Alec Wilder

3. Evolutions: Compositional Maturity in the 1950s

3 Evolutions Compositional Maturity in the 1950s from the late 1940s through the 1950s, Alec Wilder pursued a long-held goal with growing confidence and perseverance.Having made his name as a songwriter-arranger,he now aspired to become more of a“composer.” He never abandoned the popular song; in a way, the popular song abandoned him, in the voices and antics of Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley.“As the new amateur,noisy,clumsy,tasteless writers came into power,”Wilder later recalled, “it became increasingly less fun to try to write a respectable, professional, stylish, tasteful song” (The Search, 92). But he did continue to try, even as he found himself drawn more and more to the sounds and artistic sensibilities of the theater, opera house, and concert hall. Wilder’s turn toward concert music was also inspired, in his mind, by his association and friendship with his Eastman confrère John Barrows.After Eastman,Barrows had gone on to San Diego StateTeachers’ College andYale,followed by a few years in the horn section of the Minneapolis Symphony in the late 1930s. During the war he was assistant leader of the Army Air Forces Band. He then settled in New York and played with the New York City Opera and New York City Ballet orchestras in the late 1940s, along with freelance work in recording sessions and radio orchestras. Eventually he would turn to teaching, at Yale, New York University , and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.1 Wilder called Barrows “the 47 greatest musician I have ever known” (The Search, 64). Barrows took on a role for Wilder’s concert music that Mitch Miller had once played for Wilder’s experience in the popular realm: promoting him, helping him find opportunities, and offering boundless encouragement.Wilder wrote of Barrows,“I knew that there never could be a more powerful influence in my musical life. For one thing, he believed that I was a composer. Many others believed only that I was a songwriter, but because they were fond of me, [they] smiled affably when I spoke of my other writing and offered a transparent kind of lip service. From the time he came to New York to this moment [1972], John has remained the reason I still try to write music.”2 Over the decades of their friendship, Wilder would write not only because of Barrows but also for him, as a soloist and in chamber groups. Music of this type, for small forces, usually performed in intimate settings, was a natural fit for Wilder’s modest self-image and sense of his own place in the musical firmament. Opera Wilder’s turn away from popular culture in this period led him not only to chamber music but also to opera, a genre he had not previously explored. Of course, his operatic conceptions were hardly Wagnerian in scope, more on the order of the “chamber opera” for small casts, telling simple stories. And unlike some of his other writing for voices in popular songs, Wilder always depended on a collaborator for the words he was setting and for story and character development and dramatic organization. He may have first discussed operas and libretti and potential projects with Arnold Sundgaard during this time, but his initiation into the genre came about after had begun writing songs with a new acquaintance: “Sometime in the late forties I started working with a rather fey young man who had been begging me to write with him. Bill Engvick had gone back to Oakland where he was working in a record store for some abysmal salary.The New York commercial scene had been too much for him, the people dismayed him, and not enough good had happened for him to want to linger in an alien land” (Life Story, 111). The “fey young man” was Marshall Barer, then working as a commercial artist but also trying to build a résumé as a writer.Barer would find success on Broadway about ten years later working with Mary Rodgers as the lyricist and cowriter of One upon a Mattress. Wilder first set one of Barer’s poems, “River Run,” as a colorful art song in the late 1940s. They then wrote conventional pop songs for commercial releases:“I’ll DanceYou,” a throwback to the operetta waltz, with the sounds of the oboe and bassoon standing out in the backing orchestra (recorded by Eddy Howard and His Orchestra); [3.16.66.206] Project...