Samuel Barber, American Airman

Published July 24, 2015
By Senior Master Sergeant Bill Tortolano

Washington, D.C. -- Samuel Barber (1910 - 1981) was considered an up-and-coming composer when he was drafted into the Army in 1942. In 1943 he transferred from Special Services to the Army Air Force where he came to the attention of General Henry Harley Arnold. Commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, "Hap" Arnold was ahead of his time, seeking subtle ways in which to wage "influence" instead of war. He commissioned musicians, actors and artists such as Glenn Miller and Ogden Pleissner to help raise the morale of the troops at home, on the front and behind enemy lines where new music and even jazz were prohibited by the Third Reich. Barber was already well known as internationally as a neo-Romantic composer overseas and would subsequently write five more progressive compositions during his enlistment.

"Commando March" and "Funeral March" for band were his first attempts at adjusting to life in the Army. Glenn Miller had already transformed the "march" by putting a jazz combo on top of a flatbed truck as the troops swung to a new beat in a new era. Barber would imprint his own "sophistication" on this musical form, and today "Commando March" remains popular on concert band programs. With the "Funeral March," Barber was less successful. Perhaps he was trying to capture an emotion that seemed antithetical to the upbeat Air Force Song, "Off we Go" on which it was based. To this day it remains unpublished and only one (unreleased) recording exists.

"Four Excursions" for piano and "Capricorn Concerto" for chamber orchestra belong to a more "off duty" Corporal Barber in that their intent and manifestation represents a respite from all things military. Programmatic music was something Barber wanted to avoid. Biographer Barbara Heyman explains, "Barber was consistent in his work not to tell a specific story or paint a detailed picture." This doesn't mean that these works were any less patriotic. In fact each "excursion" was an opportunity for the composer to try his hand at a uniquely American idiom. From the boogie-woogie style of a five-part rondo to a theme and variations on a well known cowboy ballad, and even to a barnyard dance with a fiddler, Barber uses each genre effectively and accurately, according to neo-Romantic ideas.

"Capricorn Concerto" is yet another nod to a form and style popular at the time: Neo-classicism. The idea was to take baroque forms, such as the concerto grosso in this case, and give the harmony a twist of 20th century dissonance while maintaining the melodic line. However, the real crossroads of compositional style for Barber would be his Second Symphony (dedicated to the Army Air Forces)

Second Symphony Dedicated to the Army Air Forces

Barber was given tremendous latitude as an active-duty airman. Lt. Gen. Barton K. Yount (commander, Air Force Training Command at Ft. Worth, Texas) was so supportive of Barber's proposal to write a symphony that he allowed him to work from his home in New York. Barber, in turn, worked quickly and with an intensity not seen before. In fact, he hitched a ride on a B-24 "Liberator" bomber on a training mission to experience firsthand the thrill of flying. In a letter to his uncle he wrote, "we banked, we twisted and turned and turned, dived, then the young pilots, who seemed almost too young and small for the huge machine - they were only twenty-five - flew blindfolded." What results in terms of musical composition is "a compact, cellularly driven work," according to Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony, who has recorded five compact discs of Barber's works.

Andante un poco mosso, op. 19A ("Night Flight")

In analyzing the symphony, it makes sense to start with the second movement. This is not only because it inspired an independent composition later on, but also it is where we find Barber most articulate (musically and in commentary) about identifying with Airmen. According to Barbara Heyman, scholar and author of numerous books on Samuel Barber, "many times he wrote the slow movements of his compositions first; perhaps they were the easiest for him to write because he was a singer and because he wanted to convey feelings and emotions through lyricism." She continues, "The songs of Barber are really key in that many are biographically pointed. That might explain why so many second movements (the Adagio "Night Flight," for example) are among his most memorable works."

The 5/4 time signature is really more an attempt to blur the bar line emphasis as opposed to a manifestation of all the septuplet variants in the first movement. What we have is the impression ("hum") of four propeller engines, each with its own ostinato that underlies a soulful, if lonely, English horn solo. What is unprecedented; however, is the inclusion of "electronic music" towards the end of the movement, not in the avant-garde sense of 20th century music, but nonetheless uncommon at this time.

The device was an electric tone-generator built by Bell Telephone Laboratories to simulate the sound of a low-frequency radio range (LFR). Used by aircraft in the 1930s and 1940s, pilots navigated the LFR by listening to a stream of automated "A" and "N" Morse codes. For example, they would turn the aircraft to the right when hearing an "N" stream, to the left when hearing an "A" stream and fly straight ahead while hearing a steady tone. The range station (destination) would preempt the navigational signals every 30 seconds to transmit its Morse code identifier. In Barber's symphony, no airfield identifier is heard, but rather a series of steady tones implying, perhaps, that his new work was "on the beam" (headed in the right direction) as the Boston Globe titled its review some 70 years ago.

