Review (c 1950)

Shenandoah (c 1956)

Waly Waly (c 1930)

Everyone Sang (c 1950)

Celius Dougherty is a distinctively American phenomenon. Like Charles Ives – with whom had more than a little in common, in spite of his through professional training at the Juilliard – Dougherty recognised no class distinctions in music. He applied the same art to folk-song arrangements as to original settings of the most sophisticated verse and found no less inspiration in, say, a newspaper cutting than in th poetry of e.e.cummings or Robert Frost. A favourite example, and a frequent encore item, is Love in the Dictionary, a word-for-word waltz-time setting of the entry under “love” in Funk and Wagnalls Students’ Standard Dictionary.

No less amusing than Love in the Dictionary and probably written at about the same time, Review is based on a text “excerpted, adapted and paraphrased from actual reviews” and shows the same care for reflecting the natural rhythms of the words, with bar-by-bar changes of metre where necessary, the same gift for parody and even more eccentric harmonies within a firmly tonal context. The last line is treated with the banality it deserves. Dougherty’s characterful harmonies find their way into his folk-song arrangements too, though not so much in Shenandoah as in Waly Waly, where his dramatic approach to the crucial third stanza makes an interesting comparison with the stringent economy of Britten’s interpreation of the same material. Bolder still is the harmonically and rhythmically uninhibited setting of Everyone Sang, Siegfried Sassoon’s exuberant celebration of Armistice Day 1918 and, as Dougherty once remarked, an expression of “the joy of all at the cessation of war.”