"Time And Arenas Reclaimed"...The Chamber Music of Black Composers on MLK Day

North Carolina Chamber Music Institute

Faculty Chamber Music Recital In Celebration of The Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As A National Holiday

Monday, January 20, 2020, 7:00 pm

The Church Of The Nativity, 8849 Ray Road, Raleigh, NC

String Quartet in C Major, Opus 1, No.1 (1773)     Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1739-1799)

Allegro; Rondeau: Tempo di minuetto, grazioso

Alice Ju, Greg Logan, violins; Jacobus Hermsen, viola; Timothy Holley, violoncello

Three Spirituals for String Trio (2005)                           arr. Adolphus Hailstork, b.1941

We Shall Overcome; Kum Ba Yah; Great Day

Alice Ju, violin; Jacobus Hermsen, viola; Timothy Holley, violoncello

"Daybreak In Alabama"                                                   Ricky Ian Gordon, b.1956

"Night"                                                                              Florence Price (1887-1953)

"Feet o’Jesus"                                                                   Florence Price

"Dream Variations"                                                          Margaret Bonds (1913-1972)

Waltye Rasulala, soprano; Olga Kleiankina, piano

Five Negro Melodies, Opus 59 (1904)                            Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)

My Lord Delivered Daniel; Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child; Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel

Olga Kleiankina, piano; Greg Logan, violin; Timothy Holley, violoncello

"Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing" (1900)*                    James Weldon Johnson & John Rosamond Johnson

                                                (1871-1938)                  (1873-1954)

Waltye Rasulala, soprano; Olga Kleiankina, piano

Alice Ju, Greg Logan, violins; Jacobus Hermsen, viola; Timothy Holley, violoncello

Program Notes, “Time and Arenas Reclaimed”…

This evening’s program is the result of several “fortunate coincidences including both patience and good timing”. Our national celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the “timely reason” for this concert. Dr. King lived and died in the pursuit of freedom from racial and economic inequality. Our celebration is both an anthem and a prayer for perseverance in the face of our own history and habits of everyday living, borne out of struggles involving skin color, class and even religion. “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” will close the program as a clear and direct exemplar of this desired ideal.

The hashtag #ReclaimingMyTime attributed to U. S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-California) might fit best here as both a borrowed program title and description of the current resurgence of the music of Florence Price (1887-1953): the discovery of unpublished manuscript orchestral scores and parts in an abandoned house near Kankakee, Illinois created a storm of resurgent interest, curiosity and notoriety around this African American female composer, who in 1943 sent a letter to conductor and music director Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, introducing herself with the oddest mannerism of near desperation: “My Dear Dr. Koussevitzky, to begin with I have two handicaps— those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content—until you shall have examined some of my work? As to the handicap of race, may I relieve you by saying that I neither expect nor ask any concession on that score. I should like to be judged on merit alone”. 

In the United States we tell ourselves meritoriously that “our gifts will make room for us”. Despite her conservatory education and training and nominal notoriety, Florence Price struggled to penetrate that “glass-plated cement ceiling” of both race and gender biases in 19^th and 20^th century America. All the composers featured on this program have their unique stories to tell--of personal struggle, dogged perseverance and “legacies left, marked in gradual, hopeful forward progress”.

Joseph Boulogne, le Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1739-1799) was the son of a French nobleman Guillaume-Pierre Boulogne and a Senegalese slave Nanon on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. He was taken to France and received a classical education in Paris. He excelled on three sociopolitical and artistic “fronts”: he became the finest swordsman in France, an accomplished violinist, composer and conductor who was offered the directorate of the Paris Opera in 1776 (a royal appointment), but was cheated out of it by socially influential women at court who refused to “take orders from a mulatto”. Nevertheless, Saint-Georges led an orchestra known as the Concert des Amateurs (one of the best in Europe) and later “Le Concert de la Loge Olympique”, which commissioned a set of six symphonies for orchestra by Franz Joseph Haydn. Saint-Georges served as intermediary and conducted the first performances of the commissioned works (now known as the “Paris” symphonies, Nos. 82-87, composed in 1786). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also spent two years of “touring residency” in Paris (1777-79), during which he composed his “Paris” Symphony (No.31 in D Major, K.297, 1779) for the Concerts des amateurs, an ensemble of which Saint-Georges was a well-known member. (In fact, the origin of the sobriquet “Le Mozart noir” for Saint-Georges can be traced back to this residency.) The String Quartet in C Major which opens the concert dates from 1773, nestled among a wealth of creativity between all three men: the six highly original and influential “Sunrise” quartets of Haydn (op.20, 1771), and the two sets of early quartets of Mozart, the “Milanese” (K.155-160, late 1772-early 1773) and the “Viennese” (K.168-173, 1773). The opening movement unfolds in the manner influenced by the Mannheim orchestral style, while the second movement functions as a minuet moving in the form of a rondeau.

Adolphus Hailstork is one of the “elders” of the present generation of composers of African American concert music. A native of Rochester, New York, he studied at Howard University with Mark Fax (who was a friend of Jessye Norman and her family in Augusta, Georgia while teaching at Paine College), the Manhattan School of Music with Vittorio Giannini, and H. Owen Reed at Michigan State University. A cultural laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, he taught at Norfolk State University and Old Dominion University. One of his best-known and most riveting works, the cantata Done Made My Vow (1985) was composed for the 50^th anniversary of the founding of Norfolk State University. He arranged the Three Spirituals for string trio in 2005; they are described as “the perfect storm”—a cross-pollination of African American and European traditions. “We Shall Overcome” is given the contrapuntal treatment of a Bach chorale prelude (with the viola occupying the cantus firmus!!); “Kum Ba Yah” is a souful meditation with blues and gospel-style nuances, and the anthem “Great Day” is a no-holds barred exuberant finale!!

