the basic two-movement structure of the work in his title — a march preceded by a Bugle Call of the Green Mountain Boys that is followed by The Banjo (written nearly thirty years before Louis Moreau Gottschalk attempted a similar plucked-string evocation on the piano), with the whole rounded off by a quotation from his song All Hail to Kentucky from his Op. 1, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky (1820) — but gave no indication of its harmonic audacity, technical challenge or unusual form. The opening Ploughman’s March follows a fairly standard pattern — fanfare–march–trio–fanfare–march — but The Banjo consists of a long, continuous succession of non-repeating sections, widely varied in key and character but constant in tempo. In the liner notes for his pioneering 1975 recording of Heinrich’s music on Vanguard, pianist Neely Bruce wrote that this formal procedure is “the musical equivalent of stream-of-consciousness prose. As such it is virtually unique in the 19th century; it is not until the early 20th century that composers, Charles Ives for example, achieve similar effects over such long spans of time.”

The Union, Concert Paraphrase on National Airs for Piano

Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Born May 8, 1829 in New Orleans
Died December 18, 1869 in Tijuca, Brazil

Composed in 1862.
Premiered on February 22, 1862 in Brooklyn, New York by the composer.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the first American musician to win international acclaim, was born in New Orleans on May 8, 1829; his father was a cultured English Jewish businessman, his mother a beautiful woman of noble Creole descent. Louis showed extraordinary talent as a youngster (he substituted as organist at St. Louis Cathedral when he was seven, and made his debut as a violinist the following year), and in 1841, was sent to the Paris Conservatoire for further training. The gregarious American musician soon created a sensation among the French cultural elite for his ebullient personality, dazzling pianism and exotically syncopated compositions based on the eclectic idioms of his native New Orleans — he befriended Bizet, Saint-Saëns and Meyerbeer, elicited praise from Chopin and Berlioz, and inspired poems by Gautier and Victor Hugo. By 1850, Gottschalk had concertized throughout France and Switzerland, so he spent the following two years performing in Spain, where he instituted his “monster concerts,” for which he wrote a number of compositions, including a symphony for ten pianos. He returned to America at the end of 1852, and appeared with unprecedented success from coast to coast before migrating to Cuba and the West Indies for an extended period. He resumed his American tours in 1862, giving more than a thousand performances during the next three years, but then became unwisely involved with a student at the Oakland (California) Female Seminary (he attributed his inveterate womanizing to his stay in the tropics, a symptom, presumably, of some mysterious virus), and fled to South America, where he played, composed, and organized monster concerts until he died near Rio de Janeiro of overwork and dissipation in 1869, at the age of forty. His remains were reinterred with great ceremony in Brooklyn, New York on October 3, 1870.

In February 1857, after four years of exhausting but financially rewarding touring across America, Gottschalk headed to Havana for concerts with the soprano Adelina Patti and then spent the next five years in Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Cuba, “during which,” he confided in his autobiographical Notes of a Pianist, “I roamed at random under the blue skies of the tropics, indolently permitting myself to be carried away by chance, giving a concert wherever I found a piano, sleeping wherever the night overtook me.” Gottschalk concertized little, but he was inspired by his exposure to the Caribbean sources of the Creole music of his native New Orleans to write a large number of piano pieces as well as a delightfully atmospheric “Symphonie Romantique” titled A Night in the Tropics. He also organized ambitious music festivals in Havana in 1860 and 1861, and tried conducting (with little success) at the city’s Teatro di Tacón, but when news reached Cuba that Confederate troops had shelled Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 to begin the Civil War, Gottschalk, an ardent Unionist in a pro-Secessionist country, began to plan his return to America.

Gottschalk was back in New York by the beginning of 1862, and appeared first at Niblo’s Garden at 568 Broadway on February 11th, treating the audience to several of his recent Caribbean-themed pieces. At his Washington’s Birthday concert at the new Brooklyn Academy of Music, Gottschalk premiered a work exactly tempered to its time and place — The Union, Concert Paraphrase on National Airs_; the score was dedicated to General George B. McClellan, then commander of the Union army. (Lincoln relieved the dilatory and headstrong McClellan of his command the following month.) The Union became a staple of Gottschalk’s tours of Northern cities during the next three years, during which he estimated that he gave some 1,100 concerts coast-to-coast and traveled nearly 100,000 miles. He wrote in his memoirs that the reception the work got in Philadelphia was typical: “Unheard-of-enthusiasm. Circumstances gave it a real interest, which has been the pretext for a noisy and patriotic manifestation on the part of the audience. Recalls encores, hurrahs, etc.!” On March 24, 1864, he performed the piece for President and Mrs. Lincoln; he played it again thirteen months later at a memorial service for the fallen leader on the deck of the Constitution as it carried him to San Francisco.

