Tuesday, May 2, 2023

North Carolina Chamber Music Institute, Chamber Music Treasures III (16 January 2023)

Good evening!! If “progress is both a thing to be admired and feared”, then this evening’s program may well serve as “terrific notice of admirable progress”!! The annual MLK/Faculty Artists Concert began two years ago barely six weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Nervously thankful for having somehow “missed a global explosion”, that inaugural concert would unwittingly serve as a template for nearly two years of virtual chamber music performances. Originally recorded for archival purposes, the concert was streamed in February 2021 due to the fact that the pandemic shutdown persisted into the 2021 calendar year. The 2022 concert also marked a further significant development: a NCCMI signature student chamber ensemble was included on the program–the WCPE Quartet performing Jessie Montgomery’s “Strum” for string quartet. The United Strings of Color Quartet of Raleigh was also invited to perform at the live event and would perform virtually on the later streamed program (“Basketball” from Sidelines for String Quartet by Duke University composer Anthony Kelley). 

The 2023 program continues a fine collaborative effort among NCCMI faculty and student ensembles celebrating the chamber music of African American composers. This evening’s program opens with “Summerland” by William Grant Still, performed by the United Strings of Color. “Summerland” is the middle movement of the suite for solo piano, Three Visions (1936); it is a charming piece whose idyllic sound and expression reflects the blend of art-music and popular music styles utilized in dance and vaudeville shows of the 1920s & 1930s. The beauty of this work lies in its simplicity–and the sincere vocality originally conveyed by the piano. The poignant expression that flows within this work is its crown jewel–and it is one of the most transcribed works of William Grant Still’s oeuvre. 

Harrison Leslie Adams celebrated his 90th birthday forty-eight hours before the New Year!! A native of Cleveland, Ohio, he is a graduate of the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Cal State-Long Beach University and The Ohio State University. "L'extase de l'amour” for Viola and Piano (also known as “Poeme de l’extase”) celebrates Adams’ penchant for extensive musical phrasing best nicknamed “The Wider View”, one of Adams’ many art song cycles. The opening and closing lines of this song bestow unusual imagery to the melody and piano undulations: “In my childhood I was wont to see the horizon as a boundary, the sky as roof, the wood as wall, my world as intimate and small…but now I see beyond confusion, all boundaries are but illusion”. In the same way Adams weaves straightforward cantabile melodies for the voice in art song, and gives the viola sustained timbre and phrasing throughout the entire “poem and song”. 

Carlos Simon provides the following comments for his compositions: “Elegy–A Cry From The Grave” is an artistic reflection dedicated to those who have been murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power–namely Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, among so many others. The stimulus for composing the piece came as a result of the announcement by St. Louis County Attorney Robert McCulloch that a selected jury had decided not to indict St. Louis police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The evocative nature of this piece draws upon strong lyricism and a lush harmonic charter. A principal melodic idea–either fragmented or as a whole–is played in all the voices of the ensemble at some point during the piece. This recurring ominous motif represents the cry of those struck down unjustly in this country. While the predominant essence of this piece is sorrowful and contemplative, yet moments of extreme hope break through represented by bright consonant harmonies. 

Dorothy Rudd Moore, the widow of cellist, composer and conductor Kermit Moore passed away in March 2022 at age 81. A 1963 alumna of Howard University, she studied theory and composition with Mark Fax. After her graduation she studied with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatoire at Fontainebleau. She moved to New York after summer study, and met Kermit at a holiday party where his colleague composer Hale Smith introduced them to each other. They were married a year later!! Hale never let either of them forget that it was he who introduced them to each other; he was not the least bit bashful for having played matchmaker!! Dorothy continued her studies in composition with Chou-wen Chung privately in 1965. She became a founding member of the short-lived Society of Black Composers (1968-73), while Kermit became a founding member of the Symphony of The New World, an interracial professional orchestra that created performance opportunities for black classical musicians and championed the orchestral music of black composers (including his wife!!) in New York City from 1965 to 1978. Modes for String Quartet was composed in 1968, the same year of the founding of the SBC. Its three movements reflect the blended compositional influences of her three main teachers–the mature contrapuntal discipline and beauty of Fax and Boulanger, the inverted voice-leading from the Classical string quartet texture, unique timbral combinations and constantly shifting rhythmic vitality of the closing movement–’borrowing from both Bach and Bartok within eight minutes!! 

On Carlos Simon’s “Be Still And Know”: This piece was inspired by a quote from an 2011 interview with Oprah Winfrey: “I have felt the presence of God my whole life. Even when I didn't have a name for it, I could feel the voice bigger than myself speaking to me, and all of us have that same voice. Be still and know it. You can acknowledge it or not. You can worship it or not. You can praise it, you can ignore it or you can know it. Know it. It’s always there speaking to you and waiting for you to hear it in every move, in every decision”. 

The aria “Little Black Slave Child” is a haunting lullaby set very early in Act One of the opera “Troubled Island” by William Grant Still. Begun in 1936, the opera wouldn’t have its premiere until 1949 with the New York City Opera, conducted by Laszlo Halasz. Both the company and the composer made history…the first premiere production of an operatic work by an African American composer given by a major American opera company. “Dormi, Jesu” is a Chilean lullaby sung by mothers of the Araucanian indigenous tribe. Jacqueline B. Hairston is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina; her setting of this lullaby has been recorded by soprano Kathleen Battle and guitarist Christopher Parkening. 

Florence Price composed "Clouds" c.1942; it is a lovely work that bears an interesting sense of “freedom”. Perhaps it was the inverse response to wartime worldwide or to American racism; nonetheless it bears the clear influence of musical Impressionism…intriguingly removed from Debussy and placed closer to Alexander Scriabin. This work remained unpublished during Price’s lifetime, probably composed amid a flurry of now rediscovered creative activity. The listener is free to muse as to what meaning those clouds in wartime might convey. 

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed the Valse de la reine in 1899 as the third of Four Characteristic Waltzes, opus 22. It was composed in the same astounding wave of creativity that produced some of his highest-quality and best-known compositions, the best-known of which is the choral trilogy, The Song of Hiawatha. Like so many examples of the 19th century European social dance tradition, this waltz moves with “the elegance of royalty” that still sings with touches of fading elegance reminiscent of the passing Victorian Era. 

In the spirit of community and communal song, this program closes with “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” of James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. James Weldon Johnson penned the poem in 1900 for recitation by Stanton Preparatory School students in Jacksonville, Florida. His own account of the poem’s composition and gathering popularity follows here: “A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children. Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn is quite generally used. The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) had begun to promote it as “the Negro National Anthem” in 1919 for its defiantly hopeful singing insistence in spite of its ironic timing in a time of extreme race violence (which the poet himself nicknamed the “Red Summer) it was and remains a statement of deep faith in our profound American identity and agency expressed in its three verses. TWH 

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing 

“Lift every voice and sing, ’Til earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on ’til victory is won. 

Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers died. We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, ’Til now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. 

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand, True to our God, True to our native land.” 

Dr. Marvin Curtis, Dean Emeritus of the Raclin School of Music at Indiana University-South Bend presented a moving keynote address at the 25th Annual African American Art Song Alliance Conference at UC-Irvine in October 2022 titled “Why I Stand to Sing Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”. His address chronicled the ancestry of James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, who composed the text and music to what has been nicknamed the “Negro National Anthem” one hundred years ago (the YouTube recording is provided below). The history of this riveting poem and song cannot be undervalued nor underappreciated. His address is shared online below…please listen, learn and “sing”!! https://youtu.be/3MTUbL4L-r8?list=PLn3f5uju5ADqXikjQ0H_TR6o1GJAcj7UD&t=3067  






Tuesday, January 18, 2022

The North Carolina Chamber Music Institute (NCCMI), MLK 2022 Celebration: Chamber Music Treasures II

Notes on the Program… 

Good evening. “Chamber Music Treasures II ” is the next installment to a celebration of chamber music by composers of African and African American descent–who are now also identified by the anagram “BIPOC”. The inaugural program of two years ago is best described in hindsight as “the result of fortunate coincidences, patience and good timing”. In the past 24 months of hindsight however, these coincidences could not have been more felicitously understated!! The MLK national holiday of 2020 passed with scant mention to news of a “COVID-19” virus discovered in Wuhan, China. Barely six weeks after that performance, we would unanimously state that “the rest–AND the present--is indeed history!!” 

The faculty artists of NCCMI paid Dr. King deferred tribute last year via an online presentation of the 2020 program with commentary and conversation between Waltye Rasulala and Dr. Timothy Holley interspersed and grafted between selections. It streamed online in late February 2021–a late but still fortuitous offering of the inaugural program during the final week of Black History Month. It seems equally surrealistic that the streamed “re-offering” of the first performance aired eight weeks after the attack on the U. S. Capitol Building. Months later–amid pandemic, growing calls and protests for social justice nationwide took hold following the deaths of Breanna Taylor and George Floyd in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota at the hands of white police officers and the law enforcement community at-large. Citizens took to the streets nationwide calling for the defunding of police departments and protesting enforced lockdowns while the virus spread. Intensive care units were filled beyond capacity…and people died in record numbers daily. The relevance and potency of the “Black Lives Matter” movement at mid-year was matched only by the controversial tone and force of the landmark “1619 Project” bravely anchored by New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The entertainment and fine arts communities, already in complete lockdown–also created ways to respond (“virtually”!!) and join the global calls for justice, equity and inclusion while awaiting the development, approval and distribution of the first available coronavirus vaccines nationwide for those in greatest need. 

As we now comply with the third (and present) variant strain and responsive round of vaccinations, it is a pleasure to present this second program–hopefully live and indeed streaming as well!! The inaugural program featured the music of “le Chevalier” Joseph Boulogne de Saint-Georges, Adolphus Hailstork, Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and James Weldon Johnson. The 2022 program extends this tradition further, focusing on works of David N. Baker, Anthony M. Kelley, Florence Price, Chevalier de St. Georges, Adolphus Hailstork, Jessie Montgomery, George Walker, William Grant Still and James Weldon Johnson. This year’s program is also augmented by the welcomed presence of two guest ensembles, the United Strings of Color Quartet and the WCPE String Quartet, one of the laureate student ensembles of NCCMI. 

The program opens with the first of three works of “elegiac” tone and expression. David Baker was the longest serving faculty member of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (1966-2013). In conjunction with Jamey Aebersold, Baker championed the institution of American jazz in education, pedagogy and publication. Originally a jazz trombonist, Baker switched to cello after an automobile accident ruined his embouchure. Although he was a prolific composer, his true calling was teaching: a list of his students taught by him and colleagues who commissioned works from him over the course of five decades easily read like American music living legend (which also includes Elizabeth Beilman!!). The Pastorale was composed in 1959, five years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U. S. Supreme Court and the continued protests of the Civil Rights Movement. Baker would later incorporate it into the cantata “Black America” (1968), written in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This brief work has a carefree expression built upon an opening of major/minor scales and jazz harmonies, but a deceptive gesture at its quiet conclusion dispels that carefree disposition, leaving the listener to reflect upon it with tragic irony. 

Anthony Kelley has kindly provided the following comment on “Sidelines”: “I have two older brothers; throughout our youth they were both impressively gifted in athletics. I looked up to them and their achievements, which included many impressive trophies. The string quartet, Sidelines, is a two-movement musical translation of aspects of sports that were most striking to my imagination as I watched from the bleachers. The second movement “Basketball” explores the joy and gracefulness of buoyancy, both in the game of basketball itself and the gravity-defying players on the court. (Incidentally, baseball is the “featured sideline” of the first movement.) Bouncy, elastic pizzicato notes accompany gliding bluesy melodic and harmonic events until they reach a gentle, conclusive phrase.” Sidelines was composed for the Ciompi Quartet of Duke University. 

Florence Price’s output of Negro spirituals arrangements for voice and piano date from the full expanse of her years in Chicago, after having migrated from her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1927. Her arrangements (and those of many African American composers of that time) were modeled after the settings of Harry T. Burleigh (published by Ricordi in 1915), who sang spirituals for Antonin Dvorak during the Czech composer’s three-year American residency. By the 1920s the last surviving generation of former slaves were between 65-90 years of age; the experience of the African American former slave was still a living memory at that time. Florence Price met and heard spirituals sung by Malinda Carter, a former slave once owned by Squire Carter of Rutherford County, Tennessee. Malinda Carter’s granddaughter Fannie Carter Woods was a concert singer who sang several premieres of Price’s songs. “You Won’t Find A Man Like Jesus” is a meditative song of exultation that clearly speaks of the reflected experience of the Samaritan woman at the well in one of many Gospel accounts of documented encounters with “the carpenter’s son from Nazareth”. Its accompaniment recalls a smoothed-over syncopation often found in ragtime music. “Go Down Moses” (or “O Let My People Go”), one of the best-known examples within the African American folksong tradition, contains the easy makings of a major research effort in the mere estimation of its historical origins. It had to have been a functional protest and popular song during the years of American abolitionism, but exact historical placement of its “origin” is very difficult to determine in either place or time. The song first appeared in print as “The Song of The Contrabands” in 1862 in an arrangement by Thomas Baker based on the song heard by Lewis Lockwood, Chaplain at Union Fortress Monroe (near Hampton, VA). It was sung by the “contrabands” (slaves who defected to Union Army forces in Confederate states during the Civil War) for at least a decade before the broadside publication; Harriet Tubman knew of such “songs of protest” and used them in her work on the Underground Railroad a full decade before. When the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the song on their tours of the British Isles and Europe, their version of the song was published by the American Missionary Association in 1872. By then the song was sufficiently well-known “across the pond” through the antislavery lectures Frederick Douglass gave on tour in Great Britain, Scotland and Ireland in 1846-1847. 