Ricky Ian Gordon has been a well-known composer of songs to texts of American poets, most notably (but not exclusively) Langston Hughes (1902-1967). His biography is best discussed—and viewed online!! (www.rickyiangordon.com). The opening song, “Daybreak In Alabama” should be the global anthem of all creative persons: the beauty and grandeur of “composing”—at daybreak, amid the wonder of daybreak, and all that a day comprises--its original innocence and imaginative potential. Florence Price composed “Night” in 1946 to the poetry of Louise C. Wallace (1876-1928), a poet and colleague from Springfield, Illinois she had met prior to her family’s migration from Little Rock, Arkansas to Chicago. The poem is a surreal collage of word-pictures proceeding in muted ecstasy. The brief musical setting enshrouds the poem with lovely quiet grandeur. In addition to volumes of written poetry, short stories, plays and a chronicle of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes also composed blues lyrics. “Feet o’ Jesus” is a text dressed in the supplicative garb of the Negro spiritual, perhaps most reflective of the memories of Langston’s early years spent in Lawrence, Kansas with his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Leary Langston (whose second husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary died with John Brown at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859). Margaret Bonds was a good friend of both Florence Price and Langston Hughes; in fact both Price and Bonds made art song settings of the poem Dream Variations!! A literal anthem of the Harlem Renaissance (1924), the poem’s imagery is a COMPLETE celebration of the dark-skinned body—mind and soul!!

Following the sweep of her distinguished educational background and training in piano, organ and composition, our #TimeAndArenasReclaimed composer of the program Florence Price wrote a contrastively limited amount of chamber music…that is, what has been discovered THUS FAR!!: two string quartets (and a third possibly extant), a quintet for piano and strings, at least one character piece (“Adoration”), and a set of spiritual arrangements for violin and piano. While her vocal, piano and symphonic music remains the backbone of her compositional output, the chamber music expresses a contrastively intimate and equally profound artistic “gesture”. The Five Folksongs In Counterpoint were composed gradually, appearing in varied settings and differing song order between 1927--the year of her migration from Little Rock, Arkansas to Chicago—and 1951, the same autumnal year in she received a commission from the British conductor Sir John Barbirolli to compose an orchestral suite. (Her String Quartet in G Major of 1929 stands apart from this set of folksongs. It is available commercially and was performed at the 2017 Gateways Music Festival at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.) The two movements included on this evening’s program, “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes” and “Clementine” reflect the poetic ballad and popular folksong tradition, chronicling moments of emotional “extremity”—romantic love and tragic loss. The National Baptist Hymnal, however, does contain an adopted and lengthened text-variant of “Clementine”--the invitational hymn “Come To Jesus”!!

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was one of the best-known members of “the race” in his time. As an “Afro-British” musician and composer, the weight of his notoriety rests on several artistic triumphs, three of which are mentioned here: his visit to the United States in 1899 to conduct a performance of his cantata Hiawatha in Washington D.C., with a chorale named in his honor; three concert tours of the United States in 1904, 1906 and 1910; and the celebrated publication of the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies arranged for solo piano opus 59 (1904), for which Booker T. Washington wrote the Preface. The eminent historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois dedicated a memorial essay to Coleridge-Taylor titled “The Immortal Child” from Darkwater: Voices From Within The Veil (1920). Coleridge-Taylor was the youngest delegate to attend the First Pan-African Conference at London in the summer of 1900; he provided musical interludes between the conference sessions, and personally entertained Du Bois at his home in Croydon.  Du Bois’s reminiscent essay reflects upon that pair of now-historic occasions: his meeting Coleridge-Taylor and the development of Pan-Africanism. In Booker T. Washington’s view, the full set of “Negro melodies” constituted the Negro’s contribution to the body of art-music compositions that made him (and her!!) a worthy voice of expression on the heels of what had become a global, fully human “conference and conversation”--whether that Negro place of origin is the African continent, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom or the United States of America. Five of the melodies were arranged for piano, violin and cello and published by Novello in 1906, of which three are featured here.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was the “Renaissance Man of the Harlem Renaissance”—two decades after writing the poem “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing” in honor of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and a 1899 school visit and speech made by Booker T. Washington in Jacksonville, Florida. James Weldon Johnson had at least seven “careers” in the course of his life: composer-entertainer, diplomat, literary historian and university professor, lawyer, public administrator and civil rights advocate. The half of his story still awaits complete telling. His brother the composer John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954) set “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing” to music, and it quickly became known as the “Negro national anthem” and remains so today. Two challenges of “performance-practice tradition” also persist for all audiences to meet: singing all three verses AND standing up to sing!! TWH

"Daybreak in Alabama" (Langston Hughes)

When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

"Night" (Louise C. Wallace)

Night comes, a Madonna clad in scented blue.
Rose red her mouth and deep her eyes,
She lights her stars, and turns to where,
Beneath her silver lamp the moon,
Upon a couch of shadow lies
A dreamy child,
The wearied Day.

"Feet o’ Jesus" (Langston Hughes)

At the feet o’ Jesus,
Sorrow like a sea.
Lordy, let yo’ mercy
Come driftin’ down on me.

At the feet o’ Jesus
At yo’ feet I stand.
O, ma little Jesus,
Please reach out yo’ hand.

"Dream Variations" (Langston Hughes)

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me–
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

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

Lift ev’ry voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of 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 till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chast'ning rod
Felt in the day that hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place on which our fathers sighed.
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, till 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.