Louis Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite
Notes by TŌN horn player Felix Johnson
Louis Gruenberg was a Russian-born American composer and pianist. In his early career, Gruenberg dedicated himself to piano performance, beginning to study at age eight at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. In his 20s, Gruenberg befriended the Italian conductor Ferruccio Busoni, which greatly elevated his solo career, performing with the Berlin Philharmonic under Busoni’s baton in 1912 and later touring both Europe and the United States together. Gruenberg’s focus later changed to composition with Busoni’s encouragement. His first two works—The Witch of Brocken (1912) and The Bride of the Gods (1913)—had relative success, though it wasn’t until 1920, when Gruenberg won the New York Philharmonic’s Flagler Prize for The Hill of Dreams (1920), that he fully committed himself to writing music.
Gruenberg developed his style during the 1920s, when he began to see himself as a distinctly American composer. In the first volume of Modern Music, Gruenberg wrote about the “rich veins indigenous to America” of Black spiritual music and jazz, and how these influences should be used to create a musical style that was distinct from Europe, one that would “combine a knowledge of tradition and the modern experiment.” His Jazz Suite for orchestra is among a series of compositions that set out to do exactly this, combining the rich history of American music with an orchestral sound. The piece has four movements, each with a tempo marking of a popular dance of the period: a foxtrot, a Boston waltz, a slow blues, and a one-step. The structure is built around the call-and-response habit of a dance band, which gives each section and soloist their turn. The piece was premiered by Fritz Reiner with the Cincinnati Symphony, was well received, and had many subsequent performances with a number of conductors, including Serge Koussevitzky.
Despite the success of the piece and his career, Gruenberg’s work has largely fallen out of the repertoire, with composers like Gershwin undoubtedly being the regular touchstones for this period of American music. I find this to be a true loss as the piece clearly demonstrates the uniqueness of American orchestral writing and influence of the music of the period. When heard today, Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite deserves to be reconsidered as more than just a novelty of its decade.