Gottschalk included three “National Airs” in The Union: The Star-Spangled Banner (a melody that John Stafford Smith, a musical antiquarian, organist and composer, wrote around 1770 as a drinking song for the London Anacreontic Society; Francis Scott Key fitted the tune with his familiar words in 1814), _Hail Columbia _ (which was replaced by The Star-Spangled Banner as the country’s national anthem in 1931) and the Revolutionary-era song Yankee Doodle. The work opens with an extended and flamboyantly virtuosic introduction that leads to Gottschalk’s surprisingly subtle arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner. A brief recall of the introduction and a fanfare preface Hail Columbia, given simply at first, then above a mock-drum roll, and finally woven together with Yankee Doodle into a rousing finale.

Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello, “TSIAJ”

Charles Ives
Born October 20, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut
Died May 19, 1954 in New York City

Composed in 1904-1905.

In his book on American Music Since 1910, the composer/critic Virgil Thomson offered one of the most trenchant comments ever advanced about Charles Ives. Thomson wrote, “The man presents in music, as he did in life, two faces; on one side, a man of noble thoughts, a brave and original genius; on the other, a homespun Yankee tinkerer.” Indeed, much of Ives’ life seems almost to have joined two souls in a single body. From Monday through Friday, he was one of New York’s most successful insurance executives, heading a multi-million dollar business and even writing a guide book for salesmen. Evenings and weekends, in rural Connecticut, he was a composer creating music such as had never been heard before. He not only saw no antagonism between these two spheres of his life, but even allowed that they complemented each other. “You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance,” he said. “There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life. My work in music helped my business and my work in business helped my music.”

Just as his life style seemed to draw him to serve two masters, so his music was suspended between the poles of the great European traditions and the pioneering spirit of American adventuresomeness. As a Yale undergraduate from 1894 to 1898, he was thoroughly grounded in the German modes of form, harmony and expression by his composition teacher, Horatio Parker. Yet an even more powerful influence came from Ives’ father, George, from whom the young musician inherited an unquenchable desire for musical experimentation. George was a veteran of the Civil War, the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army, and one of the freest spirits in a place — New England — that has always prided itself on independence of mind. George encouraged his son to open his ears, to try new sounds and to listen to those around him. To “stretch the boy’s ears,” for example, he would play the piano accompaniment for America, the Beautiful in C and have young Charlie sing the melody in E-flat. One day he sat his son down next to the piano to demonstrate a new tuning that divided the octave into 24 intervals — quarter-tone music. Charlie tagged along on a Fourth of July when George went down to the town square in Danbury to see the parade, taking special delight in listening to the bands simultaneously play different tunes at different tempos in different keys. George passed on to his son the philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists — the quest to both experience the mundane and to look beyond it for a more profound meaning. An anecdote Charles recounted of his father makes the point clearly: “Once when Father was asked: ‘How can you stand it to hear old John Bell bellow off-key the way he does at camp-meetings?’ his answer was: ‘Old John is a supreme musician…. Don’t pay much attention to the sounds. If you do you may miss the music. You won’t get a heroic ride to Heaven on pretty little sounds.’”

One of Ives’ most characteristic creations is the Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano, which was begun (inspired?) at the sixth reunion of his Yale graduating class in June 1904. The title page bears the legend: “Trio … Yalensia et Americana (Fancy Names) — Real Name: Yankee jaws at Mr. Yale’s school for nice bad boys!!” Ives’ wry attitude is best realized in the second movement, a frenzied whirl of scraps of a dozen or so traditional American songs, including My Old Kentucky Home, Marching Through Georgia, In the Sweet Bye and Bye, and Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Aye. Ives said that this music was a “college days scherzo,” and named it “Tsiaj” — “Jaist” backwards: “Jest,” the precise translation of the Italian word “scherzo.” The opening movement superimposes three different layers of music: one each for cello and piano (given as the first section); a third for the violin, as the piano continues (section two); and all three together (section three). The finale is large-scale movement in a lyrical, intense, almost Mahlerian idiom that closes with a touching quotation of the hymn Rock of Ages.

