NCCMI Impact Series Concert II: Chamber Music Treasures for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2025...

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM…

Good evening!! The Impact Series II concerts for the MLK Holiday have an “indelible asterisk” attached to them, since the inaugural concert took place in January 2020–seven weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. The “second” program was the first-ever streaming of the first program as the global public health crisis stretched into 2021. In terms of programming and performances, this series will ALWAYS be “one year behind”!! These “few dozen” comments will testify to the wealth of personal and artistic connection that extend from the November 2024 program to the January 2025 Impact Series concerts. Liz Beilman & Jimmy Gilmore had no idea how small the world really was when they met James Dargan in New York City at the Chamber Music America annual conference two years ago!! (barely two minutes) As many NCCMI members may already know, the November 2024 concert featured a premiere performance of a movement of a string quartet by NCCMI from composer and Durham native James Dargan. He returns as a featured performer for this concert, and the sense of “homecoming and reunion” runs through the program like a silver lining.

In February 2019 I was invited to play a chamber music concert with the Bryan Chamber Ensemble at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. Dr. Alvoy Bryan, Jr. was the host and fellow performer for the concert, which included five still young African-American professional string players based in South Carolina: violist Arthur Ross, cellist Idris Chandler, violinist Timmothy Baker, Alvoy Bryan and me. Violinists Sarah Land, Shr-Han Wu and Catharine Hazan joined the five to complete the group. The program included the Serenade K.525 "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Octet, Opus 20 of Felix Mendelssohn. Our whirlwind weekend of rehearsals made for a very exciting performance in Chappelle Auditorium, a lovely acoustic space named for one of comedian Dave Chapelle’s ancestors. Despite a joyful reunion, a fine performance and hopes for future collaborations, we were all deeply saddened eight months later when Baker passed away suddenly in October after fighting a longtime battle with Krohn’s disease.

Therefore, this year’s MLK Impact Concert opens with a work of equally profound tribute. The Elegy for Strings (2012) is in effect a “double elegy”: Timmothy Baker was a Columbia, SC native, an alumnus of University of South Carolina and the Eastman School of Music, where he was a student of Charles Castleman. He composed this work in memory of his mentor Mr. Freddie Grace, Jr. (1961-2009), who was a distinguished and beloved strings teacher and athletic coach in the Richlands One School District. The theater of W. G. Sanders Middle School now bears his name. This performance honors the memory of both men–proverbially wise, delightfully funny and intensely dedicated “souls gone home”...’much sooner than expected.

“At The Purchaser’s Option” is a song cast in folk style by Greensboro, NC native Rhiannon Giddens. Its title makes direct references to chattel slavery and its ironic role in the development of American socioeconomic history. It is a song whose verses speak of painful experience, its refrain protesting defiantly against the physical, legal, emotional and psychological violence visited upon and absorbed by women of color. The song’s lyrics speak of a black woman’s thoughts and feelings about being bought and sold “at the purchaser’s option”. The repeated refrain resounds with greatest force and intensity: “you can take my body, you can take my bones, you can take my blood but not my soul”. The composer’s “voice of the first person” speaks haunting volumes of centuries past–a time that some “wish to imagine and maintain that we’ve moved beyond”...when we haven’t. “At The Purchaser’s Option” was commissioned through the “Fifty For The Future” Program for the KRONOS Quartet in  celebration of the ensemble’s 50th Anniversary.

Jessie Montgomery provides the following comments on 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 the work 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”. Ms. Montgomery is the current  Composer-In-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and has also been featured as one of the “Blacknificent 7”--seven internationally renowned African American composers whose works speak to this world’s need to keep pushing forward toward fuller inclusion and celebrated humanity through the arts and music.