Allegro ma non troppo

The first movement is built on musical themes that exude flight and are rife with code. Dissonant chords in the woodwinds vertically outline a theme in the strings that is jagged and forceful. Immediately following is a motif characterized by septuplets that captures the unwieldy nature of the B-24, "more difficult to fly, with heavy control forces and poor formation-flying characteristics." To someone who has flown in the back of a C-130, the sounds and feeling of gravitational stress on the fuselage are uncannily captured through Barber's music!

A mere 29 measures into the symphony, one is struck by a second, contrasting theme that sounds suspiciously like code (....-..-...--.-..-.). Never a literalist, Barber wasn't trying to tell us something in secret, rather "give the impression of Morse code ... urgent, repeated, but not a distress call," according to retired U.S. Air Force Col. Jeffrey Renner, a C-130 navigator. What makes it more than just a thematic idea that gets developed throughout the movement is the fact that it retains its four-bar structure and gets "transmitted" from the strings, to the horns, to the woodwinds, etc. In fact, it is the commanding force that drives the piece to its climax at the recapitulation. One has to jump to Barber's "Third Essay for Orchestra," written at the end of his life, to see percussion used in this manner and to this extent.

As exciting and climatic as this is, the same "code theme" is used at the movement's end with equal effect. Toward the end of the movement, the bottom drops out and we are left with "string clouds" and a diminishing code that fades as dusk becomes night. If one has ever watched the sun disappear over the horizon at sunset (that small "explosion" just before the sun disappears), then the final chord-effect in the percussion is indeed surreal.

Presto, senza battuta

A lot has been written about the third movement. Multiple program notes, including those in Barber's own words, talk about the opening being "very fast with no bar-lines between the notes. Barber wanted to express a spiral and believed the way to do it was to have the music go very freely, though with definite accents." On closer analysis, what occurs is a 28-note theme that is followed (after the fermata) by an almost exact inversion. For instance, notes that go up, like a 6th in the opening, would go down a 6th in the answer. Not exactly Schoenberg's 12-tone system of 20th century composition, but Barber's inversion "would make perfect sense in a rapid ascent ... then that momentary pause before the plane turns and descends upside down."

The theme is transformed in a number of ways, including diminution, augmentation and fragmentation. A second theme (6/8 Allegro risoluto) is made up of four bars of "rhythmic snap" followed by another four bars with a lyrical descending line. This, too, is developed using variations of triplets, duplets, fragmentation, canon, augmentation and pointillism. There is even the start of a double fugue. This displays a plethora of known compositional techniques that gradually calm just before the end, where it is eerily reminiscent of Mahler's Symphony No. 10 (Adagio, at the point just before the apocalyptic "scream").

Barber destroys the work

In 1964, Barber is reported to have entered his publisher's warehouse and personally torn up all known copies of the score and parts. People have speculated a number of reasons why he did this. Some say that Barber felt it was not a good work, others point to 1960's anti-war sentiment and there are those who don't believe it ever happened. What we do know is that at the time of its composition: a) Barber felt that this "was one of my most complicated works," b) Serge Koussevitzky (who conducted the premiere with the Boston Symphony) said it "is a work of lasting importance," and c) "comments of pilots and [Air Force members] were particularly touching." The most reasonable explanation comes from Barbara Heyman's book, "Samuel Barber: the Composer and his Music," where she quotes Barber from a letter he wrote in 1951 while on a train through the Russian zone - Berlin to Frankfurt:

"I am not so naif [sic] as not to realize the fact that several years ago these people
were my 'enemies.' I suddenly recalled, while conducting the Second Symphony,
that I was nominally in that Air Force which was technically responsible for those
square miles of desolation and rubble in the middle of their particular city ... and I
felt thankful to my art that seemed, for the moment at least, to transcend racial and political barriers."

It is curious that this is the only composition that Barber ever withdrew from circulation. It is also interesting that in 1984, a set of orchestra parts that somehow were overlooked and had escaped ruin turned up in a warehouse of a G. Schirmer agency in England." The symphony is certainly revealing in that its compositional craft separates the composer who we know, from the composer that could have been. Up until the war, Samuel Barber's style was criticized as being too romantic and having one foot in the past. Yet his Second Symphony embarked on a daring path that took him in a direction that he was, perhaps, uncomfortable with or at least unwilling on which to take a chance. Add to that the fact that post-war America was nostalgic for a musically "rural" landscape, (i.e. "Knoxville Summer of 1915"), and it's no wonder that Barber felt more at home with a style of composition that had earned him critical, if not financial, success.

Epilogue

Samuel Barber occupies a unique place amongst composers. Unlike his contemporaries Copland and Bernstein, he served in the armed forces. At first, he found it "strange that they do not use us composers more than they do for propaganda," but after the war, he questioned his own effectiveness in that endeavor. Like most veterans of that era, he chose not to talk about his feelings and instead funnel his emotions through music. Sincere but not simplistic, complex yet never confusing, the music of "Samuel Barber, American Airman" occupies an important chapter in the life of one of America's foremost composers.

Army Air Forces Cpl. Samuel Barber meets with Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky in 1944.