The 2020 recital opened with a string quartet of Joseph Boulogne, le Chevalier de St. Georges. To date, the Quatuor pour le clavecin, violon, viola et basse is the only extant work written for keyboard and strings. The date of its composition is unknown, but it shares the same two-movement structure featured in the first published set of string quartets (Opus 1, 1773). A second detail of interest beyond the instrumentation is Saint-George’s membership in the Loge et Société Olympique, a Masonic order and chamber music society in Paris. He was inducted in 1771 and remained an active member for the rest of his life. The unique keyboard and strings instrumentation reflects a lodge requirement that stipulated lodge members compose a work for their instrument and the other lodge brethren. Just as Saint-Georges had composed some of the first string quartets in France around this time, this piano quartet may have also been first of its kind as well. ‘Le clavecin’ plays the lead musical role but also engages in limited dialogue with the strings; the cello is somewhat “liberated”--from merely doubling the left hand of the keyboard throughout!! The terse g minor first movement features melodic gestures that show a clear exchange of influence with the Mannheim School of Johann Stamitz. The second movement tonality is a lighthearted rondeau--“balanced” with both major and minor modes between song and dance!! 

The reader’s indulgence is begged in the sharing of the next program note which is recycled from my doctoral dissertation recitals: “Adolphus Hailstork composed his Elegy for cello and piano in 1980; after having performed the Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (1985) some years ago, he sent me a tape recording of a performance in which I had participated, along with a score and part to this work with the following note enclosed: “Dear Tim, I don’t recall ever having sent you this short simple ELEGY. Perhaps you can use it. Best wishes, Adolphus. P.S.—If you ever do it, how about sending me a tape?” This “short, simple” piece has a quiet intensity within it that is often associated with grief and bereavement. It is also a somewhat anomalous example of an “African-American elegy”, in light of the occasionally plaintive tone of the Negro spirituals. Its withdrawn atmosphere is so removed from the highly emotional norm of expression at a time of grief and sorrow. The expressive center of the Elegy is the private and noble outpouring of grief as opposed to the expectant visible response of “outburst” (e.g., Moneta Sleet Jr.’s moving photograph of Coretta Scott King holding her youngest daughter Bernice at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968). Direct references are made to the blues in this work in terms of both vocal and stylistic inflection. Although the better-known Elegie, Opus 24 of Gabriel Faure chooses a contrastively extroverted manner of musical expression, Hailstork instead favors an austere and introverted approach, giving the cello a melodic line that is much more withdrawn and even “ascetic” in disposition. Although the piano has the larger instrumental role, it is the cello that has the task of extracting a wealth of deeply profound expression from a single melodic line (or even a single pitch). Thematic connections to Beethoven (Sonata for Piano, Op.81a, Les adieux) and Gustav Mahler (Symphony No.9, Mvt. I) can be found in the blues-affected “Farewell” melody stated by the cello. The influence of the blues in the “farewell” melody--only becomes apparent as the harmonic contour of the work takes shape. The Elegy was composed for the cellist James Herbison (1947-2008), a colleague of the composer at Norfolk State University. 

Jessie Montgomery provides the following about the creative and developmental history of her work, Strum: “Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th Annual Sphinx Competition. Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration”. 

In his fourscore and sixteen years George Walker lived four “musical lives”: concert pianist, chamber musician, composer and professor. He belongs to a unique group of African-American composers and performers who had career “trajectories” distinguished by their prodigious beginnings, their conservatory training and concert performance, including Florence Price, Robert Nathaniel Dett and Margaret Bonds. Like his earlier contemporaries, he had to maintain a “second career option” after conservatory study and his New York recital debut– because of limited performance opportunities accessible to him on account of skin color and the larger concert world’s slowness to change its “flexibility of marketable image”. The common phrase still uttered (a bit less openly) today “the world just isn’t ready yet for a black concert pianist or symphony orchestra conductor” preceded his generation and still mirrors the challenges of equal regard beyond skin color that we face today. Yet George Walker still established himself as both a virtuoso pianist and composer of equal stature, composing solo piano music, chamber music, vocal, choral and orchestral music. It goes without saying that he was blessed with apparent genetic longevity: his sister Frances Walker Slocum (1924-2018) also lived well into her nineties and enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a concert pianist and professor of music at Oberlin College. George was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music (at age 74) for his composition “Lilacs” for soprano and orchestra in 1996, a tribute to the tenor Roland Hayes. One of his first serious works he named Lament for Strings (also the middle movement of Walker’s First String Quartet, an early work composed during his graduate study at Curtis, published in 1946). Walker revised and renamed it Lyric for Strings in 1990, upon which it became one his most-performed concert works. It has a shared “kindred spirit and influence” with the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, as both men studied with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute of Music. The Lyric for Strings is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Malvina King, George’s grandmother (a former slave who passed away shortly before the completion of the string quartet). It was also performed in July 2021 at a vigil for violinist Elijah McClain on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

William Grant Still was one of the most important African American composers of the 20th century. He is nicknamed “the dean of Afro-American composers" on the strength of a quote (made in 1945) by Leopold Stokowski: “Still is one of our greatest living composers”. A similar statement of critical acclaim followed a decade later from a Belgian music critic: “This American composer shows remarkable qualities which place him as one of the very greatest living composers of the New World: a sense of immediate observation; the taste for a rigorous and brilliant orchestration; spontaneity and sincerity characterize his compositions”. His music was also championed by composer and conductor Howard Hanson, who conducted the premiere of Still’s “Afro-American” Symphony in 1931. The Danzas de Panama dates from 1948, based on a collection of Panamanian folk tunes which were collected by the American violinist, actress and ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Waldo in the 1920’s. (At last web check, Ms. Waldo is still living on the West Coast…at the youthful age of 103!!) Of the suite’s four dances, each has at least two and sometimes three separate dances within it. The last movement, Cumbia y Congo begins with a percussive hand-pounding to a high-spirited and fast dance. The choreographic tradition of the Panamanian Cumbia is this: couples advance to the center of the room, both men and women, and gradually form a circle of couples. The dance step of the man was a kind of leap backwards as the woman slid forward carrying a lighted candle in her hand holding a colored handkerchief. Notes provided in the score to this movement also refer to ladies holding a candle during the dance, perhaps recalling the holiday tradition of parading at night carrying a flambeau, not a candle (cf. the French Christmas carol “Bring A Torch, Jeannette, Isabella”). A true match for the dance, the rhythm aspect of this movement sounds purely African in origin but receives an immediate and heavy dose of Latin melody added to the mix. A brilliant, exciting Coda (“tail”) section brings the work to a rousing close, an impressive tour de force. In the spirit of community and communal song, this program closes with “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” of James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. James Weldon Johnson penned the poem in 1900 for recitation by Johnson’s students at segregated Edwin M. Stanton Preparatory School in Jacksonville, Florida in observance of President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Booker T. Washington was the honored guest at the premiere recitation. John Rosamond Johnson set the poem to music in 1905, and the NAACP adopted and dubbed it “the Negro National Anthem” (despite the turbulence of the “Red Summer of 1919”) for its hopeful insistence and deep faith expressed in its three verses. We sing and play this anthem, both to close the program and open a new year of musical heraldry!! TWH 

Song Texts: 

You Won’t Find a Man Like Jesus (arr. Florence Price) 

“Like Jesus, no you won’t find a man like Jesus. You may search from sea to sea, but this thing is clear to me, that you won’t find a man like Jesus. You can search up in the air, but you won't find him there.” 

Go Down, Moses (arr. Florence Price) “Go down, Moses, ‘way down in Egypt land. Tell ol’ Pharaoh to let my people go.!” When Israel was in Egypt’s land, “Let my people go!” Oppressed so hard they could not stand “Let my people go!” This spoke the Lord, bold Moses said. “Let my people go!” If not I’ll smite your first-born dead. “Let my people go!” “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt's land Tell ol’ Pharaoh to let my people go O let my people go!” 

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing (James Weldon Johnson) 

“Lift every voice and sing, ’Til earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on ’til victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers died. We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, ’Til now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand, True to our God, True to our native land.”























Sunday, May 23, 2021

"A Layover in Sweet Home Chicago: Remembering Robert C. Fisher, Violinist, Violist & String Pedagogue"

“A Layover in Sweet Home Chicago”: Remembering Robert C. Fisher, Violinist, Violist & String Pedagogue"
On Tuesday, 11 August 2015 I traveled to Rochester, New York as a returning participant musician at the Gateways Music Festival. It was to be my third “family reunion, tribal discovery and all-around jam-up time had” with a growing group of musicians, many of whom I went to school with, freelanced with, auditioned in line with, joked around with, sometimes argued with yet still always in the pursuit of musical excellence and artistic truth.
However, my trip would turn out to be less than direct or on-time!! A major storm hit the entire East Coast of the United States knocking out power, delaying and cancelling all planned forms of travel. I was waiting to board my 725pm flight (uh, two seats, not one!!) out of Raleigh-Durham for a quick joint to Charlotte and catch a connecting flight to Rochester, but those storms took that travel offer…’OFF the table!! The torrential rainfall often called a “gullywasher”--hit the Triangle Area and RDU Airport as I was waiting to board the plane!! Take-off was delayed but its arrival was so late that the connecting flight had already departed. Upon my eventual arrival and attempt to find and book another connecting flight to Rochester, I would learn that the next flight wasn’t scheduled to depart until 800am the next morning...NOT direct service but another two-city “hop and skip” connector through Chicago’s O’Hare Field--AND a two and one-half-hour layover upon arrival there!!
While stranded for 45 minutes maximum that evening in Charlotte, my dear cousins Jason and Blanche Laws came to the “ram in the bush rescue”!! They were in town that evening and kept me from spending an uncomfortable night in Douglas International Airport--with no luggage!! Blanche works for USAir at Douglas, and her work shift began at 6am the next day, so after a “short nap” at their home I was right back to Douglas in a few hours to await that flight. Upon arrival at O’Hare Field, I had plenty of time to have breakfast and dawdle on Facebook until my final connecting plane to Rochester boarded for takeoff.
The interesting coincidence is that two of my colleagues, percussionist Dr. Ralph G. Barrett of NCCU and bassoonist Joshua Hood of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra--traveled from the same state (Barrett on the same flight out of RDU Airport) ended up arriving in Rochester in equally diverse ways as me!! Barrett missed the connecting flight, got a hotel room and was able to book a direct flight to Rochester. Josh chose to drive, but if ”hindsight is 20/20” I should’ve rode with him!! He had to drive through that same mammoth storm system but I would've made better time riding with him!! The two of us were scheduled to play a duo for bassoon and cello, “Common Ground” by Wolfgang Gernot, at the first chamber music recital on Thursday evening during that amazing week of crowded rehearsals and performances.
My final flight landed in Rochester on Wednesday afternoon (12 August) at 230pm. I caught a bus from the airport into the downtown area, and made my way to an afternoon reception at the Eastman School of Music. I’d missed a rehearsal and welcome meeting--one of numerous Festival musicians who arrived in “ROC” after delayed travels. Needless to say, it was great to be back at the Festival, that strange “musical Wakanda” and gathering opportunity for African American concert musicians from around the United States and abroad. The Friday evening performance activity was one of the most diverse and interesting of the week--an evening of “scattered” chamber music performances given by the Festival Orchestra musicians in various venues around the city. Due to my chamber music performance the previous evening I had been “liberated” from that activity--even though I had been placed in an ensemble of string players for that evening. In the course of my "early evening dinner hour plans coincidentally vacated”...I would meet one of the Orchestra violists, Robert C. Fisher. Many of us musicians who met for the first time at Gateways had little problem getting comfortable with one another, thanks to the wealth of quality relationships developed by the Festival’s "founding mother", Armenta Adams Hummings Dumisani. Neither Robert nor I had decided on where to have dinner, so we took a leisurely walk a few blocks away from our hotel to the Upper High Falls Historic District, where we found a restaurant overlooking the gorge that served wood-fired pizza. It took little to no time for us to “connect those six degrees of separation” and to punctuate our dinner time with great laughter and banter!! (Somewhere in all of my smartphone photographs of that week is a photo of a mill water wheel preserved in that historic district adjacent to the restaurant.)
At the Gateways and Colour of Music Festivals of 2019, we would perform together orchestrally. Our reunions were always happy--and full of knee-buckling hilarity!! Like all of us during 2020 and the pandemic, Rob and I kept in touch via Facebook; his regular travel adventures of lost or broken eyeglasses, malfunctioning cell phones and general matters of our “shared seniority” kept us both in enduring and endearing laughter!! The “deal-sealer” of our friendship came when we were all about to depart from the Hilton Nashville Airport hotel for the musicians of the Colour of Music Festival at Nashville in November 2019, five months before the shutdown. I had just finished packing my car, and my wife Leslie Conley Holley had just gotten into the car. A few musicians including Robert had gathered nearby to chat and pass the time before their respective airport shuttles arrived to pick them up for the short ride to the airport. Leslie and Robert met at the 2019 Gateways Festival three months earlier...and hit it off wonderfully!! They are both natives of Chicago, so they had no trouble getting along (we also met the conductor and Chicagoan Jaman E. Dunn in Rochester as well--’barely five minutes into our initial conversation they were singing a familiar jingle for a well-known Chicago fur coat store!! Those kinds of meetings are priceless!!) Anyway, just before we are fixing to depart Nashville, I notice Rob and tell her that Leslie is here with me--and we’re ready to leave!! He SEIZES THE MOMENT, runs around to the passenger side of the car to greet “his Chicago sister” and gives her a great big hug!! Aside from having lunch at Monell’s Restaurant downtown before hitting the road back to Durham--that hug moment crowned my whirlwind weekend!! It isn’t every day that such bonding happens but I’ll always cherish it!!
The news of his passing has come so suddenly that I have not really processed its gravity. Yet. My heart rushes out to the musicians and administration of The Chicago Sinfonietta, with whom Robert had returned to “Sweet Home Chicago” to perform with guest bassist Victor Wooten after the hiatus from which we are all moving onward carefully. That photo of him and Victor onstage speaks untold volumes of pride and gratitude that came from the noble and passionate heart of a fine musician--’gruff, eyewear-challenged, phone-losing...but just fine!! “Fish” is one of those folks who I may not “traditionally grieve for” because the spoken expression “au revoir, arrivederci, see you later alligator”, whether spoken or unspoken--always lingered between us. Since the “au revoir” has now become “adieu”, the “merci” and “grazie” can’t be given sufficient expression. I believe that we shall meet again.
In the meantime, I’ll try not to lose my glasses!!😎