Regina Harris Baiocchi is a native of Chicago, a composer, poet, educator and founder of Haiku Festival and the 6Degrees Composers, five diverse women composers based in the Chicago area who have been producing concerts of their music since 2010. An alumna of NYU, DePaul and Roosevelt University, her orchestral and chamber works have been performed by the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. The Variations on Two Puerto Rican Folk Melodies heard on this program are one of the inner movements of Sketches for Piano Trio (2012). The two folk melodies of Rafael Hernandez Marin (1892-1965) are of significant historic and stylistic interest, reflecting the resultant afropuertorriqueno impact of the Great Migration present in Harlem in the early decades of the 20th century. Hernandez was one of numerous Puerto Rican immigrant musicians who were members of the Clef Club Orchestra and the 369th Infantry (“Hellfighters”) Band under Lieutenant Colonel James Reese Europe (1881-1919) during World War I.

Harrison Leslie Adams was a pianist, organist and composer of art songs, piano music. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Adams studied music at Oberlin College, Long Beach State University and The Ohio State University. The Sonata for Cello and Piano was composed in two stages of surprising germination best described in terms of locations–California and Kansas. The second and third movements were completed in 1963 in Long Beach during Adams’ graduate school years but the opening movement was completed fifteen years later in Lawrence, Kansas. Leslie Adams is a champion of lyrical song repertoire and is known for his incredibly tonal and highly enjoyable music, which always has a specific emphasis on brilliantly expressing the poetry. The middle movement of the Sonata for Cello and Piano by Leslie Adams is part of the work’s “interesting and backward developmental history”: it was written in 1963 (in Long Beach during Adams’ graduate school years) but the remainder of the work would be completed fifteen years later (in Lawrence, Kansas). Leslie Adams was a champion of lyrical song, best known for his tonally centered, highly expressive music with emphasis on poetic transformation. In his instrumental music, contemporary compositional techniques are often fused with elements of African American folk song, rhythm and blues (R&B), American musical theater and jazz. The second movement heard here is an moving exemplar of Adams's style and lyricism.

Frederick C. Tillis matured as a composer during the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. In 1968, he deliberately adopted a compositional style rooted in the thematic and harmonic materials of the African American spiritual. His interest in the transformative potential of the spiritual led him to embark upon a series of thirty-three “spiritual fantasies” for various instrumental combinations. “Wade In The Water” is the second movement of Spiritual Fantasy No.12 for string quartet (1995); the rhythm, melody, harmonic structure and expressive “drive” of the spiritual in this movement creates a “chamber music tour de force” via an instrumental medium traditionally associated with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok…and the folk music that somehow manages to “sneak into the world of their art music” that isn’t as different from American folk music as we suppose!!

Our guest composer-performer James Dargan has provided this note about the Dreamkeeper Songs and his arrangement of “The Promise”:

"I wrote my Dreamkeeper songs back in 2016, because I needed teaching material: my third and fourth graders needed some examples of different kinds of text setting and piano textures, and since James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) wrote his poetry collection "The Dreamkeepers" for children, it turned out to fit the needs of my students very well. I drew from Franz Schubert, Erik Satie, the Blues, Gustav Mahler, and African American spirituals when writing these songs, and I kept them short…’because, what kid wants to sit still for hours?!"

"Singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman (born 1964), got her first instrument, a ukulele, from her mother, when Tracy was three, and Tracy began playing the guitar and writing songs around eight years old. While studying at Tufts University, Chapman busked around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and after college, she became one of the few Black artists in the folk music scene, and one of that genre's stars. I first heard "The Promise" on Chapman's fourth album, and I've loved her music ever since."

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 (that period of time the poet himself nicknamed the “Red Summer), it remains a statement of the deepest faith in our profound American identity and agency expressed in three verses. TWH

Timmothy Baker (1978-2019)

Mr. Freddie E. Grace, Jr. (1961-2009)

Rhiannon Giddens

Jessie Montgomery

Regina Harris Baiocchi

Harrison Leslie Adams, Jr.

Dr. Frederick C. Tillis

Tracy Chapman

NCCMI Impact Series II, MLK 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

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  

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.”