Vignettes: Covered Wagon Woman, A Song Cycle for Voice and Piano

Alan Louis Smith
Born October 21, 1955 in McAllen, Texas

Composed in 2006.
WORLD PREMIERE.
CO-COMMISSIONED BY THE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER.

Alan Louis Smith is one of this country’s most highly regarded collaborative pianists and teachers and a composer of growing reputation. Born in McAllen, Texas in 1955, Smith earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance at Baylor University and his doctorate in piano chamber music and vocal accompanying at the University of Michigan, where his principal mentor was the world-renowned accompanist Martin Katz. Smith has held faculty appointments at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, the University of Michigan, Baylor University and, since 1989, at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, where he was named Chair of Keyboard Studies in 2003. He has also served for nineteen years as a member of the vocal coaching faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center and is now Coordinator of the Piano Program, for which he holds the Marian Douglas Martin Master Teacher Chair. Smith has given master classes and held university residencies throughout the country, and served as an adjudicator for national and international vocal competitions, including the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. He has appeared in concert and broadcasts with such distinguished artists as bass-baritone Thomas Stewart, soprano Barbara Bonney, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, violist Donald McInnes, violinist Eudice Shapiro and the Los Angeles Chamber Virtuosi, and been interviewed on WQXR Radio and WNYE Television in New York City, KUSC in Los Angeles and North German Radio. His articles and reviews have appeared in Piano and Keyboard and The American Music Teacher. Smith has composed several dozen songs for voice and piano, and has recently found a congenial métier in setting historical texts: Vignettes: Ellis Island (1999) borrows excerpts from recorded interviews with early-20th-century American immigrants; Vignettes: Letters from George to Evelyn, from the Private Papers of a World War II Bride (2002) was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for a gala concert celebrating the eightieth birthday of American soprano Phyllis Curtin; and Covered Wagon Woman, based on the journal of Margaret Ann Alsip Frink, was commissioned by Music Accord for The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for premiere in February 2008. Vignettes: Ellis Island was recorded by Stephanie Blythe and pianist Warren Jones by New York public television in November 2003 and aired in January 2004; the recording is now part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Television and Radio.

Alan Louis Smith has provided the following information about Vignettes: Covered Wagon Woman:

Margaret Frink and Her Journal

When Margaret Frink crossed the American continent in a covered wagon with her husband in 1850 it had only been 46 years since Lewis and Clark had begun their famous journey into the uncharted West with their Corps of Discovery and less than a year since the beginning of the California Gold Rush. Mrs. Frink and her husband, Ledyard, set out upon their journey from Indiana to Sacramento, California along with a young boy named Robert, who was eleven years old at the time of the crossing, and a young man named Aaron Rose, who was not yet 21 and who for three years had been a clerk in the mercantile store owned by Mr. Frink and Mrs. Frink’s brother, A. B. Alsip, in Martinsville, Indiana. The Frinks and the Alsips were people of means and regarded their great journey to the gold fields of California less as a desire to add to their wealth than a surrendering to the excitement of a new adventure. In the span of their marriage up to 1850, the Frinks had uprooted their lives a number of times in trying their “fortunes farther west.”

Mrs. Frink’s remarkable diary reveals her adventurous spirit, her deep love for those in her care, as well as her perspicacious and resourceful ability to provide for herself and her family through a combination of shrewd bargaining and alliances with those with whom she came in contact on their journey westward. She was generous and big-hearted toward people in need and in distress along the trail, sometimes giving the last of whatever she possessed in order to help someone.