Monday, December 14, 2020

#EthelBlueGown: Fourscore and Eighteen Reminiscences, At Least...


When writing a tribute of reminiscence for one whose longevity is so immense, I’ve discovered and accepted the fact that “writing too much”—often becomes just another verse of “I Wonder As I Wander”… So HERE GOES!!

Ethel Collins Bray (1922-2020) was a rare person. I’m still carefully studying the exact genealogical connections between her and I; after all when one says “cousin” in referring to a family member, the presumption is that the connection is intragenerational. Ethel Bray was a first cousin of my paternal grandmother, Ethel Lee Jones Holley; the “direct” family connection is to be found on the maternal side of that limb of a magnificent branch of the family tree--from Emma Longs Collins to Ethel Lee Jones Holley!! She was diminutive in stature but towering in attitude, quick of tongue and wit yet still warm and engaging. Around family she was consistent to remind us all that “she was the oldest of the gang”, which elicited the usual response from us: laughter and the rolling of eyes to the side, but it didn’t change a thing. We all were loved, accepted, admired and always welcome in her home when we made numerous trips to Columbus, Ohio to visit. When she was a little girl my paternal grandfather, M. Q. Holley Sr. told my aunts and uncles to “treat Ethel as your sister”—which they did, and over the years more than a few memories of their childhood days on West Eight Mile Road in Detroit trickled down three generations to a few of us “additional cousins”!!

First, I should clarify one matter of word pronunciation: we didn’t call her “Cousin Ethel”; over time the word as a title became “Cudd’n”, giving the familial term additional endearment. The earliest Eight Mile Road memory I recall involved some meat my grandmother put in a pot to slow-cook, with directions for Ethel to make sure it didn’t dry out. Apparently once it had cooked sufficiently, the fellas (my uncles Major, Harold and Oscar) couldn’t keep from tasting the meat, 'bit by bit. By the time my grandmother returned home only about 1/8th of the original piece of meat remained in the pot!! Those regular exchanges of banter over “who was in charge” amongst the kids while my grandparents were out and about in a normal day--lasted well into adulthood and extended far and wide throughout the family village structure!!

Cudd’n Ethel was born in Columbus, Ohio and came to Detroit after her mother and aunt passed away. “M. Q. and Cousin Ethel” (as Cuddn’ Ethel referred to my grandmother!!) took her in—that’s what family does when “push comes to shove”. Cuddn’ Ethel told me once that her mouth (and her “fas’ behavior”) and capricious commuting between Detroit and Columbus eventually caused M. Q. to issue an ultimatum: she could not play “travel ping-pong back and forth on US-23: Detroit, Michigan or Columbus, Ohio"!! She chose Columbus, and the rest, indeed…is history. Her husband Norman Bray was one of the coolest, mild-mannered men I can remember ever having met. The funniest recollection of him that I have is from a visit that must have happened in the mid-1970s. Like many metropolitan areas around the United States, Interstate Highway 70 had cut a path through the east side of Columbus. Cuddn’ Ethel, Norman and their daughter Carole had moved to another house not far from historic Hanford Village, a once-thriving African American community. My family rode to Columbus but had to meet Cousin Norm downtown--in front of the Ohio State House (you can’t miss that landmark!!). We got to the State House and waited for Cousin Norm to show; back then he drove a black 1976 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Sedan that was sharp!!—austere yet immaculately stylish, second to no other vehicle in the neighborhood!! Norm pulls up in front of the State House on Broad Street but across from where we were parked waiting for him. The street is wide—wide enough that he had to make a U-turn to pull over alongside. Just as he was fixin’ to make the turn, this young lady--“a fine young thing”--skips across the sidewalk over to his car…and GETS IN!! We’re watching all that from across the street wondering “what’s goins’ on”?? She sits in the front passenger’s seat for a few seconds chatting with him, then politely gets out of the car and flitters (or “flutters”!!) off. Norm does the U-turn and pulls over to meet us with a sheepish grin on his face, pulls away…and we follow him to the house. Both back then and now…the hilarity and laughter over that “grand encounter” remains legendary!! A good belly-laugh was HAD BY ALL!!

Cuddn’ Ethel attended Columbus East High School and went to work for Chemical Abstracts Service, where she must have worked for nearly fifty years. (There are some questions we young’uns knew not to be too nosey to ask; after all, we’re not the FBI!!) My cousin Terry Reeder attended Capital University (BA ‘80), a few blocks away from her and Norm and worked in Columbus before moving to Detroit. During his postgraduate years my cousin Charminn Ford also lived there briefly as well—cousins from three different “family tree branches” all right there!!

Each fall the Wolverines and the Buckeyes met on the football field to settle the score for the next year of trash-talking!! Cuddn’ Ethel, Aunt Sophie, Uncle Oscar, my Dad, my cousins Terry and Diane Reeder would have their annual “fan-duel” in session during and after the game!! (I understand that a friendly wager of two dollars to the winner was also part of the festivity—at least between Ethel and Oscar!!)

When I joined the faculty at North Carolina Central University, I learned about two interesting facets of the “small world degrees of separation” amongst colleagues in African American higher education: several of my colleagues had taken their advanced degrees from either Michigan State University (across town from where I grew up!!) or The Ohio State University!! (Backyard Rivalry 1.0!!) OSU also had a “graduate school recruitment relationship” with NCCU’s archrival, the Aggies of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University!! (Backyard Rivalry 2.0!!) During the first of two University Honors Program “field trips” from Durham to Columbus to attend the OSU Graduate School HBCU Visitation Weekend, I would learn that school and sports rivalries are often founded in class distinctions and stratified relationships...‘an intense and strangely unregulated competitive arena!! They also are quite intriguingly rooted in close relationships as well.  I remember very well the “Ten Year War” between Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler—the great teacher-coach and his former student, graduate assistant and assistant coach now leading “that school up North”!! I often say to Buckeye football fans “you know, this is ALL Woody’s fault”!! In life off the gridiron the two men were the closest of friends, but their desire to teach and coach to their highest abilities set them at odds one with the other—on the last weekend of each November. (By the way, two students who attended the OSU Grad Fair went on to do graduate work at OSU!! I digress, ‘but not TOO much!!)

At that grad school fair I met an OSU doctoral student, composer and instant colleague named Mark A. Lomax, who I bonded with over a cello piece he had written. Years later (April 2019) he invited me to perform a work of his at OSU (talk about “comic irony”!!), which I did…and Cuddn’ Ethel was in the audience (at age 96!!) for a full concert of cello and piano music of African American composers. My longtime friend, colleague and U-M pianist Karen Walwyn shared the concert with me—a musical victory for the Wolverines just a few blocks from the Horseshoe!! I once talked with Cuddn’ Ethel about her memory of having heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra perform live in Columbus in the early 1960s with Major playing bass!! (I recorded the conversation for my own oral history archives; if I can share it via FB I will do so…but I’ll have to preview it first!!)

After the concert at OSU my family and Ethel went out for dinner near campus. They were all seated when Leslie and I arrived to join them, and Ethel was seated at the head of the table—because room was needed for her cart. She had ordered her meal first, and her salad arrived right after we sat down. She was talking to us all—or maybe to Mark or Millie—'and pointing her steak knife above her plate!! We saw this…and ALL FELL OUT LAUGHING!! There was neither moment nor occasion where her wit and timing didn’t run AND steal the show!! Meals with Ethel and Carole at their home always moved in constant motion and at record pace!! She’d cook and announce when the meal was ready, and the cleanup would be in motion barely ten minutes after the meal had begun!! They didn’t dine in the French or Italian traditions!! SAVOR FAST!!

Leslie and I traveled to Chicago that summer (2019) for a “Tim to work but Leslie to relax and reunion” trip. I went to attend and perform at the Centennial Meeting of NANM, the National Association of Negro Musicians (who held their inaugural meeting one week before the infamous Chicago Race Riot during the “Red Summer” of 1919). We spent the first two days prior to the conference visiting Leslie’s longtime friends, Gary and Eugenia Giles, Leslie’s Aunt Lois Gray in Gary, Indiana—and took in a performance of “Hamilton” right after the NANM meeting was finished. A wonderful week was had by all!! On our way back to North Carolina we stopped in Indianapolis to visit my brother Mark and his wife Zander--and in Groveport, Ohio to visit Cuddn’ Ethel. It was Leslie’s second meeting with Ethel; they had bonded right away during a 2018 visit, not long before she moved into the Brookdale Senior Living Community. The house had become too much for her to maintain after her daughter Carole passed in 2017. On that visit she ribbed me constantly on account of the midlife belly I’ve been carrying, saying “get rid of it”!! I think of her admonition daily—and I will do so…eventually one way or the other!! On another visit she told me “Hey, I’ve got money!! Let’s go out for lunch!!” I had spoken with Mark by phone the day before, and he mentioned to me that he’d taken her to do some banking a day or two earlier, and to be sure she didn’t forget where she’d placed her cash. Once she and I began talking about having lunch, it turned out that we were closer to the front lobby than her room. I ended up taking her out to Wendy’s so I could get a quick bite of lunch because it was taking too long to for her to remember where she'd put her money “for her treat” to her nephew!! Needless to say it was a funny but sobering moment for me.

In September 2019 I was summoned to Ann Arbor, Michigan to join my longtime friend Louise Toppin and perform at the conference on African American music “Reflecting On The Past, Projecting Toward the Future, II” that she graciously hosted at The University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance. As always, a grand time was had by all!! That entire trip was full of visits too wonderful to give complete description; six months later all travel worldwide would cease and all social events became the public health risks and perils we still lament and have to accept as facts of daily life. On my way back to North Carolina, of course I stopped in Groveport, Ohio to see Cuddn’ Ethel; since I had my cello with me, I gave an impromptu performance just for her in the lobby!! Since I had arrived during the Bingo game hour (just before dinner!!), so Ethel made an announcement welcoming me and summoned all the gathered residents to listen to my concert!! I played for about 15-20 minutes, and at the close of my performance she announced to everyone that the concert was over!! I wish she had hooked her announcements up to my PayPal account!! I had dinner afterward with her “dining crew”, five other ladies all of whom were pistols just like her!! They all had stories that were moving, insightful and endearing to hear. But Cuddn’ Ethel still dictated the quality of mealtime in grace and style!! It was a joyous, hilarious and deeply meaningful time spent.

