Jerome Moross: an introduction and annotated worklist.

Of the considerable number of accomplished American composers of the twentieth century, Jerome Moross (1 August 1913-25 July 1983, fig. 1) is one of the less familiar names, but he left an important legacy of music for stage, screen, and theater, and some of it is finding a new audience. Those who do recognize the composer's name generally know Moross's once notorious ballet Frankie and Johnny (1938), his cabaret standard "Lazy Afternoon" (from The Golden Apple, 1950, with lyrics by John Latouche), or his scores to such films as The Big Country (1958), and The Cardinal (1963). Some listeners familiar with all this music do not realize that it is the work of the same man, and that each piece represents only one aspect of a multifaceted composer. A new assessment of Moross's place in American music is overdue, and what follows is an attempt to place this body of work, which has fallen into relative and undeserved obscurity, in historical perspective, to make details known to potential listeners and performers, and to stimulate further research. The annotations in the worklist relate important biographical details to the relevant music, and this brief introduction attempts only to provide an overview of the career of Jerome Moross and a survey of his musical activities.

The second of three sons born in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Jerome Moross (1) studied piano at any early age with his mother. He was a precocious child who graduated from high school several years ahead of schedule and from New York University at the age of eighteen. During the academic year 1931-32 (his final year at NYU), he also held a fellowship in conducting at Juilliard. (2) Initially, Moross wrote in a dissonant, modernistic style (e.g., Paeans for chamber orchestra, 1931), but it was not long before he began to mix a more conservative, tonal approach with jazz, popular, and folk idioms. Moross said of his early influences,

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

 
  ... all my life I heard popular music. I heard folk music. It was the 
  kind of thing we sang when I was a child, and even while I was going 
  to Juilliard I was working at jobs in jazz bands. I worked in theater 
  pits. Popular music was all around me and it seemed absolutely right 
  to use it. As a matter of fact, two people encouraged me in it. One 
  was Charles Ives, with whom I was quite friendly in my late teens.... 
  Ives was very kind and very helpful. He once told me that he thought 
  it was a good thing that I was mixing up real popular music in my 
  style, which at that time was still quite Schoenbergian/Webernesque. I 
  was intent upon quarter-tones and all the rest ... then I suddenly 
  felt it was a dead end, a wall, and I left it.... I should have said 
  three people because it was [also] Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland.... 
  (3) 

Moross was an active member of Copland's Young Composers' Group, (4) and was a frequent performer in concerts of new music given in New York City throughout the 1930s, playing both his own music and that of others. Among the more interesting pieces in his repertoire were the First Piano Sonata of Charles Ives and the Second Piano Sonata ("The Airplane") of George Antheil. (5) Large-ensemble pieces on these concerts were conducted by Arthur Berger, future lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky, or Bernard Herrmann, who would become a celebrated composer of film scores. (6) In 1936 Aaron Copland expressed both high expectations and frank criticism of a number of America's most promising young composers in an important article, writing

 
  Moross is probably the most talented of these men [writing 
  collectively of Moross, Elie Siegmeister, Irwin Heilner, and Andrew 
  Cazden]. He writes music that has a quality of sheer physicalness, 
  music "without a mind," as it were. It is regrettable that we cannot 
  yet point to any finished, extended work. What he seems to lack is a 
  sense of artistic discipline and integrity, which his talent needs for 
  development. (7) 

Both Moross and Bernard Herrmann were strong advocates for the music of Charles Ives, (8) and Moross was also active in performing or promoting performance of works by Ives, George Antheil, Henry Cowell, and the (then) little-known nineteenth-century American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. (9) Two of Moross's early orchestral pieces, Paeans and Biguine [sic] were published in 1933 and 1935, respectively, in Cowell's important New Music Orchestra Series (New Music Editions, San Francisco). It was Copland who recommended Moross to dancer Ruth Page, for whom Moross was to write several ballets, the most important of which was Frankie and Johnny (1938). (10) Through Oscar Levant, Moross met George Gershwin, who in 1937 invited the young composer to be vocal coach and pianist for the touring production of Porgy and Bess. This he did; Moross was only twenty-three years old at the time.