Peter Mennin
Concertato for Orchestra, Moby Dick
Peter Mennin was born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1923 and died in New York City in 1983. He composed this work in 1952 on a commission from the Erie Philharmonic, and that orchestra was the first to perform the work the same year under the baton of Fritz Mahler. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.
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Peter Mennin spent most of his career in academia, but it would be an injustice to call him an “academic composer” in the current sense of the term. His powerful, rhythmically-charged music found receptive audiences in concert halls throughout the country and all over the world.
After a stint in the U.S. Army Air Force during WWII, Mennin earned his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degrees at the Eastman School of Music. In 1947 he joined the composition faculty of the Julliard School, a position he held for ten years. He then studied in Europe for a year on Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships; when he returned, he spent four years as Director of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. In 1962 he became President of the Julliard School, a position he held until his death in 1983. He also served as the chairman of the National Music Council, president of the Walter Naumburg Foundation, was a member of U.S. State Department Advisory Committee on the Arts, and served on the boards of ASCAP, the American Music Center, the Composer’s Forum, the Koussevitsky Foundation, and the Lincoln Center Council.
All the while, Mennin composed prolifically. His output includes nine symphonies, several concertos, works for piano, works for band, a large number of choral works and chamber music. His compositions were commissioned by the leading orchestras and conductors of his day.
Mennin’s Concertato for Orchestra, Moby Dick, has the distinction of being the only orchestral work he composed with an extra-musical reference. Mennin had been sent a rough libretto based on Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” which prompted him to reread the classic novel. The experience didn’t tempt him to compose an opera on the subject, but it did lead him to compose this Concertato, a distillation of his symphonic method into a short, one-movement piece. (Out of many possible meanings for concertato, one assumes that what was meant in this instance was “little concerto”—in this case, a concerto for orchestra.) Mennin warned that his music did not aim to tell Melville’s story in a literal way; he said it “depicts the emotional impact of the novel as a whole rather than musically describing isolated incidents occurring in the novel.”
Mennin very often used a process of continual variation in his compositions and you can hear it at work in his Concertato. The piece is in two parts. The first part begins with a single violin note and a mysterious chord progression in the winds. That chord progression contains a hint of the main theme of the work, which is then immediately heard in the strings. The melody itself is simple, as motives often are, but it is set with a harmonic richness that is utterly beautiful. The flute elaborates, then the music develops itself to a large climax that leads to the second part and its faster tempo. The two themes of this section appear immediately: the jaunty wind tune and the flowing music in the strings, both derived from the work’s first theme. These are developed with relentless rhythmic energy, wide dynamic contrasts, and the kind of sheer musical drama that leaves you breathless.