Whenever my family would visit Columbus, it would always be a brief matter of time before I began to browse her record collection. While I played only few of them on her stereo, she was always quick to notice and express her appreciation of my musical curiosities. Two years ago she told me, “I want you to have all my records”; on one of my now-infrequent “Midnight NASCAR road trips” I went to get them. I was astounded to see some of the musicians—vocalists and instrumentalists, many of whom she’d seen perform live when they came to town. 

Our times move so fast, from going to hear live music to seeing it happen virtually due to the shutdown. I’ve begun calling the era prior to 13 March 2020 the “beFo' Times”, and still wonder what the “AftaTimes” will eventually become once the COVID-19 vaccine is proven to be effective and consistently safe for public health globally. It is the strangest means of human bonding: social distancing for fear of “manslaughter by abject negligence”. Nevertheless, we are forced to remember the words of the Biblical 90th Psalm, either in part or whole: “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly are away… 'Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” 

I am, and my family village stands thankful to the Lord for the ninety-eight years of faithful and enduring strength given to #EthelBlueGown #NobleLady, and for the nobility of her life and bearing as the “oldest” of her adopted siblings, their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, stepchildren (and “play-cousins”, of course!!)

May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us—yes, establish the work of our hands.” (Psalm 90:17) AMEN.

Monday, November 2, 2020

Adolphus Hailstork: Sonata for Solo Cello (2012), Timothy Holley, cello

The Sonata for Cello (2012) of Adolphus Hailstork is an imposing work whose opening movement contains a gesture of "homage" paid to the Suite No.1 in G Major for Unaccompanied Cello of Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1007). Following that polite "nod" however, this work immediately goes to places that Bach didn't have cultural access 295 years ago!! The influence of the closing gigue (jig) from the Bach suite pervades the entire movement, and yet the presence of blues melody strangely works in tandem with the dance, producing a unique musical result and aesthetic effect. The second movement is best described as "a slow tempo blues song in rondo form", but playing and hearing it can also resemble a trip across Pennsylvania on Interstate 80!! Formal structure and travel descriptions cast aside, a secondary melody is introduced bearing a curious indication in the score: "call and response". This indication refers to the tradition of "lining" or "raising” a hymn, which comes from the black sacred music tradition. The final movement reprises thematic material from the previous two movements, engaging in what sounds like the “dialogue, disagreement and dissolved argument...between children”!! Odd as that opening “argument” may sound, it gives way quite fittingly…to the sound of children's play song!!  In this manner, the Bachian gigue and blues dance aesthetic of the opening movement are “prayed over” in the call and response of the middle movement road trip. Then “both music and prayer join hands” with the play songs of children in the final movement.  TWH 

https://youtu.be/1UjVWWLK53k

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

"Three Recitals of Violoncello Music of African American Composers", The University of Michigan Rackham School of Graduate Studies (1996), Timothy W. Holley, Violoncello

 

These are the complete program notes for the three Dissertation Recitals performed in lieu of a written dissertation, done in partial fulfillment of the degree Doctor of Musical Arts (A.Mus.D.) in The University of Michigan School of Music, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies by Timothy W. Holley, violoncello

Dissertation Title: “Three Recitals of Violoncello Music of African-American Composers”

Recital One: 23 April 1995, Northside Community Church, Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Recital Two: November 14, 1995, Recital Hall, School of Music, The University of Michigan.  Recital Three: March 12, 1996, Huron Hills Baptist Church, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Program I (23 April 1995): David N. Baker: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1968) Fast; Slow (Blues); Fast.  Dorothy Rudd Moore: Dirge and Deliverance for Cello and Piano (1971).  Noel G. Da Costa: Two Pieces for Unaccompanied Cello (1973); Five Verses/With Vamps for Cello and Piano (1968).  George Walker: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1957) Allegro passionato; Sostenuto; Allegro 

Collaborative Artists: Howard Watkins, piano; Kelley Benson, piano

First Dissertation Recital Notes

David N. Baker, cellist, bassist, composer, arranger and teacher, is one of the foremost jazz educators of this century.  As director of the Jazz Studies Program at Indiana University, his performing, teaching, composing and developing instructional materials on jazz improvisation with Jamey Aebersold have helped to expose at least two generations of young musicians to American jazz.  As a composer, Baker studied with Bernhard Heiden, Juan Orrego-Salas and George Russell.  The list of musicians who have commissioned works from him reads like a Who’s Who list: Josef Gingold, Janos Starker, Ruggiero Ricci, Gary Karr, Harvey Phillips, Paul Freeman, and the Beaux Arts Trio, to name a few.  He is called upon regularly to serve on national arts panels as an authority on American jazz, and is Music Director of the Smithsonian Institute Jazz Orchestra, which frequently tours the United States.  The Sonata for Cello and Piano was composed in 1968.  Its three movements of alternating tempo are cast in sonata-allegro or ternary form.  The stylistic interest of this work is its successful wedding of the European sonata-allegro principle with the rhythmic fluidity of American rhythm-and-blues and jazz.  The compositional and stylistic approach in this work is comparable to the chamber music of Bela Bartok, as both composers have sought to combine the flexible improvisatory nature of folk music material with the structured framework of European musical craftsmanship and form.  As Bartok drew from an inexhaustible well of folk melodies from eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, so Baker draws from nearly as many wells of stylistic and compositional influence—the formal craftsmanship of Haydn, the musical language of Olivier Messiaen, Miles Davis’ modal jazz and the “sound-streams” of John Coltrane, and tritonal effects reminiscent of Charles Ives and Alban Berg.  The formal design of the opening movement clearly displays Baker’s intent of joining jazz-syncopated melodies with the Classical sonata-allegro paradigm.  The tonal polarities of the Tonic and dominant chords are dispensed with, and the dramatic discourse takes place between instrumental partners on a highly rhythmic and melodically angular level.  Although Baker does not dispense with tonality altogether, his harmonic language is additively chromatic and yet still remains centered on a single pitch, D-natural.  The two themes presented in this movement are contrasted more by rhythm than melody or harmony, just as themes in sonata-allegro procedure contrast each other, without regard to style.  The second movement is originally titled “Slow”, but the ancillary title “Blues” was devised by Mr. Starker, who has performed this movement frequently as a separate piece.  The term “blues” fits loosely for the slow tempo and meditative quality of the opening soliloquy.  However, in terms of musical form and style, the suitability of the title stops there—or at best should be called “kind of blues”.  The attempted pun is intentional—despite the fact that no evidence of the blues in its original form is present in this movement.  The extended cello passages recall the modal style of jazz played by Miles Davis in the late 1950s, as displayed on his recording “Kind of Blue” (1959).  The piano provides tenderly reflective interludes between the extended cello passages—reminiscent of the similar balladic dialogues heard in the various Miles Davis Quintet combinations of the same time (c.1958-1963).  The overall tone of this movement is elegiac, perhaps a memorial to two great musicians, John Coltrane (1926-1967) and Wes Montgomery (1923-1968), as evidenced by the quasi-improvisatory melodic writing and fingered octaves in the cello cadenzas.  The final movement is an impetuous tour-de-force, punctuated and seasoned by constantly darting rhythms shifting back and forth between intense lyricism and earthy blues dialogue.  The lightness of instrumental texture is created by the active cello line supported by the rhythmic commentary in the piano, which doesn’t inhibit the sense of musical directness that characterizes the opening theme.  This movement also develops two important motives—the first, melodic in function, is taken from the blues scale.  The second motive functions rhythmically and harmonically, resembling a blues figure.  The middle section is a serene waltz that contains a hint of a different underpinning, perhaps Swing.  A retransition from this section back to the main theme follows, marked by rapid rhythm-exchanges between cello and piano.  Also featured are instrumental effects, the dragging of the fingers across the white keys of the piano, and a combination saltando-glissando effect, the bouncing of the bow on the strings while producing a glissando with the left hand.  The outworking of formal events in this movement mirrors European sonata treatment quite predictably, but the blues motives continue their development to the point of near-disintegration, where only their harmonic outline remains.  The virtuosic writing for the cello takes wing, quickly spanning the full range of the instrument before the ultimate “out-of-tune” final chord.  Michael Peebles and Gayle Cameron premiered this work in June 1968 at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and Janos Starker and Alain Planes recorded it in 1974 for the CBS Black Composers Series, Volume Six (CBS M-33432).

Dorothy Rudd Moore is one of the most eloquent spokespersons for the music of African-American composers.  As a founding member of the Society of Black Composers, her compositions are mainly concerned with the musical portrayal of African-American historical figures (including an opera based on the life of abolitionist Sojourner Truth).  A native of New Castle, Delaware, she studied at Howard University with Mark Fax, the American Academy at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, and privately with Chou-Wen Chung.  One of her most frequently performed works is “Weary Blues” (1970) for baritone, cello and piano, after Langston Hughes’ poem.  Her song cycle “From the Dark Tower” (1970) consists entirely of settings of poetry from the Harlem Renaissance: James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, Waring Cuney, and Langston Hughes.  She lives in New York City with her husband Kermit Moore, who is a cellist, composer and conductor.  Dirge and Deliverance was written for her husband, and the composer herself has kindly provided notes to this work:  “As the title suggests, the work is in two movements.  The “Dirge”, marked Adagio, begins with stark chords in the piano.  The cello then enters, announcing the principal theme, which is characterized by a three-note motif.  The theme represents the human spirit longing to be free.  The chordal and rhythmic structure forms a pattern which embodies a force enchaining the spirit, thus intensifying its despair.  Deliverance”, marked Allegro, begins with the cello alone, and is based on the same three-note motif of the “Dirge”.  Its character has become angry and determined however, as the spirit is actually fighting to be free.  The piano enters, engaging is a struggle with the cello.  Suddenly, the cello plays alone again in an extended cadenza, which alternates between rage and hope.  Reflectively, the cello plays quiet harmonics and rejoined by the piano.  This movement, which is agitated and probingly frenetic, ends with the celebration of the liberation of the spirit.  Dirge and Deliverance was premiered by Kermit Moore and Zita Carno at Alice Tully Hall in 1972.  Kermit and Raymond Jackson recorded the work for Cespico Records, CR#77001.

Noel G. Da Costa was born in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to the United States with his family as a child.  His earliest ideas about music and composition were shaped in his public school years, where he had the eminent African-American poet Countee Cullen as an English teacher.  He studied at Queen’s college of the City University of New York (B.A., 1952) and Columbia University (M.A., 1956).  As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence, Italy.  He has taught at Hampton University (VA) and in the several city colleges of the CUNY system.  Presently, he is an Associate Professor of Music at the Mason Gross School for the Arts at Rutgers University.  His works are often concerned with the synthesis of African-American musical idioms with dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) and serial techniques.  The Two Pieces for Unaccompanied Cello were written in 1973 and are based on Ewe chant-rhythms and melodies.  The Ewe are an African tribe of Ghana, and many of its people and tribal chants were brought to the New World by way of the slave trade.  The main motive of the first piece is declamatory, and the main motive of the second is dance-like.  Each motive is stated repeatedly at the outset of each piece.  These pieces were written for Ronald Lipscomb, who gave the premiere in 1973 at Alice Tully Hall in New York City.  Several distinct musical styles and compositional procedures are mingled side by side in the second work of Noel Da Costa, Five Verses/With Vamps.  Predates the Two Pieces by five years, this work intermingles the dodecaphonic concision of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern) with the popular idioms of African-American music, particularly the vocal idioms of the song verse and vamp.  Although such a “mixture” of cultural and musical material appears rather precarious, the system is surprisingly receptive to the composer’s attempts to impose African-American musical idioms onto this tonally “egalitarian” system of composition.  These five pieces—externally simple in outline yet internally complex in structure, use the verse and the vamp as their structural underpinning.  However, each verse and vamp section fails to function in the same way twice.  Most vamps are short and the verses long; but the vamps found herein occasionally grow to unusual lengths, while the verses consequently lose their sense of even proportion in the process.  In the opening piece, the verse is repeated at the outset while the vamp features a jazz harmonic progression which includes a cryptic reference to J. S. Bach in the cello line.  An altered version of Bach’s musical signature appears in the vamp spelled in retrograde order, “H-C-As-B” (B-natural, C, A-flat, B-flat), recalling Alban Berg’s musical tribute to Schoenberg and Webern in the Chamber Concerto of 1925.  The second piece is the most complex in terms of polymeter, and justifies the use of full performance scores for both instruments.  Only the vamp is of a consistent meter in this piece; all other measures of the “verse” are of different meters: 7/8, 5/8, 7/16, 3/8, 9/16, etc.  The rate of metric and melodic change is so great that a pattern only becomes audible at the end of the verse and in the vamp.  The third piece forms the core of this work because of its austere and poignant expression.  Only in this piece does the cello have a fleeting chance to sing.  The piano texture is quite sparse, and never in conflict of acoustic balance with the cello.  The vamp is simpler in this movement, perhaps an attempt at restoring a modicum of simplicity within an already complex work.  All feints at sustaining any such long-term simplicity are again dispensed with in the fourth piece, which presents the largest rhythmic challenge to the pianist.  Unlike the second and third pieces, the vamp in the fourth piece is both complicated and extensive—whose material also serves as a Coda, punctuated by a “funky” bassline figure played by the cello.  The final piece is an epilogue, restating the opening material of the first piece, but omitting the repeated “verse”.  The restrained lyricism of the third piece is briefly recalled, and the vamp section is restored to its short-phrased simplicity and serenity.  This work was premiered 3 March 1970 by Evalyn Steinbock and David Garvey, and also recorded by them for Composers Recording, Inc., CRI SD-514. 