Unlike many emigrants who crossed the continent as part of a large wagon train, the Frinks made their way independent of a sizeable, organized contingent. One fascinating aspect of Mrs. Frink’s diary was her recounting of the variety of other emigrants with whom they came in contact, sometimes joining forces and traveling for a time together, sometimes having only the briefest interaction, often traveling alone. She mentions many of the people they met by name and with several she formed a comradeship. Two contacts important to her are mentioned in several places in the diary. One of the earliest contacts was with the Carson brothers, who crossed the Missouri River at the same time as the Frinks. The crossing of the Missouri River was especially auspicious for the westward-bound emigrants because it marked the true beginning of “The West” and the crossing in itself was dangerous and exciting. After being separated from the Carsons for weeks at a time, the Frinks and the Carsons arrived in California together. Mrs. Frink had another special reason to have made note of the Carsons as “they were strongly of the opinion that Mr. Frink would never get through, because he brought his wife with him.” The second important and repeated mention was that of a Mr. Russell. When Mr. Russell met up with the Frinks he was with one other man on foot, each leading a mule. They had no provisions left, almost everything they had had been stolen, and they had left their wagons behind. In Mrs. Frink’s words, “We happened to have two biscuits left and I handed one to each of them as I would to children.” Mr. Russell asked that Mr. and Mrs. Frink see him through to California, offering his mule for pay. It was Mr. Russell and his mules (he seems to have acquired at least one more along the way) that became crucial to the Frinks’ survival and ultimate success when it came time to cross the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

(A microfilm of the original journal is housed in the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It is with the gracious acknowledgement of the Beinecke Library that the texts are used here. Mrs. Frink’s complete journal and some biographical information can be found published in: Kenneth L. Holmes, editor and compiler. Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1850. Volume 2 of eleven volumes. Reprinted from Volume 2 [1983] of the original eleven-volume edition titled Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1890, published by the Arthur H. Clark Company, Glendale, California, 1983. Introduction to Volume 2 of the Bison Books Edition [1996] by Lillian Schlissel. [University of Nebraska Press; Lincoln, NE, 1996], pp. 55-169.)

The Song Texts

For two or three years before receiving the commission for a vocal chamber work from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, I had a still, small tickling in the back of my brain that compelled me to want to know more about the lives of pioneer women, particularly in their own words from their letters and diaries. From time to time, I would look around in bookstores and browse online, but never in earnest. When the commission from the Chamber Music Society became a reality I became serious about seeking out the words of those intrepid women. I have written two other song sets on excerpts from real-life experiences in American history: Vignettes: Ellis Island (written for Stephanie Blythe), on snippets of interviews given by immigrants who passed through Ellis Island; and Vignettes: Letters from George to Evelyn, based on excerpted sections of love letters from a soldier who died in World War II in Germany.

It had been my original thought in reading diaries of a number of pioneer women that I would set portions of the diaries of several of them, creating a musical work based on a communal experience of what it must have been like for those valiant souls; but my attention was continually drawn back to the diary of Margaret Frink. For one thing, her adventure was amazing; for another, her writing was beautiful, human and compelling; and, to top it all off, it was apparent from reading her diary that here was a great soul who faced challenges and fears with nobility, who cared deeply for others, and who seemed to have immense resources of personal strength. It was not lost on me either that Mrs. Frink shared many attributes with my wonderful friend Stephanie Blythe.

The diary as it is published is 111 pages long. What to include in a musical setting? What to leave out? I decided to go instinctively with those sections of the text that leapt off the page to me, believing that a text that revealed itself in that immediate manner would have the best chance of imparting its essence to an audience hearing it set to music, hearing the text for the first time and hearing it for only one time. The texts that presented themselves for the songs, as wonderful as those texts are, are only tantalizing nuggets of the veins of gold to be discovered in the complete diary. My hope is that hearing the songs will spark an enthusiasm in many to read the whole, not only of Margaret Frink’s diary, but of the diaries of those many remarkable pioneer women.

The Music

My single goal in setting these marvelous texts to music was to be honest to the words, to the inherent emotions; to illuminate where appropriate and to stay out of the way when that was what was called for. One of the great pleasures of composing music for Stephanie Blythe is that she loves words, their meanings, their sounds, their emotional and dramatic impact. I know that she, at any given moment, will zero in on the core meaning of what she is singing, so my “job” was to set the vocal lines in such a way that I would not impede her communication, but encourage it. Most of the text is set syllabically (one syllable to one note) for clarity of understanding. Occasionally I wrote some runs in the vocal line to illustrate a particular idea such as the buffalo chase, knowing that Stephanie is no stranger to florid runs with all of her success in Baroque operas. Likewise it was a great pleasure to write the piano part for Warren Jones, knowing that he would instinctively find the full meaning of what was intended as well as imbue the musical meaning with his terrific musical imagination and splendid pianism.

