Spoon River is based on an early American fiddle tune, Percy Grainger created a setting that “aims at preserving a pioneer blend of lonesome wistfulness and sturdy persistence.” The 16-measure melody is fully explored and developed in a variety of harmonisations and instrumental colours, and is particularly noteworthy for the extensive use of “tuneful percussion” (bells, chimes, xylophone, marimba) as well as important parts for piano and harp. His setting (begun March 1919; ended February 1929) aims at preserving a pioneer blend of lonesome wistfulness and sturdy persistence. It bears the following dedication: “For Edgar Lee Masters, poet of pioneers.”
American Music Folk-Settings consists of a single melody (‘Spoon River’), taken from a fiddle tune. This theme was arranged by Grainger for three formations: Orchestra (‘Elastic Scoring’), Piano Solo, and 2 Pianos 4 Hands. Each arrangement is structurally slightly different (i.e. the orchestral version is longer than the piano solo version). A version for band was performed in 1933 by Edwin Franko Goldman, but it was never published and the parts were lost.
This American folk-dance set for concert band is based on the tune Spoon River, which a Captain Charles H. Robinson heard in 1857 being played by a rustic fiddler at a country dance in Brandford, Illinois. Passed to Grainger through poet Edgar Lee Masters in 1914, it is a very archaic tune in character: typically American, yet akin to certain Scottish and English dance-tune types. Grainger aims in his original setting at preserving a pioneer blend of lonesome wistfulness and sturdy persistence. This edition for band seeks to maintain the Grainger sound, while offering bands instrument substitutions for those that have become less common and making small additions such as clearer dynamics.
Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters’ home town. The aim of the poems is to demystify the rural, small town American life.
