This week’s theme is…Music about Transportation! When we hear the word “transportation” in the twenty-first century, we imagine many modes of moving people and things from place to place, over sea, land and air. This is largely a modern set of images, although people and things have moved from place to place throughout all of history. Because of this, the theme of transportation is present in music to varying degrees through its history.
Music about Transportation, Day 5 – Horse and Buggy by Leroy Anderson
It is not without a little irony I note that we must turn to music of modern times to find sonic depictions of more ancient forms of transportation. It must be a comparatively recent phenomenon for musicians to evoke different kinds of transportation in their music. It didn’t really start happening until the Romantic age, probably for a couple of reasons. One is a greater general comfort with program music, that is music based on extra-musical models like literature or art, and another might be a fascination with the powerful machinery brought about by the industrial revolution. Although that kind of influence didn’t really hit concert music until the 20th century. Maybe composers of 18th century simply didn’t think to evoke transportation in their music, or they felt it was improper in some way. Maybe it just wasn’t something they thought about in the same way that we do. With trains, planes, automobiles, ships, space shuttles, bicycles, motorcycles and the like, transportation has evolved into a major, multifaceted industry in a way it simply could not have been a couple hundred years ago. For Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, if you wanted to get somewhere, you either walked, rode a horse, or rode in something drawn by a horse. Or you sailed if you had to cross water. But that was it. The word “transportation” is relatively young in the English language and it, or whatever its German translation is, simply would not have had the same rich resonance to any of them that it does to us, evoking all the intermodal images that it does.
So maybe that’s why it is simply not a common image in music before the modern era. On occasion you will see Baroque composers write about ships caught in storms – I can think of examples of this by Vivaldi, Handel, and Gluck, all of them in serious operas. And it’s not until Romantic music that we start to see the image of the horse evoked in piano pieces and songs, and quite often once that started to happen. After the nineteenth century saw such significant advances in transportation as the train and the automobile, composers of the twentieth century began to evoke both in their musical works more frequently. By this point musicians were even more comfortable basing their music on extramusical influences-it is simply more common to see musical works written in the twentieth century that identify some other thing as their inspiration than the preceding centuries. Whatever the reason, composers of the twentieth century created beaucoup music about transportation in a way that composers of the eighteenth century did not.
So, we need to look to the twentieth century to find a piece of music based on a kind of transportation with which Bach, Handel, Mozart, Vivaldi and Beethoven would most likely have been quite familiar (although I’m not sure if they were more common in some of those regions than others) but never worked into their music: the horse-drawn carriage. And for a snappy little piece that craftily evokes the horse and buggy we turn to the master of American light music himself, Leroy Anderson.
It shouldn’t be altogether surprising that Leroy Anderson is the composer who used the horse and buggy as inspiration. Known for his light orchestral miniatures, practically every little piece that he wrote has some kind of extramusical association. A large majority of his works bear titles that refer to some kind of programmatic influence, and part of the fun of listening to Leroy Anderson is hearing how he sets those different subjects in music, almost always impressively well, and with great efficiency. A fun fact about Leroy Anderson is that he had an intuitive knack for composing orchestral pieces that were short enough to fit on one side of a 45 RPM record, which must have been of considerable help in making his music as commercially viable as it was. In a very real sense, Leroy Anderson was writing orchestral “singles” that could be marketed to a very wide audience. And he was quite successful in this regard, selling millions of records. Those brief little pieces are easily digested, and they also forced Anderson to be most succinct in expressing and developing his musical ideas. Because the pieces are so much fun to listen to, it can be easy to overlook just how well crafted they are and how good a composer Leroy Anderson must have been to create them.
1951’s Horse and Buggy is a great example. Whenever I hear it I just can’t help but to appreciate how well it is constructed:
I’m sure you can hear the horse and buggy of the title. The clip-clopping of the wood block that pervades the entire piece constantly reminds us of the horse pulling us along, and the whip prompts him into a brisk trot. But the rest of the experience is evoked by purely musical means. There is the atmospheric rustling of anticipation in the very beginning as we prepare to depart, then the peppy first and second themes which illustrate our initial delight as the horse takes off. And then, in the middle, that most enchanting lyrical theme presented by the solo horn, and then the strings. Can you hear the horse slow down there? I always thought this part felt like finding a lovely view and slowing the horse to take in the scenery as time slowed down in the best way. You really have the sense of losing yourself in the experience; there is such a sense of peace and contentment here as the theme swells and the beauty of the heartland washes over you. But, enough of that; let’s crack the whip and have the horse resume its brisk trot. We hear the initial bustling themes again, but with different orchestration to keep our interest and change the feeling just a little bit. And then at the end we hear a reprise of the lyrical vista theme, but harmonically altered to bring the work to a close, which happens right after we hear the very first rustling again, but this time in anticipation of leaving the buggy.
There’s just not a dull or awkward moment to be found in that piece. Anderson was a true master. Not only does he capture the subject well, but the music is constantly inventive and almost transcendently well-written in every respect. Anderson’s Horse and Buggy pays the best possible homage to the now quaint mode of transportation that would have been most familiar to the great musical masters of the past who did not see fit to write about it themselves. But they have Leroy Anderson to thank for making the effort centuries later.
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