To be remembered, a composer needs advocates who will promote and perform his music. George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1931), who complained about the lack of interest in his music during the last decade of his life, has benefited greatly from devoted advocates in recent years. Victor Fell Yellin and Steven Ledbetter did much to make scholars and performers aware of the composer's contributions to U.S. musical life through groundbreaking research and publications, particularly in the years following the U.S. Bicentennial. Conductors Kenneth Schermerhorn, Neeme Järvi, and José Serebrier; the Portland String Quartet; pianist Peter Kairoff; and others responded with recordings of Chadwick's works. Since the 1990s, Marianne Betz and Bill F. Faucett have deepened and expanded our understanding of this important figure through their biographical and analytical studies as well as through their efforts to convince Chadwick's heirs to make his correspondence, memoirs, and manuscript scores accessible to scholars. Three fine volumes published by these two scholars in the A-R Editions’ Recent Researches in American Music series provide carefully produced critical scores of several of his lesser-known instrumental compositions, significantly enhancing our understanding of Chadwick's early works.

The First String Quartet was completed in early 1878 while the composer was a student in Leipzig and reviewed favorably at its Gewandhaus premiere on 29 May 1878. The Second String Quartet was completed the following year and premiered in the Gewandhaus on 30 May 1879. His Rip Van Winkle Overture was greeted with much acclaim upon its Gewandhaus premiere on 20 June 1879. These three works were subsequently played in Boston after his return to that city in early 1880. The Third String Quartet, dedicated to his Boston colleague and fellow chamber music composer Arthur Foote, was completed in 1886 and premiered on 9 March 1887. After a hiatus of nearly a decade, Chadwick returned to the quartet genre with the completion of his Fourth String Quartet, premiered by the Kneisel Quartet on 21 December 1896. The Fifth String Quartet was completed on Thanksgiving Day in 1898 but was not heard in public until its 12 February 1901 premiere by the Adamowski Quartet. The elegiac overture Adonais was composed in 1898 following the death of his friend Frank Fay Marshall and was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 2 February 1900. Of these seven works, the Fourth Quartet was published by Schirmer in 1902, and the Fifth Quartet was published privately in Germany in 1910, but the other five works remained unpublished until these critical editions. Taken as a group, the pieces in these three volumes represent a substantial portion of the works that remained unpublished at the composer's death, significantly expanding our understanding of his compositional output.

Chadwick was arguably the most successful orchestral composer of the Second New England School, but conductors and audiences have embraced his works for this medium selectively. The dramatic overture Melpomene was the most frequently played of his orchestral works during his own lifetime. The Second and Third Symphonies were highly regarded and frequently performed, and his Symphonic Sketches achieved widespread currency, especially the “Jubilee” movement. The two scores in Faucett's volume, on the other hand, were rarely heard and are published here for the first time. Rip Van Winkle was played several times in Boston after the composer's return from Germany, but it was recognized as a youthful work that did not remain in the repertoire.Footnote ¹Adonais did not outlive its premiere performance, in part because of conductor Wilhelm Gericke's indifference to the work.

Logistically, both works demonstrate Chadwick's mastery of orchestration in the medium of a relatively small ensemble. Contrary to the stereotype of bloated orchestras in the late nineteenth century, both scores call for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings, with the addition of an extra flute and piccolo, tuba, bass drum, and harp for Adonais. Faucett points out in his introduction that the orchestras Chadwick heard as a student in Europe were rather small, and that U.S. orchestras of the same era were also not large. He states: “Chadwick knew that the mastery of this element of composition was key to the creation of a large sonic canvas with modest instrumental forces. . . . Although Chadwick's instrumentation is rather lean by the progressive standards of the late 1870s, his aggressive system of doubling makes his orchestra sound larger and fuller than it actually is” (xii).

Faucett addresses the stylistic issues posed by these two works in his introduction. Although Rip Van Winkle is a programmatic work on an American story, both it and Adonais are essentially cosmopolitan in style. He notes: “Chadwick stood apart from the ardent musical nationalists of his time. He was not an outspoken proponent either of the creation of an ‘American’ musical style or of the founding of an American ‘school’ of composition. None of his writings reveals a deep concern about the quest for musical Americanism, and Chadwick's stance on the matter was generally known among critics and professionals” (ix). Like his older contemporary, John Knowles Paine, Chadwick was more concerned with his relation to the European mainstream than to a national school. This is not to say that he was unsupportive of his U.S. colleagues or uninterested in the future of musical composition in the United States, but rather that he had no desire for U.S. composers to be labeled “provincial.” For Chadwick, cosmopolitan style was neither incompatible with American music nor unpatriotic.

