Dr. Wilbur James "Jimmie" Abbington in blessed retrospect...

Remembering Dr. Wilbur James “Jimmie” Abbington: Notes To Self About My Longtime Friend and UM Classmate...

“Rolling up”...

I arrived at The University of Michigan in August 1982. I had spent the previous four years “learning to play the cello at a level that might garner the attention of a listener with some serious and convincing intent”. My senior year was busiest and most fruitful, a culmination of those four growth-filled years that featured two crowning performances of a windchest full of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at the 50th Baldwin-Wallace College (now University) Bach Festival, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. 

Jimmie Abbington arrived sometime “in close succession”. He was a recent graduate of Morehouse College, piano accompanist of the famed Morehouse Men’s Glee Club, directed by Dr. Wendell P. Whalum. I met his fellow Morehouse Glee Club alumnus Frank Ward around the same time. Those early weeks were rather hectic and fun. I can only recall placement exams and auditions that became a sort of “grand welcome reception” given for all the music students at the U-M School of Music (now the School of Music, Theater and Dance). 

My earliest memories of Jimmie are always marked by his unique and irrepressible sense of humor. While I don’t believe he intended to “hold regular comic court” among his fellow students, those “comic breaks” always occurred to our profound amusement between classes, rehearsals, the lobbies and practice rooms--all the while developing professional obligations that had already moved beyond the walls of the Moore Music Building on U-M’s North Campus.

The Organ, Ann Arbor and “WE”...

(The famed stride pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller called the organ “The God Box”, and was known to enjoy playing the works of Bach, either in church sanctuaries or theaters.) Jimmie was an indefatigable student of the organ as an instrument of accompaniment to worship. He was also an equally astute practitioner of congregational songs, gospel hymns and African American spirituals. From his small-town West Virginia church beginnings to sanctuaries nationwide, I believe that he made it his goal to make the folk and code songs of former slaves stand on balanced equal footing beside the chorales and choruses of Johann Sebastian Bach–regardless of the skin color or ethnicity of the singers or the listeners.

We were in Ann Arbor when the music world celebrated the Stravinsky centennial and the Brahms sesquicentennial. Thanks to the influence of Dr. Willis Patterson and his dedication to the music of Black American composers, we received an enhanced musical education that brought together and celebrated the beauty of our people, the grandeur of our musical expressions, and the boundless potential of our artistic intellect. The African American students who arrived now float in my memory like a distinct “Who’s Who” list of esteemed musicians, performers, educators and administrators.

It remains a true privilege and honor to have studied alongside them in those halcyon years. 

I remain both impressed and humbled at the AA student community I found myself studying, rehearsing, “numb-fumbling” and occasionally scuffling alongside during those brief and amazing years. Jimmie was certainly one of the busiest and most impressive of this group. We now find ourselves all bowing and shaking our heads at so many Facebook posts of glad tidings, well wishes…and the hails and farewells. At times like these we have neither convenient choice nor option aside from the reminder that “ there's a man going round taking names”.

Trajectories, Parallelisms and Concentrics…

I can’t remember exactly when Jimmie’s master’s degree work ended and his years of service at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church began. Hartford is one of the most distinguished African American congregations in the city, having long-standing connections among HBCUs, the University of Michigan and the community of African American musicians in Detroit. Jimmie wasted no time engaging colleagues from U-M in as many church musical activities as the calendar would agreeably allow!! My years of “triangular ricochet” between Ann Arbor, Detroit and Toledo would last from 1982 to 1996, which involved joining the Toledo Symphony, getting married, starting my family and returning to U-M around the same time to pursue doctoral studies. 

It turned out that Jimmie had also begun the “DMA commute” from Detroit as well; we shared a memorable semester together as students in a course titled Proseminar In Music Analysis, taught by Professor Elwood Derr. One morning he appeared in class (a crowded affair in one of the too small classrooms on the second floor of the Music Building) with a contemptuous scowl on his face; the reason for this apparent scowl remain a mystery to this day, but both Jimmie and I would mirthfully revisit that moment for years because one of our fellow classmates, a young woman overcome by nervousness burst into tears upon seeing Derr’s scowling face!! I’m sure all the rest of the class were equally on edge, and Derr made our edgy feelings no more comfortable or assured in his presence–at least on that day!! 

The class had a solid curricular reputation for preparing DMA students for the qualifying exam in music theory (the “Theory Prelim”), and several students had failed the exam the previous year. Therefore, we were quite nervous about the upcoming semester, the course and our relatively independent preparations for the exam of which we were all given the cryptic recommendation “go to the Music Library Reserve Shelves and study the exam questions from previous years”. Fortunately to my recollection, all of my cohort of DMA students passed the exam including Jimmie. Once that first “hurdle” was cleared and my coursework continued into candidacy, I’m sure that Jimmie’s church service, organ studies (with the ageless Marilyn Mason!!) and growing scholarship in African American spirituals kept him very busy. Our occasional performances at Hartford would be the “few and far between” opportunities for us to rehearse, perform, reminisce and laugh about the past and present. 

