Till All Success Be Nobleness
for orchestra
Herbert Hoover once said that Prohibition was “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” Certainly, the advocates of the 18th Amendment hoped that outlawing the making of, sale, and transportation of alcohol would enable the United States to reach its true potential as a nation.
As the headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League and the American Issue Publishing Company, Westerville played a prominent role in convincing the country to vote dry. Its history in the Temperance Movement dates to the Whiskey Wars of the 1870s, when residents sang hymns of protest outside Henry Corbin’s saloon and his establishments were “mysteriously” blown up multiple times. In the years leading up to Prohibition, the AIPC sent out up to 40 tons per month of brochures in support of its cause.
However, when Prohibition became the law of the land, the “Noble Experiment” did not work out as well as they had hoped. Most of us have heard tales of bootleggers and violent gangsters circumventing the law, but there was also wiretapping, brutal enforcement tactics, and virulent racism against immigrants for whom the saloon had been an integral part of their communities.
Till All Success Be Nobleness is drawn from a line from “America the Beautiful”: “America, America! / May God thy gold refine / Till all success be nobleness / And every gain divine!” The piece itself is organized around the “America the Beautiful” tune. It also draws inspiration from immigrant drinking songs, hymns and songs that defined the Temperance movement, the sounds of the humming printing presses, and the music that came to define the Jazz Age which ran concurrently with Prohibition. On this 250th anniversary of our nation, my hope is that Till All Success Be Nobleness will be a reminder that America is still struggling to reach that ideal. We are not there yet, but this continual striving defines our great nation and gives us hope for the future.
Introduction: Crown Thy Good with Brotherhood
Saloonatics in the Melting Pot
Drys at the Printing Press
Interlude: Confirm Thy Soul in Self Control
Scofflaws at the Speakeasy
Epilogue: Till All Success Be Nobleness
For Their Land And For Mine
for string orchestra
For Their Land And For Mine was commissioned by the Johnstone Fund for New Music in Columbus, Ohio, to be performed by the string section of the Greater Columbus Community Orchestra in February 2026, right before Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia on the program. I discovered that poet Lloyd Stone set the famous Finlandia hymn tune to words in 1934. Called “This is My Song,” the poem is a prayer for global peace and understanding. The words are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them in between two world wars. My piece takes as inspiration the hymn tune itself and the meaning of the words of Stone’s poem:
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song a peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine:
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies and bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
© 1934 (Stanzas 1 and 2), © 1964 (Stanza 3) Lorenz Publishing Company (ASCAP) (Administered by Music Services, Inc.) All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
DEVELOPED BY DUMASTAR
Kate and the Beanstalk
for chamber orchestra and narrator
Kate and the Beanstalk was created for the Tunes and Tales program, a long-running collaboration of the Westerville Symphony and the Westerville Public Library in central Ohio. The music is designed to be performed along with a reading of Mary Pope Osborne’s book of the same name for an audience of children and their families. The characters and the story come to life through the musical themes played by the orchestra.