Formally, the two works employ sonata-allegro structures. Faucett notes that Chadwick was a master of this form and employed it often in his orchestral music. In Rip Van Winkle, the structure is modified somewhat through the use of five distinct themes that are recapitulated in an unconventional manner dictated by the programmatic content. Faucett compares Chadwick's methods to those employed by Mendelssohn in his programmatic overtures, noting that both composers use painterly suggestion rather than the explicit description typical of the symphonic poem. Adonais likewise employs sonata-allegro form, and Faucett uses the word “conventional” three times in his description of the work. Chadwick felt it was “in some respects the best of my works” despite its lack of repeat performances.Footnote ²

Betz divides her edition of Chadwick's five string quartets into two volumes, following both chronological and stylistic logic. The first encompasses Quartets 1–3, tracing his early stylistic progression. In the introduction to this volume she notes: “A comparison of the three quartets makes evident the transition from a talented composition student to a mature composer. The works trace a path from relying on compositional models to developing more individual formal structures. Furthermore, they reveal changes in Chadwick's harmonic language, shown by the growing preference for mediant keys” (xiii). The second volume contains the two quartets written in the late 1890s after a hiatus of a decade. By this time Chadwick had become one of the country's most renowned composers and an instructor at the New England Conservatory.

Like Faucett, Betz notes that Chadwick's first three quartets are essentially cosmopolitan. Although the composer famously included a tune entitled “Shoot the Pipe” in the third movement of the first quartet along with his characteristic pentatonic melodies, the music is not self-consciously “American.” The formal structures and key choices of the movements follow the conventions of absolute music of the Classical era. The introduction to this volume includes copious analytical descriptions of each work, emphasizing form and harmony to demonstrate the progression from student works to mature composition.

In the second volume, Betz addresses issues of nationalism. She points out that Quartets 4 and 5 were composed shortly after the premieres of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony “From the New World” and “American” String Quartet. These justifiably famous works shifted the debate on nationalism in the United States, causing critics and audiences to listen to new works with different expectations than before. In Chadwick's case, the pentatonic scales that had always been a prominent feature of his compositional style were now compared to similar passages in Dvořák's works that were explicitly labeled “American.” More than one reviewer attributed these melodies to Chadwick's penchant for Irish humor: “The characteristic Irish brogue still remains . . . but the Irish turn of this or that phrase has nothing of vulgarity in it, neither does it impress one as indicating a with-malice-prepense dive into the Volkslied; it all sounds wholly instinctive and natural.”Footnote ³ Quartets 4 and 5 were written concurrently with the Symphonic Sketches, a set of four ebullient programmatic works for orchestra that are most closely associated with his “Americanist” style. Although they remain absolute music, these two quartets share the spirit of the Symphonic Sketches and emerged in a climate of debate over nationalism in the art music of the United States.

Among the most valuable contributions of Betz’s study is an essay, “Chadwick and the Issue of Chamber Music,” embedded within the introduction to her second volume of quartets. In this essay she traces the trajectory of Chadwick's career as a chamber music composer within the context of U.S. musical life. She notes the vibrant culture of Hausmusik and chamber music concerts that existed through the 1880s, followed by the growing prestige of orchestral concerts. She documents the supplanting of chamber music, with its “union of performer and listener, a special characteristic of this genre,” by the large social gatherings of symphony concerts, “communicating the vision of a culturally unified people” (xiv). The immediate motivation for this discussion is to explain Chadwick's abandonment of chamber music in the last three decades of his life, but her observations on this important shift in musical culture in the United States have broader significance and should be carefully considered by scholars of this era. The transformation of U.S. musical culture that took place in the 1890s has been examined by scholars from different perspectives in recent years; her views on the decline of chamber music should be read as yet another facet of this complex and influential decade.

The editorial practices in these editions continue the high standard of previous volumes in the series. The scores are laid out generously, with ample margins, wide spacing between staves, and relatively few measures per page. The press could have saved a significant amount on production costs in the quartet volumes by printing four systems per page instead of three, or by compressing the passagework to squeeze an extra measure onto each system. For ease of reading, though, readers will be grateful for the wide spacing.

Betz, Faucett, and A-R Editions have given us an important contribution to the scholarly literature on Chadwick. These editions serve on the one hand as parallels to the European tradition of Denkmäler [monuments] to important national works of literature. If that were their only purpose, however, it would be a disappointing tribute to a composer like Chadwick, who thrived on live performances of his works. Let us hope that these sumptuous editions continue to inspire future generations of performers to revisit these works and give them sonic realizations in new interpretations.