Article No. 3, Originally in the 1999 AAA Festival Journal
by Dr Robert Young McMahan about:
Wallingford Riegger: Cooper Square
Paul Creston: Concerto for Accordion and Orchestra
Virgil Thomson: Lamentations
is online at: https://www.ameraccord.com/aaacommissions24.php

Following the first commission of the American Accordionists’ Association Composers’ Commissioning Committee (CCC) in 1957, Paul Creston’s landmark Prelude and Dance, CCC Chairperson Elsie Bennett, promptly and boldly set upon assigning three more works in close succession within a twelve-month span, resulting in Wallingford Riegger’s Cooper Square, Paul Creston’s Concerto for Accordion and Orchestra, and Virgil Thomson’s Lamentations, contracted respectively in April 1958, July 1958, and April 1959. A more widely diverse and renowned representation of world-famous American composers of that time could hardly be imagined and was quite a coup for the AAA and the growing contemporary repertoire for the accordion.

Wallingford Riegger had achieved world recognition in the 1920s as an early American proponent of atonality and twelve-tone serialism and was proclaimed by modern music pundits to be a member of the then avant-garde “American Five,” the other four of whom were Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, John Becker, and Henry Cowell (the last to eventually be commissioned twice by the AAA as well). Sometimes, however, he would write in more traditional ways as he did in this rather humorous, boisterous, and at times, Latin dance-style piece. The title might have referred to the Five Spot, a popular eatery on Cooper Square in New York City where many noted musicians, mostly in the jazz field, often informally performed.

Creston’s highly virtuosic and entertaining three-movement concerto is a landmark work for our instrument, especially in the USA, where it has enjoyed many excellent performances with both world renowned and local symphony orchestras and is an indispensable part of every concert accordionist’s repertoire. It represents Creston at his very best.

It may be argued that Missouri born Virgil Thomson made his first great mark on the world in the Paris of the 1920s where he, like many artists both in or visiting that musical mecca of the day, was in the court of the curious and great literary figure residing there then, American born writer and poet Gertrude Stein. Thomson’s fame was arguably first established by his and Stein’s curious opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), in which he elected to conspicuously include the accordion throughout the orchestration. Generally a rather harmonically traditional composer, his commissioned solo for the AAA, Lamentations, is a brief series of virtuosic variations on a loud, almost terrifying marching theme consisting of crashing dissonant polychords. It is one of the most interesting and curious works of the CCC commissions.

All three composers were greatly respected figures in America’s formative period in modern music. Creston and Thomson were generally regarded as the more conservative of the three while Riegger had a somewhat more radical reputation, both musically and politically. 

Read the article at: https://www.ameraccord.com/aaacommissions24.php