By Roy Hemming

Morton Gould still winces whenever he recalls it. He was visiting one of America’s leading classical-music stations just a few years ago, for an interview about a new work of his being introduced that week by a major symphony orchestra. The program director was proudly showing him the station’s new computer index for its many thousands of recordings. “Ask me for any pieece,” he challenged Gould, “and I’ll show you how quickly we can locate all the recordings and all the information we need about them.” Gould thought a minute and replied, “OK, what have you got of mine?” The director pushed a few computer keys and, after a number of whirrs and whooshes, up came the printout: “Morton Gould: see Pops and Light Classics.”

“They even had my twelve-tone Jekyll and Hyde Variations in that category!” Gould recalls with anguish in his voice.

That’s not an isolated incident, either. Musical America’s Composer of the Year has written symphonies, concertos, orchestral suites, overtures, and other works that have been premiered by the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, and dozens of other major orchestras. He composed one of the most famous of all American ballets, Fall River Legend. In fact, he’s the only American composer who has written original scores for the “Big Three” of American ballet: Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, and George Balanchine. The list of conductors who have introduced his music on concert programs over the years reads like a Who’s Who of the Podium: Arturo Toscanini, Leopold Stokowski, Artur Rodzinski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Eugene Ormandy, Lorin Maazel, Georg Solti, Leonard Slatkin, and Mstislav Rostropovich, among others. This past year he was specially commissioned to compose the only piece (titled Ghost Waltzes) required of all semifinalists in the Ninth Van Cliburn Piano Competition.

But he’s still categorized by many for the radio work and recordings he did back in his twenties and thirties as a conductor and arranger of light classics, Broadway show tunes, and popular music. Not that he’s ashamed of that, or of the two Broadway musicals (Billion Dollar Baby and Arms and the Girl) and four film scores he wrote. Quite the contrary. His success in those areas gave him the economic security to provide for his family and to concentrate on more classical composing since the ‘50s. It also honed his skills as a master orchestrator for all sizes of orchestras—a skill that few other composers to this day can begin to match. It’s just that in terms of Gould’s overall career, the “pops” work was only a small part. As he prepared to celebrate his 80th birthday, on December 10, 1993, he seemed relieved that a less skewed and more balanced overview was emerging in the many tributes being planned this season. “For example, the Chicago Symphony will be playing the Fall River Legend suite, the Pittsburgh Symphony is doing my Burchfield Gallery, and the American Symphony Orchestra in New York my Spirituals for Orchestra,” he noted with evident satisfaction. In addition, other major Gould works are on the 1993-94 schedules of orchestras in Toronto, Boston, Albany, Nashville, Cedar Rapids, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, to name just a few. And several record companies are reissuing not only some of Gould’s own works but also his pioneering ‘50s and ‘60s recordings as a conductor of works by other composers—including a Grammy Award-winning disc of Ives’s First Symphony.

Actually, there are some who feel it’s partly Gould’s own fault that he’s never been able to shake off the “pops” categorization. That’s because, even in his most serious pieces, his innate skill for writing attractive, accessible melodies always seems to shine through-even though that‘s long been considered “out of step” or “old fashioned” in some of our loftier academic and critical circles. But it’s a very natural part of Gould’s musical soul, and he’s never been willing to suppress it in order to be “in style.”

Similarly, he admits to an inability to resist using what he calls the vernacular in many of his works. “I’m fascinated by all the sounds I hear around me every day,” he says unashamedly, “and I like to use them creatively wherever I can. I mean jazz rhythms, cowboy music, hillbilly music, old hymns, spirituals, gospel, Hebraic chants, Muslim chants—almost any kind of musical sound triggers me. They can really launch me into a certain kind of creative orbit. I use them as jumping-off points and transform them—I’m that kind of a composer. That’s my chemistry.”

Gould recently became the first major composer to use rap in a concert work. Both the Nashville Symphony and the Pittsburgh Youth Orchestra have performed his The jogger and the Dinosaur for narrator and orchestra, and it’s scheduled by at least five other orchestras for their 1993-94 season, as well as for a recording session. “I wrote both the music and the text about two years ago,” Gould says, noting that this was before the hit movie Jurassic Park made dinosaurs all the rage. “The narration is all done in rap—a stylized rap. The jogger runs into a dinosaur outside a museum and they start rapping. The dinosaur tells the jogger he was here ‘long before your kind,’ and so on. There’s a lot of fun in it.”

Gould has had to cut back on composing time in recent years because of his job as president of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers). He’s the first classical composer to head that prestigious performance-rights organization since Deems Taylor in the 1940s. He agreed, at first somewhat reluctantly in 1986, to serve for one or two terms, and is now in his eighth term. “It’s a real full-time working presidency, not a figurehead position,” he observes. “And we go from one crisis to another, particularly over the piracy of material that the creators have copyrighted. Because of all the advances in technology, somebody today with equipment you can hardly see can have 2,000 copyrights on a single chip and duplicate them with the highest professional quality. That’s plain theft of creative property! Also with satellites up in the sky and all that, music now goes through so many different communicative areas that after a while it’s hard to know who owns what or who has rightful use. These are tough problems with no easy answers.”

Tough, yes, but then Morton Gould has never been one to live and work in some artistic ivory tower far away from the heart of the musical activity of his time. “You know,” he continues, “we live in a time when everybody says a symphony orchestra should open itself up to doing all kinds of music. Not necessarily. It should be music that really uses the symphony orchestra and doesn’t just have the players doing a holding action while, say, a jazz group noodles in front of them. It doesn’t make sense to have a few soloists playing real jazz while the orchestra has only a sustained chord or two. It bastardizes both idioms. But you can take the gestures of jazz—and many other kinds of music—and transform them into something that really uses the apparatus of a symphony orchestra. That’s another story. That’s justifiable. That’s what I try to do.”

And, indeed, he has succeeded like few others. In a nation that prides itself on its melting-pot diversity in so many areas, Morton Gould stands tall as a boundless creative force spanning the fullest dimensions of 20th-century American music.

Roy Hemming is the author of Discovering Great Music (Newmarket Press) and a regular contributor to Stereo Review, Video Review, and Gramophone, among others. He also produced the New York Philharmonic’s weekly syndicated radio broadcasts from 1980 until their demise in 1991.