Music: Indiana Melody

Songwriter Hoagy (Stardust) Carmichael was not sure he was quite up to the job. “I know my limitations . . . I’m not a student of music.” But on the other hand, he did have an idea, and he was a native Indianian, and that was more than most of the other invited composers could say as they began to compose short symphonic pieces for the centennial of Hoosier Poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916). “I got on the telephone with [Indianapolis Symphony Conductor] Fabien Sevitzky and told him what I had in mind,” said Hoagy. “He encouraged me to go ahead.”

Last week, Indianapolis audiences also got to hear what had been on Composer Carmichael’s mind. It was Hoagy’s first serious composition, a nine-minute tone poem entitled Brown County in Autumn.

Yellow Peak. Spruce but hatless, Hoagy had flown into Indianapolis from Los Angeles earlier in the week, dashed straight to the Murat Theater to oversee the rehearsals. Conductor Sevitzky* made room for him next to the podium, and after the photographers had finished crawling under the music racks to snap the new composer, the orchestra got down to work. Hoagy stood by intently, rolling his tongue in his cheeks as he always does when he is composing or listening to a song he has recorded.

Hoagy had had the inspiration for the tone poem in his memory since boyhood. He was born in Bloomington, six miles from hilly, rural Brown County, and often went there on fall outings. Brown County in Autumn had “written itself,” he said, “just like any song that I compose.” It was melodic “because I’m a melody man and I’ve always thought there should be a little more melody for the average symphony patron.” It opened with a slightly somber daybreak. The music went into full action with the purples and reds of the leaves, rose to a peak in the description of the yellows, then slowly died away.

Lofty Redwoods. When the orchestra had finished, the musicians gave Hoagy a nice round of applause. Conductor Sevitzky patted him on the shoulder and told him, “That’s nice piece, very nice piece.” To Hoagy himself, the orchestra sounded “Fine, fine, wonderful, very pretty.” He thought “maybe a little lift here and there on the brass—that is my only suggestion.” That was soon arranged. There was no featured instrument and no characteristic rhythm, but plenty of melody. Indianapolis audiences were mighty pleased with the whole thing.

At 50, Hoagy can almost support his family (a wife and two young sons) on the income from Stardust, written in 1929. Says he: “It’s practically an annuity.” He still felt “like a rank amateur” after his first long-haired composition, but he confessed he was already at work on a second. This one, he said, would be about the California redwoods and would be “sort of austere, with an ecclesiastic, cathedral-like quality . . . ‘Lofty’ I think would be a good word.”

*A nephew of Serge Koussevitzky, Fabien dropped the “Kous” from his name when he came to the U.S. in 1923 so as not to trade on his uncle’s reputation.