Saturday, March 30, 2019

"Works In Progress": Solo Cello Music of African-American Composers (31 March 2019, NCCU), Program Notes...


Program Notes

This afternoon’s program takes its inspiration from the opening work, a selection from By Grace (2008) by Mark Lomax II (b. 1979)—a four-movement composition for violoncello and piano. The third movement contains a section reserved for the solo cello, to be played (as Lomax writes) “freely, like a lined hymn.” However, this “lined hymn” instead takes on the quality of another vocal tradition known as a “church moan,” which is connected to the lining tradition and to West African song. Having origins from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the hymn lining or “raising” tradition migrated and spread in several directions in response to the Great Awakening in the 18th century: a) to northern colonial churches whose founding congregations may have been semi-literate or illiterate; b) toward the frontier via the Appalachian Mountains; and c) to the “invisible churches” among enslaved persons in the southern colonies. According to the Smithsonian Institute, hymn lining is “the oldest English-language religious music in oral tradition in North America.” The relative age of West African song is more complex and challenging to determine. Seven centuries’ worth of Moorish (Islamic/North African) influence on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) from 711 to 1492 must be taken into consideration, followed by the determination of how far into West Africa that influence extended.

Despite its listed year of composition (2005), the Suite for Cello of Primous Fountain III (b. 1949) is in some measure a “much younger” work. Its seven movements were not given a premiere performance until September 2018 at the National Autonomous University of Mexico by cellist Kristen Yeon-Ji Yun in Mexico City. The two opening movements heard here move with seamless progression, sounding like two sections of a single movement. The opening “Cantabile” resembles a prelude, having several surprising melodic cross-relations and expressive declamatory pauses. While the Baroque dance tradition is clearly alluded to in the “Gigue,” this movement is concerned with more than meter and choreographed gestures. Touches of flowing, recitative-like melody provide a brief disruption of the dancing character of the jig.

The "aesthetic Montparnasse" of the solo cello repertoire is the Six Suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, a sequence of Baroque dances in the French style following an introductory prelude. The Baroque Suite of Dorothy Rudd Moore (b. 1940) is a three-movement homage to this tradition written as a wedding present for the composer’s husband Kermit Moore. It follows the Bach model but maintains its own noticeable peculiarities. The opening movement is both prelusive and choreographic: a rousing dance resembling a polonaise typically rendered in triple meter but cast in five instead! The middle movement is a moving aria that unfolds in slowly expansive quintuple meter. Its long beautiful phrases tempt the ear away from the lopsided asymmetric feeling in the opening movement. As with the Fountain suite, the closing movement is a gigue dominated by cross-metric accents, overlapping melodies, and “short-shrift” musical phrases.

Prior to her immigration to the United States, Tania León (b. 1943) was a graduate of the National Conservatory of Music in Havana. She came to the US in 1967 during the 1965–73 “Freedom Flights” that brought over 260,000 Cuban citizens to the US in response to premier Fidel Castro’s invitation for them to leave Cuba permanently. She made her way alone to New York City’s Harlem and supported herself teaching piano in the basement of a local church. Not long afterward, León met dancer and choreographer Arthur Mitchell and ballet master Karel Shook, with whom she founded the Dance Theater of Harlem in 1969 as its first music director. Several of her earliest pieces were composed for the company. The Four Pieces for Violoncello were composed in 1981, her first work completed after the death of her father. Of the four movements, the second piece is a quiet memorial to him; clear references are made to his homemade flute via the overtones of the open strings. Beginning, ending, and interspersed with repetitions of the instrument’s second lowest pitch, a low C♯ (“c-sharp”), the closing fourth piece is a rhapsodic tour de force.

Trevor Weston (b. 1967) has kindly provided the following comments about Shapeshifter, which was written for and premiered by cellist Jason Calloway in 2011: “I began working on Shapeshifter with the intention of writing a piece from the standpoint of a machine, thinking that machines would organize music with dramatic changes in material from moment to moment in order to be expressive (what would HAL 9000 compose?). This form of expression should be nonlinear, containing sequences of seemingly unrelated musical events. The idea of a mythical shapeshifter (a being that can change its form and shape rapidly) seemed an appropriate title for this piece, but the actual piece developed into something slightly different. The musical material contains melodic inflections of the blues—flatted thirds and fifths along with mechanical rhythmic ideas (hence the subtitle). So, the two ideas merged: blues-like performance practices, foot-stomping as if playing a blues guitar or piano, along with music that seems to toggle between these different ideas. Like a shapeshifter, all the different facets of the piece stem from the same “DNA”; this becomes most apparent at the end of the piece.” Weston studied at Tufts University and the University of California-Berkeley with T. J. Anderson, Olly Wilson, Andrew Imbrie, and Richard Felciano. He is an associate professor of music and chair of the music department at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) was named a Cultural Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1992, enjoying a distinguished career as Professor of Music emeritus at Norfolk State University and Old Dominion University. “Draw the Sacred Circle Closer” is a melody taken from his cantata EarthRise (A Song of Healing), written for two ethnically diverse choirs and orchestra using texts by Friedrich von Schiller, whose “Ode to Joy” Beethoven used as the choral finale to the Symphony No. 9. Five variations follow the theme, drawing from a range of contrasting moods: pastoral, playful, introspective, melancholic, and jubilant. Allusions to blues melody can be heard occasionally, even though this is not a work based on the blues. I gave this work its premiere performance in 2010 and prepared the commercial edition at the composer’s request.

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