George Walker (1922-2018) had a long and distinguished career as a pianist, composer and educator spanning over seven decades. He studied at Oberlin College, the Curtis Institute of Music, the American Academy at Fontainebleau, and the Eastman School of Music. His principal teachers were Rudolf Serkin, Robert Casadesus, Clifford Curzon, Nadia Boulanger, Rosario Scalero and Gregor Piatigorsky. Dr. Walker made his debut at New York’s Town Hall in 1945, and from 1950-1963 toured Europe, Scandinavia and the West Indies. His teaching career included tenures at Dillard University, Eastman, the Dalcroze School of Music, the New School for Social Research, Smith College, University of Colorado, University of Delaward, and Rutgers University (professor emeritus). The Sonata for Cello and Piano was composed in 1957 as his doctoral dissertation at the Eastman School of Music. The year of its composition places it in an interesting developmental position in the history of the cello sonata in the 20th century. Several important sonatas of both European and American origin* precede it, and yet it possesses an individual sense of originality which allies it to, and still distinguishes it from these works. The cello sonatas of Samuel Barber, Dmitri Shostakovich, Bohuslav Martinu, Paul Hindemith, Elliott Carter and Sergei Prokofiev were all written within twenty-five years of the Walker sonata, and each in its own way either follows or breaks rank with some stylistic or compositional precedent, yet still forging a new and personal statement. It is quite probable that the originality of the Walker sonata is connected to his knowledge of the Beethoven cello sonatas, and the relative novelty of the aforementioned works may have escaped his attention at the time he was composing this work. Nonetheless, the score to this work is sufficiently imposing, particularly for the piano and reflecting Walker’s consummate knowledge of the instrument and his own technical virtuosity. The cello part is also highly lyrical, and presents few non-idiomatic passages as it moves smoothly between its singing sound and jazz-like basslines. The opening movement is cast in sonata form with rather austere proportions, similar to the pared-down control of material that occurs in the sonatas of Beethoven (opp.101 & 102, the latter opus written for piano and cello). The melodies in the Walker sonata are linear, generated by the opening piano figure. The sonata is tinged with with African American rhythms which represent “the pouring of old wine into new skins”: a more rhythmically-driven approach to the dynamic form and process of the sonata, much as David Baker has done in his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1968). The intense lyricism of the melodies are balanced against an unusually rhythmic recitative between instruments—a feature no to be found among the precedent group of sonatas. Much of the first movement is undergirded by two main rhythmic motives which grow out of the opening phrased of the Exposition and Development sections. The second movement is an atmospheric essay, a sort of musical “still life drawing”. The otherworldly beauty of the piano chords underscore the cello line much like the music of Olivier Messaien (1908-1991), which speaks of heavenly serenity (e.g., Le banquet celeste” or “In Praise to the Eternity of Jesus” from the “Quartet for the End of Time”). The melody is interwoven within the piano texture instead of sounding apart from it, by restricting its rhythmic activity. A short canon occupies the middle section of this movement, giving balance and contrast to the movement, but barely disturbing its overall serenity. The final movement is a fugal structure in 6/8 meter, with expositions alternating with intermediate episodes in 9/8 meter—divided in a most unusual manner: 3+4+2 instead of 3+3+3, a metrical feature common to Walker’s style.  The fugue subject is more linear than the main theme of the first movement, but in contrast to J. S. Bach’s fugal writing doesn’t sound very fugal at all (or “lend itself” to predictable compositional treatment). The episodes seem to evoke a ragtime feeling within this unusual meter. The cello plays pizzicato jazzlike basslines, and the piano seems to play stride piano type of lines throughout as well. The sense of musical expansion and contraction can be easily heard in the 9/8 sections as both the piano and cello lines become more texturally dense and rhythmically involved. This breathing sense of expansion and contraction subsides as each section closes, and is followed by a final statement of condensed and diminuted rhythms in the closing Coda (“tail”) of the work, except that the note-values of the subject are cut in half (diminuted to 3/8 meter), and is followed by short, lightning-fast Codetta (“tip of the tail”). The Sonata was premiered in 1964 by Paul Olefsky and George Walker in New York City at a concert of the Violoncello Society under the auspices of the Kosciusko Foundation. Italo Babini and George Walker recorded the Sonata for Serenus Recordings (SRS 12081). [*The cello sonatas mentioned which precede the Walker sonata by no more than a generation (25 years) are: Samuel Barber, Sonata, Opus 6 (1932); Dmitri Shostakovich, Sonata in d minor, Opus 40 (1934); Bohuslav Martinu, Sonata No.2 (1941); Paul Hindemith, Sonata (1948); Elliott Carter, Sonata (1948); Sergei Prokofiev, Sonata in C Major, Opus 119 (1949).]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David N. Baker, Lida M. Belt, Herman C. Hudson, editors: The Black Composer Speaks (Metuchen, NJ, 1978); Mark Gridley: Jazz Styles (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1978; A. M. Jones: Studies in African Music (London, 1956); LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): Blues People (New York, 1963); Woodie King, ed.: The Forerunners—Black Poets In America (Washington, D.C., 1961); Eileen Southern: The Music of Black Americans, A History (New York, 1971, 1982, 1996); Eileen Southern: Readings in Black American Music (New York, 1971)

SCORES

David N. Baker: Sonata for Cello and Piano (New York, Associated Music Publishers; Lauren Keiser Publishing, 1978; 1990); Noel Da Costa: Five Verses/WithVamps, for Cello and Piano (New York, Columbia University/Kings Crown Press, 1976); Noel Da Costa: Two Pieces for Unaccompanied Cello (Halsco, ms., 1973); Dorothy Rudd Moore: Dirge and Deliverance, for Cello and Piano (New York, American Composers Alliance, 1971); George Walker: Sonata for Cello and Piano (Hastings—on-Hudson, NY, General Music Company, 1972)

Program II: (14 November 1995) Howard Swanson, Suite for Cello and Piano (1949); William Grant Still, Summerland (1936); Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Variations in b minor (c.1907); Adolphus Hailstork, Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (1985)

Collaborative Artists: Kelley Benson, piano; Karen Walwyn, piano; Joseph Striplin, violin

Second Dissertation Recital Notes

Howard Swanson (1907-1978) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, into a musical family and began his musical studies at age twelve after the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio.  He entered the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1930, studying piano and composition, respectively, with Ward Lewis and Herbert Elwell.  He completed his studies in 1937, and went to France to study further with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau on a Rosenwald Fellowship during the summer of 1938.  He remained in Paris until impending wartime events forced him to flee in 1940.  He traveled to Spain, Portugal and northern Africa before returning to the United States in 1941.  He went to work for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, but left that position to devote all of his time and energy to composition two years later.  His musical output during the war decade consists mainly of vocal music, settings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and T. S. Eliot; much of his early work had to be left behind when he fled Paris.  It is his setting of Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1942) that brought his name its first major recognition when Marian Anderson sang it in recital in 1949.  The Short Symphony (1948) was the result of a commission from the conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos, and was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1950, received thirty performances by other orchestras, broadcast and recorded several times, and received the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award for the “most interesting orchestral composition” performed by the New York Philharmonic during the 1950-1951 season.  The Suite for Violoncello and Piano (1949) also belongs to this emergent period of creativity, and is dedicated to Bernard Greenhouse, who gave the first performance with pianist Anthony Makas at Town Hall in New York City on 26 February 1951.  The opening Prelude is a brief tone-picture that could suggest a rural Georgia landscape from Swanson’s childhood, crafted with the motivic homogeneity of a Bach keyboard prelude.  The consistent texture of chordal writing predominates much of the movement, calmly proceeding beneath the meandering melody of the cello, an opening gambit of musical gestures tempered by the influence of personal experience, black sacred music and the blues, all elements which unify the entire work.  The second movement, Pantomime, is a curious piece, both for its allusion to the world of the theater couched in musical terms, and its foiling of one instrumental “character” against another.  Having its origins in the ancient Roman theater, pantomime is the art of character demonstration by way of gestures without speech, often accompanied by music and dance.  Although there is no direct connection between ancient roman pantomime and Negro minstrelsy, it is possible (in contemporary terms) to connect the image of the paled-faced mime to the minstrel performing in blackface, who was a standard comic figure on the vaudeville stage as late as the 1940s.  Musically speaking, the pantomime is characterized by the “gestures” of both partners, abruptly angular outbursts that interrupt a smoothly flowing line of melody and rhythm.  The third movement, Dirge, contains references to death and sorrow, both musical and autobiographical.  A dirge is a lament performed at a funeral or memorial service for the dead.  Swanson was no stranger to the sorrow of bereavement as a young man; by the time he reached adulthood, he had lost both his parents and younger sister.  The music of Beethoven, Chopin and Gustav Mahler provide well-known examples of dirge-marches from the European concert repertoire.   However, this dirge has the added emotional impact of the blues influence mentioned earlier, both in the artfully placed harmonies between both instruments, and in the main melody heard throughout.  The impact of the melody comes in no small part from the bi-tonally juxtaposed chords that groan beneath the plaintive cello line.  The accompaniment doesn’t provide the expected harmonic changes with the blues melody—to the extent that divergent meters are notated between each instrument in the score.  The title of the final movement, Recessional, is a reference to the close of a church worship service.  At this place in the service, the entire congregation usually sings, the ministers and choir march out (“receding”), followed by the Benediction.  What follows is normally a time of open mingling and fellowship inside and outside the sanctuary—an easily identifiable social experience on a larger human level.  In this movement, the pictorialism on the opening Prelude is united with the arching influence of the blues from the Pantomime and Dirge, creating a disjointed yet strangely flowing musical effect.   A gigue-like dance rhythm opens the movement, but is soon interrupted—quite often, actually—perhaps descriptive of the busy, animated (and interruptive) visual, aural, physical and verbal exchanges between people following a church service.  These “picture-ideas” (drawn partially from human experiences) are shaped with the composer’s stamp of individuality while maintaining clarity of melodic line, which may have come from his work with Nadia Boulanger or his own instinctive self-expression, which was noticed by his Elwell: “Like all truly creative persons, he found his way alone, and is probably the stronger for it”.  Such individuality of expression is paralleled in the literary work of Langston Hughes, with whom Swanson was well-acquainted and set several of his texts. 

