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