Of the two string parts the cello has the larger role. There is a reason for this — in many cases the cello part represents Mr. Frink. Though we do not hear from him directly in words via the diary, the cello as employed in the song cycle often is a representation of his inner thoughts and feelings. The violin part most often represents the inner thoughts and feelings of Mrs. Frink. Since her words are heard much of the time, the commentary of the violin part on her inner thoughts is not copious. From time to time the strings represent pictorial ideas such as running buffalo, the braying of mules, or the back-and-forth motion of rocking chairs; at those times their musical illustration is absolutely equal in importance.

The pitch “A” provides an important musical reference point for the songs. The cycle begins on that note in both the piano and cello parts and it appears at other prominent moments in the group of songs, most notably in Margaret’s Dream, the eleventh part of the cycle, which is written for the instruments alone. Over a chordal piano accompaniment the violin sustains a long, high A that represents the huge distance of Mrs. Frink’s journey from both a physical and an emotional perspective. After a turbulent middle section, the long A returns, this time in the cello (Mr. Frink’s inner state of being), while the violin sings a soaring descant. Even the shape of the letter A, with its two “feet” rising to a midpoint reminds me in an abstract way of the famous arch in St. Louis, that city being an important setting-off point for many westward travelers. The shape of the St. Louis arch describes the metal hoops on the covered wagons that held the canvas tarps in place. Just so, the note A describes the length of Mrs. Frink’s journey with one “foot” in her Indiana home and the other firmly fixed in her destination in California, with the height and grandeur of mountain ranges in between.

One other important aural landmark that recurs frequently throughout the set of songs is heard in the very opening in the piano part. It is a shimmering chord in close harmony with added chord tones at the intervals of a ninth and an eleventh. The chord vibrates with harmonic possibility, just as the Frinks’ hearts and minds must have vibrated with the possibilities for what was ahead of them in their journey. The chord is arpeggiated in the very opening, but even when it is played as a block chord, as it is at many places in the cycle, it is luminescent like the shimmering allure of gold.

Listeners may find it interesting to know that the opening tune in the seventh song, The Sioux Tribe and the “White Squaw,” is a traditional Sioux melody that I found in a book of melodies for the native wooden flute. It is played by the cello in harmonics in order to impart the flavor of the native instrument.

The overall shape of the song cycle is such that the longest song, No. 10, The Mountain, arrives at the point of the Golden Mean and builds in intensity in the same way that Mrs. Frink describes the fierce exertion of humans and animals in reaching the top of the mountain. The song occupies a special place in the scope of the set of songs, just as the experience depicted by Mrs. Frink occupies a remarkable moment in the span of their journey. Margaret’s Dream, the piece that follows The Mountain, stems from my own imagination, not from the diary, and portrays both the bliss and anxiety of following her and her husband’s dream to emigrate to The West.

Vignettes: Covered Wagon Woman

Text from the Daily Journal of Margaret Ann Alsip Frink (1850)

The texts from Mrs. Frink’s journal are used with the kind acknowledgement of Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

1. The Allure of the West (Instrumental)

2. Prologue to the Journal

… We knew nothing of frontier life, nor how to prepare for it. And besides, we were met with all the discouragements and obstructions that our neighbors and the people of our county could invent or imagine, to induce us not to attempt such a perilous journey. But, nothing daunted, we kept at work in our preparations for the trip.

… We bade farewell to all our relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances.

… It was a beautiful spring day. Our faces were now at last set westward.

3. There’s a Lady — Monday, April 1

… whenever we stopped, even to water the horses, there would be squads of people standing about, full of curiosity, and making comments upon ourselves and our outfit, thinking we were certainly emigrants bound for California. But some would remark, “There’s a lady in the party; and surely there’s no man going to take a woman on such a journey as that, across the plains.” Then some of them would venture to approach the wagon and cautiously peep in; then, seeing a lady, they would respectfully take off their hats, with a polite salutation; and we felt that, if there was anything in having good wishes expressed for us, we should certainly have a successful and pleasant trip.

4. Considerable Excitement — Saturday, April 6

… We found considerable excitement prevailing over the report that a California emigrant had been murdered that day some ten miles west of the city, on the road we were to travel the next day. I then began to feel that we had undertaken a risky journey, even long before we came to the Indian country. We got out the Colt’s revolver that night to see that it was in good order, and made ready to defend ourselves against attack …

5. The Face of the Earth — Tuesday, May 14

We were safely across the wide and muddy-colored stream by eleven o’clock this morning. Now that we are over, and the wide expanse of the great plains is before us, we feel like mere specks on the face of the earth.