I tell people that “the Lord and the Chronicle of HIgher Education” brought me to Durham, North Carolina to join the faculty at North Carolina Central University. However, as I continue to teach and now vacillate between administration and performance, I keep discovering numerous connections between my family “village” and NCCU. My family and I (wife and two young daughters) arrived in Durham three days before Hurricane Fran made landfall at Wrightsville Beach, NC (a few miles slightly upshore of Wilmington). Winds of 115 mph, power outages lasting as long as six weeks in remote rural areas, flooding and downed trees brought much of the state to its knees. 

At that same time, my U-M friend and colleague Richard Banks, his wife Deborah and son Donnell had settled in Raleigh where Richard had joined the faculty at Saint Augustine’s University. Years later he would join the faculty at NCCU. Jimmie would remain at Hartford for some years before leaving and coming to teach at Shaw University, barely a mile from St. Aug’s!! Louise Toppin had been at East Carolina University (and later on UNC-Chapel Hill) for some years, and would become a collegial “magnet” among so many of us that one alumna coined the phrase “Michigan Mafia” to describe our jocular sense of community and our so-called “geographically arranged control…or controlled geographic arrangement”!!

Morehouse, Black composers, Humor and Practice…

I saw the Morehouse Men’s Glee Club perform live for the first time in Cleveland at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Dr. Wendell Philips Whalum directed, Sam McKelton was a featured soloist on that concert, assistant director David Morrow got to conduct a few selections, and Jimmie Abbington was at the piano. The most impressive memory of that concert wasn’t merely the performance, but it was the audience!! Even in our present time when black folk “turn up” to hear a well-prepared, well-marketed event involving a consistent show of excellence…it leaves a mark and indelibly enhanced self-esteem upon all in attendance. The Glee Club opened the program singing the Soldatenlieder of Johannes Brahms, the 19th century German Romantic composer. The sight and sound of a stage full of black men singing soldier songs left an impression of militarism and militant expression–leveled not against whiteness or white men but against a sustained supremacy that still hampers us today. The last notes the men sang were the songs of their people, their beauty, bravery, tenacity and sustained message of legacy from ancestors to those yet unborn. 

Our community of U-M students of the 1980s were unfairly blessed to have direct access to the art music of Black American composers via the scholarship of Dr. Willis C. Patterson, whose volume of Art Songs of Black American Composers was still rather new at the time, and whose local public performances were given quizzical reviews in the press. In August 1985 Patterson brought together African American composers, performers, educators, administrators, musicologists and historians to celebrate and discuss “the way forward” in support of the music of Black Americans. The Black American Music Symposium provided a wealth of opportunities for the community of students and a wealth of access to the composers of music they were challenged to acquaint themselves: Ulysses Kay, David Baker, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Hale Smith, T. J. Anderson, Leslie Adams, Robert Owens, Noel Da Costa, Carman Moore, Kermit Moore, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Adolphus Hailstork, Frederick Tillis, Eva Jessye, Jester Hairston, Brazeal Dennard, Wendell Whalum and a generation of then younger composers, performers, educators, musicologists and historians now pressing forward for the next generation. 

Over the years I always enjoyed Jimmie’s tendency to readily engage in humor that always bordered on the “righteously sarcastic”!! I remember our schoolmate Oral Moses taking a few of us aside, and saying to us with lowered chin and tone of voice: “y’all need to SPLIT UP”!! What we now refer to as “Black Joy” was open to misinterpretation, misunderstanding and even a silent gesture of potential mistreatment…usually rooted in misplaced fear. But the use of humor is a unique way and means of truth telling, both to persons, places and positions (things) of power. However, Jimmie’s sense of humor served as also a mantra and mantle which might read thusly: “I must practice my music at least one and a half times as much as I tell jokes and funny stories”. His unique love of the Lord and musical expression was a natural and inextricable extension of his roots, his unique educational opportunities and the professional distinctions that followed. Proverbs 22:29 posits: “Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings; they will not serve before officials of low rank.” The main exception that applies to Jimmie in this proverb is that he “served before kings” while making himself accessible to those “of low rank” from the organ bench and choir loft. Psalm 90:17 provides the most fitting benediction: “May the favor of the Lord or God rest on us (Jimmie); establish the work of our hand for us; yes, establish the work of our hands.”

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