This year 1995 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of William Grant Still (1895-1978), who was born in Woodville, Mississippi and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas.  He studied music at Wilberforce College (1911-1914), Oberlin College (1917-1919) and privately with George Whitefield Chadwick and Edgard Varese.  He moved to New York in 1919, working as staff arranger for the Pace & Handy Recording Company during the 1920s (after having worked previously with W. C. Handy in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916).  He also performed, playing oboe in the pit orchestra for the musical “Shuffle Along”, the first all-black musical production to open on Broadway (1921).  His work with Handy led to further experiences as arranger for Will Vodery, the musical director for the Ziegfield Follies.  The Eastman-Rochester Philharmonic brought Still historic recognition when Howard Hanson conducted the premiere of the Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American”—the first performance of a work written by an African-American by a major American orchestra.  He was hailed as “one of our greatest composers” by Leopold Stokowski in 1945, and in his later years was (and still is) regarded as the “dean of Afro-American composers”.  Summerland” is the second movement of Three Visions, a suite for solo piano written in 1936.  I transcribed it for cello in the fall of 1985, a few months after meeting Judith Anne Still (the composer’s daughter) at the Black American Music Symposium held at The University of Michigan that summer.  I had recently seen a most interesting photograph of William Grant Still on the cover of the February 1984 issue of Music Educator’s Journal, in which he is posing with a cello.  (The same photograph is presently on display here at the School of Music.)  I inquired about any works of his written for stringed instruments, the cello in particular.  Much to my surprise, I found that there were no works originally written for the cello, but since there were numerous arrangements of pre-existing material already within his catalogue of works (which is usually the case with most composers), the idea of attempting a transcription came immediately.  Shortly after the summer’s end, I received a nice-sized package of William Grant Still’s violin music from Judith, who owns and operates the William Grant Still Music Company in Flagstaff, Arizona.  In a short time the transcription (or “version for cello, after the violin arrangement by the composer”) was finished, and the first performance took on 23 November 1985 in Ann Arbor.  It is a charming piece that is quite reflective of the blended art-music style in which he had been working at while arranging dance shows and vaudeville even in the 1920s.  Unlike the “Afro-American” symphony, no attempt is made to fuse the more vernacular blues style with the craftsmanship of the European symphonic tradition.  He seems to emulate the flavor of French modern music (Debussy and Ravel) in this work, quite the contrast of the symphony of five years earlier.  The beauty of this work lies in its simplicity and the vocal quality of the melody.  The poignancy produced in this work is its crown jewel, for it is probably the most transcribed work in William Grant Still’s catalogue.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was the best-known composer of African descent of his day on both European and North American continents.  In spite of his interracial heritage, over the course of his life he adopted a largely African-American racial identity.  His father was Daniel Peter Taylor, a West African medical student from Sierra Leone.  His mother, Alice Hare Martin, was a white Englishwoman from Dover, Kent, who met Taylor while serving as a companion for Mrs. Benjamin Holmans of Croydon, Surrey.  Unfortunately their marriage didn’t last; Daniel returned to Africa, living and practicing medicine in Gambia for the rest of his life.  Martin and Samuel were taken in by the Holmans family, who became adopted grandparents to the boy (and Mr. Holmans, called “Grandfather” by young Samuel, was an amateur violinist).  A few years later Alice Martin married a railway storeman named George Evans of Croydon, and their marriage provided a modest yet fertile home life and musical atmosphere for young Samuel.  His earliest musical experiences were violin lessons with Joseph Beckwith and singing as a chorister at St. George’s Presbyterian Church, where he won the support of the choirmaster, Colonel Herbert Walters.  Unwilling to see the boy’s precocious talent wasted, Walters approached Sir George Grove about arranging for his admission to the Royal College of Music, where he studied for seven years (1890-97, where his classmates included Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst), and some of his early compositional successes were due in large part to professional assistance received from Sir Edward Elgar and August Jaeger of the music publisher, Novello.  He was schooled in keeping with the Victorian tradition of German Romanticism through his composition teacher Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, heavily influence by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms, as well as non-Germanic composers (Chopin, Dvorak and Grieg).  As he grew to compositional maturity, his music began to show the extramusical of his African-American contemporaries, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.  Of particular influence on Coleridge-Taylor was that of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), whose name had burst into international literary prominence when his volume of poetry “Lyrics of Lowly Life” was in England.  The two men met in London in 1896, and they soon collaborated in joint performances, song cycles and an operetta, Dream Lovers.  He read and admired the biographies and works of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, but it was W. E. B. DuBois historical analysis of the Negro in America, “Souls of Black Folk” that was to most clearly shape much of Coleridge-Taylor’s thought, both in terms of his racial identity and the “programmatic” identification with African and African-American ideas and subjects in his compositions (e.g., “Toussaint l’Ouverture” and “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”, the use of Negro spirituals as thematic material in symphonic works, and his collaboration with prominent African-American musicians during his American concert tours).  His best-known work by far at that time was (and still is) his choral trilogy, “The Song of Hiawatha” after the saga of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which was frequently performed in England, Europe and the United States during his lifetime. 

Coleridge-Taylor composed only two works for the violoncello, both introduced in 1907 amid the flurry of activities which interspersed his second and third American concert tours (the first made in 1904, followed by the others in 1906 and 1910).  The exact date of composition for the Variations in b minor for violoncello and piano is uncertain.  Biographer W. C. Berwick Sayers makes mention of some “Variations for Cello, which have since vanished mysteriously” in his account of the composer’s activities for 1906, which included the composition and first performances of the rhapsody Kubla Khan, two of the six suites of incidental music to plays commissioned by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree for His Majesty’s Theater, numerous other compositions, performing and teaching engagements, and his second tour of America late in that same year.  Amid this mix of activity, he lost two of his close friends Paul Laurence Dunbar and composer (and RCM classmate) William Yeates Hurlstone who died that year, affecting him profoundly.  Mention of the dates of first performances of both cello works are made; however, in light of the fact that Sayers’ biography is not exclusively diaristic, it must be concluded that their “gestation” took place between the time of his second concert tour of the US and the middle of 1907.  In a later chapter, Sayers comments at length about the first performance of this work: “At the String Player’s Concert, on 30 November 1907, Mr. C. A. Crabbe played from the manuscript some Variations on an Original Theme for the Violoncello, a work which proved that this instrument received very special attention from him [Coleridge-Taylor] during the year.  I have been unable to see the copy of this work, as it has disappeared mysteriously; but at that single hearing we formed the opinion that it was a fine, sustained, characteristic work, and the audience, which recalled player and composer some half-dozen times, more than shared the opinion.”  In an earnest footnote, Sayers provides even further update: Mrs. Coleridge-Taylor later informed Sayers that the work had been recovered after eight years (c.1915), and that it would hopefully be published, which it was, in 1918.  It is quite probable that the work was composed for Mr. Crabbe, who was a member of the Croydon String Player’s Club, a select group of musicians from the Croydon Orchestral Society formed for the purpose of presenting chamber music concerts.  (The other concerto-form work for cello, the Fantasiestucke in A Major, although premiered on 7 July 1907 by Mary McCullagh and the New Brighton Orchestra with the composer conducting—remains unpublished.)   The Variations in b minor are modeled largely after the variation-form works of two composers, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Peter Ilytch Tchaikovsky (1840-1893).  Brahms used the variation form in the final movement of the Quintet in b minor for clarinet and strings, Opus 115; Tchaikovsky’s only concerted orchestral work for the violoncello is the Variations on a Rococo theme, Opus 33.  The Coleridge-Taylor Variations use a theme of similar elegance and simplicity as the “Rococo” theme, followed by four variations.  Throughout the work, thematic transformation is given equal structural importance as the spinning out of subsequent variations.  In each variation, the theme has a different character, melodic contour, rhythm, and key center; in one variation it is even obscured.  In cellistic terms, it has a manageable set of technical parameters, and virtually no tangles of insurmountable difficulty.  Nonetheless, it has a cantabile quality naturally suited to the instrument, and the theme has a direct and dramatic musical quality that shows the influence of one of the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies (Opus 59) that Coleridge-Taylor transcribed for solo piano, “Don’t Be Weary, Traveler” (No.12).  In addition to the aforementioned composers cited as models, Coleridge-Taylor”s affinity for the music of Antonin Dvorak and Edvard Grieg makes itself heard as well.  In his emulation of these composer’s styles, he manages to “tip his hat” in a gesture of homage to some of their best-loved works.  He feigns pastiche in quoting a passage from the middle movement of the Dvorak Cello Concerto in the first variation, and pays tribute to Grieg in an infantine passage of the final variation.  The work makes little attempt at deep extramusical profundity, only a well-crafted essay in the variation of an original and typically elegant Victorian theme. 

The Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano was composed in 1985 for the NOVA Trio, three musicians having a close musical and professional relationship with Dr. Hailstork, who teaches at Old Dominion University and Norfolk State University in Norfolk, Virginia—violinist Ray Pancarowicz, cellist James Herbison and pianist Jayne Kaplan.  The ethnic makeup of the trio caused Hailstork to include utterances of Afro-American and Jewish music within the themes and rhythmic drive of the work.  Familiar forms of folksong and chorale are used in the opening movement with a uniquely generative facility that permeates the entire work.  The general mood of the opening movement is quite somber, interrupted only once by music of compact intensity.  The second movement is a scherzo (with trio) of agitated character, accentuated by the cross-metric rhythms of the strings.  The intervening trio section provides a respite from the agitation of the scherzo, introducing a new melody derived from the folksong of the first movement.  The repetition of the scherzo leads directly into the final movement, a lively dance in 11/8 meter.  The low-register melody played by the piano is a Hassidic Jewish melody (taken from an early work written for a church choir).  In this movement the Hassidic-flavored melody meets the provocative “groove” of African-American rhythm, as the rhythmic division of each 11/8 measure (2+2+3+2+2) receive a dynamic accent throughout.  A second melody in 7/8 meter follows, a further adaptation of African-American musical idioms in an asymmetric meter.

Technical virtuosity is not to be overlooked in this movement, as the violin has two extended passages, “mini-cadenzas” leading back to the Hassidic melody, and later to a slow section that recalls both the main theme of the movement and the opening folksong and chorale.  The confirmation of structural and musical cyclicism in this work is united with a sense of familiarity, “of having come full circle from a definite point of origin”, which can be heard and felt here.  The work closes with an “apotheosis” of both melody and rhythm, the inclusion of both themes (of 11/8 and 7/8 meters), united by the “feeling of the dance” which has been present throughout both middle and final movements.  The Trio shares an “unconsciously modeled” relationship with the Trio No.2 in e minor, Opus 67 (1944) of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), a work also having a very strong Jewish sentiment predominant throughout the entire work.  Both works utilize Jewish folk music within established formal music processes (folksong, chorale, passacaglia), asymmetric meter and the cyclical treatment of thematic material (already intensified by the “folk presence”, be it Jewish or African-American).  However, it is the close contacts with Jewish culture and music in Hailstork’s own background that serves as the basis for any such comparative relationship between the two works.  The Hailstork Trio was premiered 31 March 1985 in Norfolk, Virginia by the NOVA Trio, to whom the work is dedicated.  This work has been performed several times in Ann Arbor: 12 August 1985, at the Black American Music Symposium at The University of Michigan; 27 September 1987, on an all-Hailstork program of chamber music as part of the composer’s King/Chavez/Parks Fellowship Residency; 12 October 1992, for the Black Arts Series at The University of Michigan School of Music.  The work is soon to be recorded by the present group of musicians.

*Other sources list the cellist as A. E. Crabbe. **The three aspects of Coleridge-Taylor’s racial identity that are noticeable in his music are: the two concert overtures “Toussaint l’Ouverture” and “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”, and the Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63 for orchestra; the use of Negro spirituals as thematic materials in symphonic works; his collaboration with prominent African-American musicians during his American concert tours.

Program III (12 March 1996) Frederick Tillis, Spiritual Fantasy No.7, “On My Journey Now”(1983); Hale Smith, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano (1955); Adolphus Hailstork, Elegy (1980); William Grant Still, “Mother and Child” from the Suite for Violin and Piano (1943); Lawrence Brown, SPIRITUALS—Five Negro Folksongs (1923)

Collaborative Artists: Robert Conway, piano; Kelley Benson, piano

Third Dissertation Recital Notes

Frederick Tillis began playing trumpet and saxophone at an early age, and was influenced by the music of Benny Carter while playing in small jazz bands in his hometown of Galveston, Texas.  He studied at Wiley College (TX) and The University of Iowa, but gained early compositional experience while serving as director of the 3560th Air Force Band (1952-56).  Dr. Tillis later taught at his alma mater, Grambling State University, and chaired the music department at Kentucky State University.  He is now Professor of Music and Special Assistant to the Provost for the Arts and Director of the University Jazz Workshop at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  His compositions have been commissioned and premiered by Dr. Billy Taylor, the Max Roach Double Quartet and the Trio Pro Viva.  His Inaugural Overture (1989) was composed in honor of the installation of Dr. Johnetta B. Cole as President of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.  The Spiritual Fantasy No.7 for Cello and Piano, “On My Journey Now” was composed in 1983 as part of an ongoing series of fantasies on African-American spirituals for various vocal and instrumental combinations that presently numbers seventeen.  It has been Dr. Tillis’s aim and commitment throughout the series to both document and preserve the heritage of African-American sacred song in a variety of settings. Such large-scale serial treatment of one musical form or idea certainly has several historical precedents (e.g., J.S. Bach’s harmonizations of Lutheran chorales, the numerous collection of folksong arrangements of Johannes Brahms, Bela Bartok, Ralph Vaughan Williams, etc., as well as Heitor Villa-lobos’ Bachianas brasileiras and Choros).  On My Journey Now” is a spiritual whose origins are nearly impossible to ascertain, as it is the product of oral transmission instead of codifed documentation.  It is quite probable that this particular song was “composed” early in the years of American slavery, when and wherever slaves were allowed to gather for religious services.  (In his book on the history and development of the Afro-American spiritual, “Black Song: The Forge and The Flame”, John Lovell lists the earliest known Negro Baptist church as the Silver Bluff Church near Savannah, Georgia, which was a joint venture of sympathetic whites and slaves, founded in 1773.)  In the context of the spiritual, the “journey” is a term of double meaning, either a pilgrimage of the soul heavenward or a planned escapade northward via the Underground Railroad.  Dr. Tillis first heard the spiritual sung by the Morehouse Men’s Glee Club, under the direction of Dr. Wendell Whalum.