6. Buffalo Chase — Wednesday, May 22

After we had started this morning, there was great excitement over a buffalo chase.… As far as we could see, every one that was on horseback went flying in the direction of the buffalo. Our men gave the saddle-horses a fatiguing run, but not without a reprimand from Mr. Frink when they returned. He informed them very distinctly that he had not started for California to hunt buffalo. But I really could not blame the men very much, though the chase was bad for the horses. The animation and excitement of the moment beat anything I ever saw, and I would not, for a good deal, have missed the sight of that great chase over that grand plain. Someone brought us a piece of buffalo steak, so that we were not without a share of the prize.

7. The Sioux Tribe and the “White Squaw” — Monday, June 3

We traveled ten miles today and stopped on good grass. In the afternoon we passed an Indian encampment numbering seventy tents. They belonged to the Sioux tribe, but were quite friendly. The squaws were much pleased to see the “white squaw” in our party, as they called me. I had brought a supply of needles and thread, some of which I gave them. We also had some small mirrors in gilt frames, and a number of other trinkets, with which we could buy fish and fresh buffalo, deer, and antelope meat. But money they would not look at.

8. Lost Boy — Saturday, July 27

… Our boy Robert took up a horse near the road, it having the appearance of being lost, and by doing so got separated from us. During the afternoon we became quite anxious about him, but reconciled ourselves with the thought that we should find him at the river. But when we reached the river, Robert was not there, and it was getting late.… I was almost frantic for fear the Indians had caught him.… But Aaron Rose had unhitched the best horse, and started back over the hills. Never can I forget those minutes. The thought of leaving the boy, never to hear of him again! But just at dark, Aaron came in sight, having the lost boy with him. My joy turned into tears. It was some time after dark before we got into our camp for the night.

9. Upon Them She Depended — Tuesday, August 27

… At noon we stopped in the cañon and took our lunch. Here we met some emigrants, among whom was a lady who had lost or left her husband behind. Their horses had been stolen by the Indians, and he went after them, but never returned. The mother, with seven children, had been brought thus far by strangers, and upon them she depended to get through to California.

10. The Mountain — Friday, August 30

After traveling one mile from the edge of the lake, we came to the foot of the mountain. It was very steep and high and looked impassable.

The road turned to the left and went up slanting, which was an advantage. But it was a hard struggle for the weak horses. Though the wagons were nearly empty, we had to stop often and let the animals rest.

After great toil, we had climbed by noon to the steepest part of the road where it seemed impossible to go any further.… The snow in the road was melted down to the ground, leaving the bare rocks to travel over. The snow walls on each side of this passage were twelve or fifteen feet high.…

We halted here and took our lunch, and fed to the tired horses the last of the hay that Mr. Frink had provided for them.… We first took everything we could out of the wagons, in order to lighten them, and packed them on Mr. Russell’s mules. Then Mr. Frink unharnessed the two horses from the small wagon, and hitched them with the four horses on the large wagon. Then he tied long ropes to the tongue, and strung them out in front. Four or five men put these ropes over their shoulders and pulled with the horses. Others lifted at the wheels, and when the horses stopped, they held the wheels to keep the wagon from rolling back. Robert and I went ahead leading the pack mules.… We had to stop often and take breath. The air was getting lighter at every step, and the climbing was hard work.

At last Robert and I got to the top with the mules and their burdens. I was utterly exhausted. I took a buffalo robe from the packs and wrapped myself in it, and lay down by the side of the road on top of the mountain and went to sleep. I told Robert to keep watch over me and the mules.

11. Margaret’s Dream (Instrumental)

12. Here We Are — Saturday, September 7

During the last eight days of the journey, we had descended, in traveling ninety miles, from a height of nine thousand three hundred thirty-eight feet, to within thirty feet of the tide-level of the Pacific Ocean.

We had left home just five months and seven days before. Our friends the Carsons came into camp with us. They had crossed the Missouri River with us … but were separated from us for weeks and months at a time. They were strongly of the opinion that Mr. Frink would never get through, because he brought his wife with him. Yet here we are, all together once more, safe at the end of our long and eventful journey.

13. Epilogue to the Journal

… We had traversed the continent, from the far east to the farthest west, and were now on the verge of its broadest ocean. But we had no wish to tempt the perils of the great deep. The future … seemed to us full of promise, and here we resolved to rest from our pilgrimage.