Peter Mennin: a composer born from the Eastman tradition…

There is so much to say about this symphony, as it is filled with so many interesting elements, especially in terms of harmony and rhythm. But I feel like I’ve ramble on enough about this piece and want to move on to others.

So for my last post on Peter Mennin (at least until I study him again), I want to talk about where he belongs in the history of music. When historians and history books cover this era of music history, they tend to get tied up in the areas of atonality, serialism, chance music, minimalism, and so forth. However, Mennin fits in another camp, that of extended tonality, a continuation of what was going on before Schoenberg moved into the atonal realm.

As you have seen here, vertical harmonies might not always function the way we would expect, but horizontal lines are indicative of a key. These are elements of 20th century counterpoint, used by composers such as William Schuman, Bernard Rogers, and Howard Hanson.

I suppose you could say this area is sometimes avoided in history texts because it adds a whole new dimension to recent music history. Certainly Schumann, Rogers, Hanson, and their peers wrote for orchestra, but their names are most commonly associated with compositions for wind ensemble.

As the title of this post suggests, Mennin was born out of the Eastman tradition. He was at Eastman right before Frederick Fennell formed the Eastman Wind Ensemble, of which Hanson was a big supporter. Hanson composed several works for wind ensemble, a sound that belongs to what many college directors call “50s band music.” It is a distinct extended tonality that characterizes these works. Instrumental choirs were used independently and rarely mixed.

That being said, when I first heard Mennin’s Third Symphony, I instantly heard the sound of the wind ensemble in the orchestration and tonality. This stems from the sound that he inherited from his teachers. In flipping through Howard Hanson’s first two symphonies, what sticks out to me is his grouping of instrumental choirs, frequent use of brass for melodic material, and frequent meter shifts.

The characteristics of Mennin’s Third Symphony are very similar. And here, I am going to list the qualities of Mennin’s symphony that sets him apart from other symphonic composers:

• The use of counterpoint within tonal areas without much regard for vertical sonority.
  
• The use of asynchronous rhythms and metric pulses.
  
• The use of the orchestras choirs to present themes in whole, rarely blending woodwind and brass, or brass and string, etc.
  
• Minimal thematic material with lots of development.
  
• Ambiguous, yet fluid form.

Though Mennin’s symphonies belong to this camp of tonal (or at least tone centric) music, I hope in the future that these symphonies will get studied more frequently.

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Works Referenced

• Battisti, Frank L. The Winds of Change. Galesville: Meredith Music Publications, 2002.
  
• Hanson, Howard. Symphony No. 1. Boston: Carl Fischer Inc., 1923.
  
• Hanson, Howard. Symphony No. 2. New York: Carl Fischer Inc., 1932.
  
• Mennin, Peter. Symphony No. 3. New York: Hargail Music Press, 1948.