Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfus) did not serve in the military. There are still parallels to be drawn between Colonel Harold Van Heuvelen (U. S. Army, retired) and the fictional music teacher in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Stationed at the New Orleans Army Air Base during World War II, the young then-lieutenant was an instructor for officer candidates.
But with victory in Europe and the possibility of sending more soldiers to Japan, the Army stopped sending officer candidates to New Orleans, and the instructors there found themselves with nothing to do.
As he waited for orders to Japan, the young musician wrote a Symphony. The war ended about a month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was time for a lot of soldiers to return to civilian life.
Van Heuvelen became an Army reservist and studied music at Tanglewood, taking a class with Leonard Bernstein. The famous conductor actually spent a good three hours looking over Van Heuvelen’s score.
That’s probably a lot more than Leonard Slatkin for my music (though, to be fair, I can’t know for sure because part of that communication was through e-mail, and in any case his vague feedback turned out to be a hell of a lot more actionable than anything the Underwood New Music Reading Session judges have ever given me).
Bernstein told Van Heuvelen his music sounds a lot like Johannes Brahms, which at the time Van Heuvelen took as a compliment. Back then, the young composer and his first wife enjoyed listening to Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor in particular.
I do hear that a little bit of Brahms in Van Heuvelen’s Symphony, but I think there are also other influences I can’t quite put my finger on yet. In hindsight, Van Heuvelen realized Bernstein meant his music was not original enough.
The Army reservist also asked Bernstein if he should try to make it as a composer full-time. The conductor advised the young composer to be a music teacher, advice the composer heeded.
Van Heuvelen went on to teach at Bismarck Public School for decades, and his wartime Symphony would wait for almost seventy years for its premiere.
It was at about that time that Bernstein championed Harold Shapero’s Symphony for Classical Orchestra of 1947, conducting the first performance in 1948. Shapero can be described as being influenced by Beethoven and Stravinsky. And jazz.
Shapero’s Symphony is more my cup of tea. Not because I think he’s more original than Van Heuvelen (I don’t even care to argue that one way or the other), but because the composers Shapero chooses to emulate are more or less the ones I would have chosen, and what he achieves is more or less what I would have striven for.
It also helps that I’ve known Shapero’s Symphony longer. I found the score at the Detroit Public Library more than twenty years ago, and I’ve had Andre Previn’s recording with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for almost as long, though I found the music gripping from the very first bar.
I also have Bernstein’s 1953 recording with the Columbia Symphony, though for whatever reason it wasn’t in my iTunes library (an omission I rectified today).
Shapero was also a music teacher, he taught at Brandeis. But even with Bernstein’s support, Shapero’s Symphony has languished in obscurity. There are only two recordings that I can find, and I have them both.
That’s better than Van Heuvelen’s Symphony, though, which for a long time existed only in a score in the composer’s home. And in the composer’s mind.
Harold’s son, Bob, found the score while helping his father clean, had it transcribed into an electronic format (I’m guessing Adobe PDF by way of Finale 2010) and also produced a computer rendering (probably MP3 from Finale 2010 with Garritan Instruments).
Bob was convinced the music deserved a performance by a real orchestra, but he realized it was too difficult for a high school orchestra.
Now, it just so happened that Bob Van Heuvelen was chief of staff for Senator Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota), and he mentioned his father’s forgotten Symphony to Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan).
As you might remember, Levin was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Levin asked the Army to see about having an Army orchestra premiere the Symphony.
Levin was joined by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) and Ambassador Max Baucus (D, at the time also a Senator from Montana).
Reportedly, Major Tod Addison was hesitant, worrying the music might not be any good. That changed when he actually saw the score.
And so, Harold Van Heuvelen’s Symphony No. 1 was premiered at Brucker Hall by the Army Orchestra conducted by Major Addison, at a Veterans Day concert in 2012.
Here’s the video, from YouTube. There’s almost six minutes of opening remarks, but I decided to start this at the beginning. Skip ahead to about 5:30 if you only want to hear the music.
The strings don’t always sound quite together, but I don’t know if that’s because of insufficient rehearsal or because the composer wrote some excessively fast runs.
There were also a few brass flubs, one of which might be attributable to an excessively fast horn passage. Still, the performance is one which clearly pleased the composer.
I certainly do like this a lot better than Adam Schoenberg’s shorter American Symphony. I had actually forgotten about Van Heuvelen until, after listening to the United States Marine Band playing John Williams’s Midway March, YouTube suggested Schoenberg’s Symphony, also played by the Marine Band.
I then remembered that Carl Levin had helped a World War II vet get a performance of his music after decades of obscurity. Was that Adam Schoenberg? No, Adam Schoenberg’s a kid.
I had to search for something like “veteran symphony Carl Levin” to find Harold Van Heuvelen. I did think that I should listen to Schoenberg’s Symphony before publishing this article.
I don’t know, Adam Schoenberg’s American Symphony kinda got on my nerves after just a few minutes (and that’s coming from someone who likes the Chamber Symphonies by Arnold Schoenberg).
So I looked around and found this recording of the Marine Band Chamber Orchestra with soloist Staff Sergeant Patrick Morgan, conducted by Major Michelle Rakers, in Carl Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto.
That’s what I had playing as iTunes worked on importing Bernstein’s recording of Harold Shapero’s Symphony for Classical Orchestra.
I think Harold Van Heuvelen’s Symphony No. 1, Opus 7, is worth hearing at least once. There are no commercial recordings available that I know of, though. So the YouTube video might be the only way for you to hear this music.
I leave you with the Marine Band playing Semper Fidelis by John Philip Sousa.