The song (whose alternate title is “Mount Zion”) maintains a special identity within this genre; despite its long-standing notoriety, it isn’t easily found in the volumes of spiritual arrangements for concert use by vocalists, even though it is well-known and commonly sung in African-American church congregations.  The spiritual itself serves as the main theme, out of which variations are spun, and also as a developmental springboard for the fantasy, which then takes on a shape and character of its own.  Because this work operates as both a fantasy and variation-form, the “fantasy-variations” have an equal sense of structural value as the theme.  In the course of this work, the theme will undergo melodic and harmonic transformation and textural stratification to the extent that only the rhythm of the theme will remain unaltered.  The element of musical fantasy is most appealing throughout the work as the listener will embark upon a “journey” through various musical styles including the blues, jazz and particularly Asian music, as a Japanese folk melody is introduced and recalled late in the work.  An intriguing use of pivotal pentachords* will mark the latter sections of this work, one of a blues outline and the other from the Japanese melody.  Such juxtapositions as these will serve as an aural cue, pointing to a larger humanitarian statement uttered in musical terms.  The pentachords alternate with each other in close proximity, revealing striking similarities between the basic elements of folk music of two different continents.  A brief cadenza bisects the final statement of the spiritual, combining the various musical influences presented earlier in a musical benediction, accomplished by the extension of the overtone series about the natural sonority of open 5th in the cello.  Although this “journey” takes us much farther than expected, the simplicity of the song’s text remains firmly rooted in a deep faith in God, which never gets “lost” no matter how far or long the journey.  Spiritual Fantasy No.7 for Cello and Piano, “On My Journey Now” was premiered in 1984 by the cellist Leopold Teraspulsky at a faculty artists’ recital at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Hale Smith is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and he resides in Freeport, New York.  He studied composition with Marcel Dick at the Cleveland Institute of Music in the early 1950s, and moved to New York in 1958.  From that time he has gained both national and international attention as a composer and arranger of both jazz and concert music, composing and arranging music for jazz luminaries Ahmad Jamal, Quincy Jones, Chico Hamilton and Eric Dolphy in the 1960s, and more recently Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman and Wynton Marsalis.  Hale Smith first gained national recognition for his composition, Contours for Orchestra (1962), which was premiered by the Louisville Orchestra, and later recorded for First Edition Records.  The Sonata for Violoncello and Piano was composed in 1955 for the African-American cellist Kermit Moore, who was living in Paris and studying with the French cellist and pedagogue Paul Bazelaire at the time of its composition.  Smith and Moore were fellow students at the Cleveland Institute of Music; the work was requested for Moore’s European concert tour.  The Sonata received its first performance at Paris in 1956; subsequent performances were given in Switzerland and Germany.  The American premiere followed in 1958, given by the cellist Benar Heifetz and pianist Ward Davenny in New York City.  The first movement is cast in sonata-allegro form, with an introduction that provides both germinative and cyclical material for the movement and the entire work, a broad melody in 12/8 meter generated by a six-note motive.  The presence of recurring material between varied movements in Classical sonata from is quite common and could be considered an expectant feature in the works of numerous composers**, including Brahms, Dvorak and Franck in the 19th century and Debussy, Ravel, Kodaly and Prokofiev in the 20th*.  All of these works have an abundance of material stated and “recycled” within, and notwithstanding the strength of traditional influence, the cyclical process is used with an equal touch of individuality and originality in the Hale Smith Sonata.  Although the recurrence of thematic ideas are important in this work, they do not overshadow the directness of dramatic discourse that takes place between instruments.  The predominant atmosphere of the opening movement is one of intense dialogue balanced by brief sections of calm.  The calmness which occurs late in the movement consists of an interlude for solo piano using thickly-textured chords that have already characterized the introduction.  A short cadenza for solo cello follows prior to the tumultuous close of the movement.  The second movement is a literal continuation of the first (marked attacca, a directive to proceed onward), using the broad opening melody stated by the cello.  It is in this particular movement that the presence of recurrent themes aren’t merely stated; the melodic, harmonic and emotional direction of the work up to this point is transformed by each recurrence of the introduction and its partial or complete statements.  Despite the lack of a time interval between movements, the slower tempo and calmer atmosphere created a gradual and more natural “break” by way of dynamic contrast and a new melodic and harmonic direction.  A sense of vocal, even operatic feeling embodies the cello line (marked “quasi recitativo”), followed by a nocturne supported by a blues-like harmonic texture.  The nocturne seems to float almost effortlessly above the bluesy underpinning before returning one last time to the music of the work’s opening.  This final reprise points in two musical directions—both backward to the midsection of the first movement (the canonic writing) and n to the final movement, which is a dance-fantasy, subtly gestured at be the slowly-quadrupled waltz-feeling of the meter (12/8).  The last movement (Dance-Finale) is a curious fantasy on dancelike rhythms.  The precipitously-phrased cello melody negotiates a “catwalk” among the rhythmic, angular interjections of the piano, whose “riff” (a recurrent accompanimental motive quite common in jazz) is an upbeat three-note motive shared with the cello.  This motive is transplanted from the first movement via the minutest instance of a recurrent rhythm in a sonata structure, three barred sixteenth notes.  The movement’s rondo form (A-B-A-C-B-A) has inherent formal idiosyncrasies, in which ne section in truncated (or left incomplete upon its restatement) to the extension of another.  The most extensive internal sections feature the waltz (having several “occasionally missing beats” and weak-beat accents) and the Magyar-flavored melody that recalls Bela Bartok and Hungarian folk music.  So many influences harmoniously coexist in this work that it tends to resist cogent stylistic classification.  This work seems to negotiate a “catwalk” on another aesthetic level, the merger of stylistic influences of an individually-developed and uttered vernacular style working alongside the European classical tradition, in which the jazz and blues traditions are brought so close but not exclusively embraced, and the rigid, time-honored custom of the Classical tradition are used as a flexible formal mold, and not as an inflexible straitjacket.

Adolphus Hailstork composed his Elegy for cello and piano in 1980; after having performed the Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (1985) some years ago, he sent me a tape recording of a performance in which I had participated, along with a score and part to this work with the following note enclosed: “Dear Tim, I don’t recall ever having sent you this short simple ELEGY.  Perhaps you can use it.  Best wishes, Adolphus.  P.S.—If you ever do it, how about sending me a tape?”

This “short, simple” piece has a quiet intensity within it that is often associated with grief and bereavement.  It is also a somewhat anomalous example of an “African-American elegy”, in light of the often-elegiac tone of some of the Negro spirituals.  Its withdrawn atmosphere is so removed from the highly emotional norm of expression at a time of grief and sorrow.  The expressive center of the Elegy is the private and noble outpouring of grief as opposed to an expectant visible response (cf., the photograph of Coretta Scott King holding her youngest daughter Bernice at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968).  Direct references are made to the blues in this work in terms of both vocal and stylistic inflection.  Although the better-known Elegie, Opus 24 of Gabriel Faure chooses a comparatively extroverted manner of musical expression, Hailstork favors an austere, introverted approach, giving the cello a melodic line that is far more withdrawn, even “ascetic” nature.  Although the piano has the larger instrumental role, it is the cell that has the task of extracting a wealth of deeply profound expression from a single melodic line (or even a single pitch).  Thematic connections to Beethoven (Sonata, Op.81a, Les adieux) and Gustav Mahler (Symphony No.9, mvt. i) can be found in the blues-affected “Farewell” melody stated by the cello. 

Mother and Child” is a single-movement transcription from the Suite for Violin and Piano (1943) of William Grant Still.  The Suite is an interesting example of a piece of music written by an African-American composer directly inspired by a work of visual art by an African-American artist.  All three movements are inspired by the sculpture of three African-American artists: Augusta Savage, Sargent Johnson and Richmond Barthe, all of whom flourished during the Harlem Renaissance (c.1919-1929), and belonged to the generation of artists who first answered the eminent Negro philosopher Alain Locke’s call for African-American artists to re-examine primitive African art for their inherent inspiration and subject matter (e.g., Meta Warrick Fuller, Barthe, Savage, Selma Burke, etc.).  It is of minor interest that Still composed this work from a position of distant historical perspective, as the Harlem Renaissance ended c.1929 or shortly thereafter, as many movements of cultural interest with the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression that followed.  Nevertheless, Still captures both the beauty of the sculpted figures of mother and child, and the middle section of the music touches on an even deeper emotional bond naturally created between a woman and her child.

Lawrence Brown was the accompanist of Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson, as well as a prolific arranger of Negro spirituals.  A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Brown moved to Boston in 1914 to study music privately, going abroad in 1920 to study composition and voice with Amanda Ira Aldridge at Trinity College, London.  The same year he accompanied Roland Hayes in his London debut at Aeolian Hall.  He also accompanied Hayes in a command performance for King George V of England at Buckingham Palace in 1921, after which Hayes and Brown toured together for the next four years.  He first concertized with Paul Robeson in 1925, and their collaboration would last for thirty-eight years (and later be paid posthumous tribute in a two-man play based on the life of Robeson).  During their years in England, Roland Hayes and Lawrence Brown made the acquaintances of some of the best-known English musicians of that time.  Beatrice Harrison (1892-1965) was certainly one of that distinguished group, and one of the few cellists of that time who had the liberty to perform primarily as a solo artist and chamber musician, a pioneering effort for a woman of Victorian/Edwardian Era England.  The second of four very talented sisters, Beatrice studied with William Whitehouse at the Royal College of Music in London, Hugo Becker at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, and gave numerous premieres of works in the modern cello repertoire.  She gave the first English public performance of the Zoltan Kodaly Sonata for Solo Cello, made the first recordings of the Edward Elgar Cello Concerto, and introduced compositions of Frederick Delius, John Ireland, Arnold Bax and Cyril Meir Scott (all written for her).  She toured Europe (1910-1912) with her sisters May (violin) and Margaret (piano) as both a duo and trio, respectively; she made two tours of the United States in 1913 and 1932.  Her pleasant reminiscence about Lawrence Brown is included in her autobiographical memoir, The Cello and The Nightingales: “ I became acquainted with Lawrence Brown, the accompanist of Roland Hayes, the famous Negro tenor.  He was a delightful person and most enthusiastic.  He used to come down to Foyle Riding [(sic, the Harrison family cottage)] and fry chicken for us, just as it was done in the southern states.  It was after this, in the Music Room, that he taught me to play the beautiful Negro songs and I was able to catch their unusual rhythms which pleased him greatly.  He arranged these songs for me and we gave a concert at Wigmore Hall which attracted so much attention that it was completely sold out.”  A review from the London Daily Telegraph also appears in her memoir: “Mr. Brown has given these beautiful tunes an unobtrusive background calculated to set off their natural charms to the best possible advantage and Miss Harrison’s employment of a slow portamento could readily be accepted as a successful attempt to produce one of the most characteristic features of Negro singing”.  In his lifetime, Lawrence Brown made nearly four hundred vocal and choral arrangements of spirituals, including the settings for violoncello and piano, which date from 1923.  Some of his vocal arrangements were published in the double-volume of spirituals compiled and edited by James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond (American Negro Spirituals, New York, 1925, 1926).

Final Oral Examination “Opening Gambit”:

The recurrent issue within each work programmed in this series of three recital of violoncello music of African-American composers has been that of “stylistic merger”, which is the blending of once seemingly disparate musical styles with each other in a common compositional framework.  The first recital program dealt with the merger of modern (and postmodern) musical ideas within the traditional sonata-allegro formal process in the David Baker Sonata.  The work’s tripartite form is traditionally conformist, yet the content of each movement is filled with and generated by stylistic motives and rhythms of considerable African-American identity, of which jazz and R&B (rhythm-and-blues) are the most pervasive.  Dorothy Rudd Moore’s Dirge and Deliverance might very well have taken its structural cue from Robert Schumann, whose Adagio and Allegro, Opus 70 and Fantasy Pieces, Opus 73 both make use of a single melodic idea as the basis for multiple sections of the work.  However, the Dirge and Deliverance attempts to achieve an equal to greater height of drama in posturing the opening Adagio as a sort of continuous variation-form (i.e., passacaglia) in order to build up a larger amount of musical and psychological tension.  The Deliverance serves to both struggle with and eventually relieve the tension built up during the Dirge, culminating in the cadenza for the cello at its midsection, representing the struggle between rage and hope within the human spirit.  The two works of Noel Da Costa manage to combine the dodecaphonic technique of the Second Viennese School (i.e., Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) with the pliability of African-American melodic and rhythmic ideas.  The Two Pieces for Unaccompanied Cello, based on Ewe chant rhythmc and melodies, are largely an exploration of the inherently choreographic aspects of the rhythms, which are taken from a ritual dance of the Yeve cult, a social and religious group within the Ewe tribe.  The Five Verses/With Vamps (for cello and piano) deals directly with the interfacing of African-American musical idioms with the 12-tone technique (and possible some serialistic aspects of composition as well).  The George Walker Sonata might well be considered the most “neoclassical” work of this program, as it adheres to a greater degree of motivic clarity than the foregoing works.  Its formal proportions betray an austerity of musical material, despite a considerable demand of technical capabilities for both partners.

