A Louisville Orchestra original 75 years ago...and Saturday night

The Solar System-sized The Planets , and a classical music-sized Mozart piano concerto headline the Louisville Orchestra ’s season-opening concert September 14 in Whitney Hall. But it might be one of the orchestra’s original originals that grabs a slice of the limelight as it leads off the symphony’s 87 ^th season.

Guest conductor Paolo Bortolameolli , of Santiago, Chile, has the baton, and French pianist David Fray performs Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21.

But before all that, the concert’s leadoff number is one of the five new music works commissioned and recorded by the Louisville Orchestra for its 1948-49 season. That’s the year the symphony began championing new music by contemporary composers – and Darius Milhaud was the “name” composer the symphony sought and signed to add international interest to its new direction.

Milhaud, who grew up in Aix-en-Provence (the south of France city favored by painter Paul Cezanne), alternated musical seasons between the European music capital of Paris, the recording scene in New York, and a teaching post at Mills College, in Oakland, California. Mills was a women’s college, but a few graduate male students were admitted into its music program to study with Milhaud – including Stan Getz and Burt Bachrach. Plus, Milhaud took a few years in Brazil, where Latin rhythms danced naturally into his music.

Naturally, Darius Milhaud would rank at the top of the wish list for Louisville Orchestra music director Robert Whitney — and Louisville mayor Charlie Farnsley, a partner with Whitney in focusing on contemporary composers. The pair was eager to include a Milhaud piece among the first five the L.O. would commission. And signing a “name” composer, the director and the mayor agreed, could boost interest in the symphony’s new direction.

In New York, Whitney met with executives of Columbia Records to talk radio and recording, and with influential music critic/composer Virgil Thomson, of the New York Herald-Tribune, to get the news out. Corresponding by mail with Whitney, Milhaud accepted the same fee the orchestra offered each composer, $500 – which, he noted, was below his standard $1,000 commission — but was happy to “help out” Whitney in his plans.

Milhaud was always on the move, and in 1948 he told music writer Arthur Berger that he delighted in composing while traveling across country by train. He said he had just received a commission from the Louisville Orchestra to compose a piece that he would he call Kentuckiana , and that he “was going to think about it, plan it out, on the train.”

For her doctoral dissertation, Southern Baptist Seminary graduate student Sandra Lee Fralin researched the era and in 2000 published a two-volume The Role of the Louisville Orchestra in the Fostering of New Music, 1947-1997 . She found the train story, and more.

Milhaud very happily followed Whitney’s suggestion that the piece could contain some Louisville or Kentucky flair – if the composer liked. Milhaud studied the published and unpublished music of the region and called his new piece Kentuckiana: Divertissement on Twenty Kentucky Airs. He described it as, “an overture in the French style on twenty Kentucky airs.”

What were those “airs?” Fralin concluded that identifying the exact 20 tunes Milhaud referenced would be difficult. It wasn’t that clear cut. And Courier-Journal critic Dwight Anderson, who was also Dean of the University of Louisville School of Music, dismissed the exercise as missing the point.

“The twenty tunes chosen by the composer are not developed or varied,” wrote Anderson. “They just appear in profusion, sometimes heaped upon each other so prodigally that the ear can’t untangle them. One leaps at you, but before you can catch it another tumbles after. Singly,” Anderson said, “they spell Kentucky’s knobs or hills or mountains; together they race with panoramic speed from Mills Point to the Breaks of Sandy.”

He liked it.

Listening to the Louisville Orchestra’s First Edition recording of Kentuckiana , one finds the whole thing clattering along at a nice pace, kind of like that train on which Milhaud composed. The “sound” of the thing reminded me of an Aaron Copland cowboy piece. (Copland, himself, was a later an L.O. commissioned composer.) Or Ferde Grofe at the “Rodeo.” It’s kind of a Bluegrass fields, county fair, courthouse square kind of thing. Marching along.