Biography
Morton Gould was born in Richmond Hill, New York on 10th December 1913. Early on, he was recognised as a child prodigy with the ability to improvise and compose. His first composition was written at the age of six. It was at Julliard School of Music that he studied piano with Abby Whiteside and composition with Vincent Jones. During the Depression, as a teenager he found work in New York’s Vaudeville and movie theatres. By the age of 21 he had established himself nationally through conducting and arranging a series of orchestral programmes for radio.
He composed Broadway scores, film music, music for television (Holocaust, the CBS documentary World War I) and ballet scores. His music was commissioned throughout the United States by symphony orchestras, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Centre, The American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. Gould integrated jazz, blues, gospel, country and western as well as folk elements into compositions which bear his unrivalled mastery of orchestration and imaginative formal structures.
Gould was of Jewish origin, and understood the recent and distant history of oppression and discrimination experienced by both the Black and Jewish communities. It is therefore little wonder that he drew inspiration from Negro spirituals that captured an experience and aspiration for another world in which these communities would feel entirely at home and not like aliens. Gould died in Orlando, Florida in 1996. Concerning his passion for spirituals he states:
“ I have always been stimulated by the vernacular, by the sound of spirituals, jazz etc…. As a composer I have written a number of original works that have their roots in the [spiritual] idiom. In this work [Spirituals for Strings], however, I have used actual spirituals in instrumental settings. I have purposely treated them with what I hope is restraint.”
Spirituals for Strings (1959)
- Were you there? – Steal Away: Slowly
- All God’s Children Got Wings: Fast
- Little David Play on Your Harp: Freely out of tempo, rhapsodic
- Calvary – He Never Said a Mumblin’ Word: Slowly, moving, funereal
- Ezekiel Saw de Wheel: Brisk and spirited