The second program takes on a more Romanticist tone, addressing programmatic ideas in ways removed from those of the Baker and Moore works.  Two of the works on this program are even more unique within this genre for the reliance on the heritage and influence of the blues, and thus creating a further sense of uniqueness within the merger of musical style.  The Suite of Howard Swanson is a highly individual and sophisticated treatment of the blues influence, as heard in the meandering melody of the Prelude, the ironic, bittersweet minstrel-like comedy of the Pantomime, the inescapable sorrow of the Dirge, and the stained-glass coloristic effects of the Recessional.  Despite the suggestiveness of each movement title, assistive references to the poetry of Langston Hughes are helpful in beginning to comprehend the individuality of Swanson’s craft and musical expression in this work.  The short piece of William Grant Still, “Summerland”, sounds of the influence of Debussy and Ravel, yet it maintains both clarity and simplicity of melody, harmony and texture (e.g., the Preludes of Debussy, Jeux d’eau and Sonatine of Ravel).  The work is taken from a three-movement suite for solo piano, Three Visions, which may be one of precious few essays emulating the French Impressionist style.  The Variations in b minor of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor are perhaps the earliest known work written for the violoncello by a composer of African descent.  Composed c.1907, its from is one used quite commonly within his complete oeuvre; one of his better-known orchestral works, Symphonic Variations on an African Air, (Op.63, 1906) uses the spiritual “I’m Troubled in Mind” as its theme.  The merger of style and form is more apparent in the orchestral variations—the union of the Negro spiritual with European symphonic treatment.  The theme of the ‘cello variations is original yet not without a connective reference to one of the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies for Solo Piano (Op.59, 1904), “Don’t Be Weary, Traveler” (No.12), which also makes use of the variation-form.  The only chamber work presented on these programs is the Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (1985) of Adolphus Hailstork.  The work’s three-movement cyclical structure unites the influences of two great musical cultures, the Jewish and African-American.  The “folk presence” of the Trio is mainly Hailstork’s highly imaginative treatment of the opening folk melody; however, the utilization of Jewish or African-American folk music within an established formal process in a cyclical manner also recalls the Trio No.2 in e minor, Opus 67 (1944) of Dmitri Shostakovich.

The third program was originally planned as a lecture-recital on the influence of the Negro spiritual as found in several cello works of African-American composers.  Although the lecture-recital did not come to fruition, this program dealt instead with the germinative presence of the spiritual (or Negro folk song) in the two works that opened and concluded the program.  The Spiritual Fantasy of Frederick Tillis is based on the spiritual “On My Journey Now”, and operates on several structural and musical levels, wedding both the fantasy and variation-forms while also incorporating various musical styles and cultures in the process.  The Sonata of Hale Smith shares an affinity with the sonatas of David Baker and George Walker, mainly for its imitative yet originally reserved handling of formal process, as well as what should now be referred to as the “inclusion of the necessary”—jazz and blues elements—in a most striking and honest manner, true t the original style yet tastefully extending the potentialities thereof in a concerted work.  The Elegy of Adolphus Hailstork predates his Trio by five years; its lyrical style is similar to the opening movement of the latter work, both of whom share a plaintive atmosphere.  The Elegy tends to maintain a certain measure of anomaly, in light of the “expectable” outworking of emotion at a time of sorrow.  Its withdrawn tone is quite the opposite of the elegies of the European repertoire (cf. Gabriel Faure Elegie, Opus 24, Frederick Delius Elegy), yet it uses the familiar three pitches descending in stepwise motion as its “farewell motive”, as Beethoven and Mahler have done.  The merger here is most imaginative, as in the Trio: the motive doesn’t change, and yet the harmonic and emotional atmosphere is transformed from a deeply sorrowful and extrovertive lament to a profoundly introvertive “adieu”—a gesture of resignation.  The influence of the blues in the “farewell motive” only becomes apparent as the harmonic contour of the work takes shape.  The single-movement transcription of “Mother and Child” is from the Suite for Violin and Piano (1943) of William Grant Still.  In a manner recalling Samuel Coleridge-Taylor or Howard Swanson, Still uses the visual inspiration of the work of three African-American sculptors, Augusta Savage, Sargent Johnson and Richmond Barthe, all who flourished during the years of the Harlem Renaissance (c.1919-1929).  In this work Still seems to have moved away from the French Impressionist influence, adopting a more thickly-scored Romantic tone (recalling Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff), perhaps better capturing the visually-perceived feeling of bonding between mother and child.  The Five Negro Folksongs (1923), as arranged by Lawrence Brown, form the “other end” of the influential connective of the spiritual, this time in a much more “original” setting.  The cello world owes a large debt of gratitude to Beatrice Harrison for her advances made upon the instrument in both performing presence and addition to the repertoire, from her performances of the Brahms (and Delius) Double Concerto with her sister May to giving the first English public performance of the Kodaly Sonata for Solo Cello, a work whose technical demands remain most advanced in our time as well.  Lawrence Brown’s arrangements are part of a sizeable body of cello literature written for, premiered by and/or championed by her; in fact, Brown may be the only American to have composed or arranged any music for her.  Harrison’s most expressive tone must have been easy to “exploitatively” arrange for, particularly in the slower songs—an “art” that she successfully learned from Brown during his years in England as an accompanist for Roland Hayes.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Program One/Textbooks:

David N. Baker, Lida M. Belt, Herman C. Hudson, eds.: The Black Composer Speaks (Metuchen, NJ, 1978); Mark C. Gridley: Jazz Styles (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978); Arthur Morris Jones: Studies in African Music (London, 1956); LeRoi Jones (aka Imamu Amiri Baraka): Blues People (New York, 1963); Woodie King, ed.: The Forerunners—Black Poets in America (Washington, D.C., 1981); Eileen Southern: The Music of Black Americans, A History (New York, 1971, 1982, 1996); Eileen Southern: Readings in Black American Music (New York, 1971). 

Scores:

David N. Baker: Sonata for Cello and Piano (New York, Associated Music Publishers, 1978); Noel Da Costa: Five Verses/With Vamps, for Cello and Piano (New York, Columbia University/Kings Crown Press, 1976); Noel Da Costa: Two Pieces for Unaccompanied Cello (ms., 1973; calligraphy by Hale Smith); Dorothy Rudd Moore: Dirge and Deliverance, for Cello and Piano (New York, American Composers Alliance, 1971); George Walker: Sonata for Cello and Piano (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, General Music Company, 1972).

Program Two/Textbooks, Articles:

Herbert Anticliffe: “Some Notes on Coleridge-Taylor”, MQ, viii (1922), 180; Verna Arvey: In One Lifetime—The Biography of William Grant Still (Fayetteville, AR, 1984); David N. Baker, Lida M. Belt, Herman C. Hudson, eds.: The Black Composer Speaks (Metuchen, NJ, 1978); Coleridge Alexander Braithwaite: A Survey of the Lives and Creative Activities of Some Negro Composers (diss., Ph.D., Columbia University, 1952); James H. Cone: The Spirituals and The Blues (New York, 1972); Ronald A. Crutcher: “The Chamber Music of African-American Composers”, American String Teacher, Fall 1995, 71; Ronald A. Crutcher: Music Alive 1990!! “Chamber Music of African-American Composers”, Chamber Music, viii (1991), 22; Maud Cuney-Hare: Negro Musicians and Their Music (New York, 1936); William Edward Burghardt Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1903); Samuel Floyd, ed.: Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance (Westport, CT, 1990); Jeffrey Green: Edmund Thornton Jenkins—The Life and Times of an African-American Composer (Westport, CT, 1982); Robert Bartlett Haas: William Grant Still and The Fusion of Cultures in American Music (Los Angeles, 1972); D. Antoinette Handy: Black Conductors (Metuchen, NJ, 1995); William Christopher Handy: W. C. Handy—Father of The Blues (New York, 1941); John Tasker Howard: Our American Music (New York, 1930); Nathan Huggins: Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971); Langston Hughes: Selected Poems (New York, 1959); John Lovell, Jr.: Black Song—The Forge and the Flame (New York, 1972); Garfield Moore: “Recitalist’s Choice: Music for Solo Cello”, STRINGS, May/June 1995, 80; Hans Nathan: Dan Emmett and The Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1962); Claire Lee Purdy: Victor Herbert (New York, 1944); Marsha Reisser: “Howard Swanson: Distinguished Composer”, BPIM, xvii (1989), 5; W. C. Berwick Sayers: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, His Life and Letters (London, 1915; Chicago, 1969); Rawn Spearman: “The ‘Joy’ of Langston Hughes and Howard Swanson”, BPIM, ix (1981), 121; Robert C. Toll: Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1974); Various contributors: Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music (London, 1990, 3, 30); Glenn Watkins: Pyramids at the Louvre—Music, Culture and College from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA, 1994); W. Wells-Harrison: Modern British Music for Violoncello and Piano, No. VII…Coleridge-Taylor, Variations in b minor, STRAD, xxix, no.339 (1918), 67; Percy M. Young: “Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 1875-1912”, MT, cxvi (1975), 703

Scores:

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Variations in b minor for Violoncello and Piano (London, Augener, 1918); Adolphus Hailstork: Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (St. Louis, MO, MMB, 1991); William Grant Still: “Summerland” from Three Visions for Solo Piano. Transcription by Timothy Holley (Flagstaff, AZ, WGS Music Co., 1985); Howard Swanson: Suite for Violoncello and Piano (New York, Weintraub, 1951)

Program Three/Textbooks:

David N. Baker, Lida M. Belt, Herman C. Hudson, eds.: The Black Composer Speaks (Metuchen, NJ, 1978); Tilford A. Brooks: America’s Black Musical Heritage (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1984); James H. Cone: The Spirituals and The Blues (New York, 1972); Beatrice Harrison, Patricia Cleveland-Peck, ed.: The Cello and The Nightingales—The Autobiography of Beatrice Harrison (London, 1985), 137; Alain Locke: The Negro and His Music (Washington, D.C., 1936); Alain Locke: The New Negro (New York, 1925);  John Lovell, Jr.: Black Song—The Forge and the Flame (New York, 1972); Eileen Southern: The Music of Black Americans, A History (New York, 1971, 1982, 1996); Eileen Southern: Readings in Black American Music (New York, 1971). 

Scores:

Lawrence Brown (arr.): SPIRITUALS—Five Negro Folk Songs (London, Schott, 1923); Adolphus Hailstork: Elegy for Cello and Piano (ms., 1980); Hale Smith: Sonata for Violoncello and Piano (New York, C.F. Peters, 1984); William Grant Still: “Mother and Child” from the Suite for Violin and Piano (1943).  Transcription for cello by Timothy Holley (Flagstaff, AZ, WGS Music Co., 1988); Frederick C. Tillis: Spiritual Fantasy No.7 for Violoncello and Piano, “On My Journey Now” (New York, American Composers Alliance, 1984)

*Pentachordal Outlines, Frederick Tillis, Spiritual Fantasy No.7, “On My Journey Now (The blues pentachord extends horizontally; the Japanese melodic pentachord extends vertically)

D         e          f/f#     a          b          (Blues melody)

E-flat

G

A/A-flat

C

(Japanese melody)

**Selected Listing of Cyclical Works:

Johannes Brahms: Sonata for Cello and Piano (Opus 38), and Violin and Piano (Opus 78); Antonin Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 in e minor, Opus 95 “From the New World”; Cello Concerto in b minor, Opus 104 (1895); Cesar Franck: Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano; Claude Debussy: String Quartet; La mer; Trois Nocturnes; Sonata for Cello and Piano (1915); Sonata for Violin and Piano (1917); Maurice Ravel: Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922); Sonata for Violin and Piano (1927); Zoltan Kodaly: Sonata for Cello and Piano, Opus 4; Sergei Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No.1 in D Major, Opus 19; Sonata in f minor for Violin and Piano, Opus 80; Sonata in C Major for Cello and Piano, Opus 119