Four Centuries of Great Music February 25, 2024 Black Composers Episode 2

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music we are continuing our series of episodes featuring black composers.  We are opening today’s episode with David Baker

David Baker was born in Indianapolis Indiana and got bachelor and masters degrees at Indiana University Jacob’s School of Music.  Trombone and then later cello were his principal instruments.  He was an active performer until a facial injury in 1953 resulted in his shifting to primary responsibilities of composer and educator.  He began teaching  at Lincoln University, a historically black institution, in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1955.  Baker resigned from his teaching position and moved to Chicago after he married Eugenia ("Jeanne") Marie Jones, a white opera singer, due to Missouri's anti-miscegenation laws.   He began teaching at Indiana University Jacob’s School of Music in 1966 and began it’s jazz program, one of the first in the nation.   He is credited with writing more than 2,000 compositions, 400 academic articles and 70 books.  He passed away in Bloomington Indiana in 2016 at the age of 84 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy body dementia.


Let’s listen to David Baker: Sonata No. 1 for Piano from 1968.  It is in three movements Black art; A Song - After Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Coltrane.  Here is a performance by pianist and acquaintance of mine Karen Walwyn from her album Dark Fires, Volume 2

Next on Today’s Four Centuries of Great Music featuring our celebration black composers is Adolphus HAILSTORK.  

Adolphus Hailstork was born in Rochester New York in 1941.  He began his studies in composition at Howard University.  In the summer of 1963 he attended the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, France, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger  In 1966, Hailstork received a Masters from the Manhattan School of Music and received his PhD in composition from Michigan State University in 1971.  He taught at Michigan State, Youngstown State University, Norfolk State University and Old Dominion University.

Adolphus Hailstork  Piano Concerto No. 1

It is in 3 movements:  I. Moderato; II. Adagio 9:30 and III. Lento – Vivace.   The first movement starts with soloist and violins in unison, setting out a chantlike melody and establishing a serious tone, reminiscent of both Hindemith and Britten. The music opens into wider vistas and becomes more forceful but retains a
songful touch, becoming lost in thought as the movement closes.

After a brief introduction, the second movement finds the solo piano extolling a beautiful and bittersweet melody. A burst of activity brings an angular profile to the keyboard writing before strings and piano resume their intensely lyrical discourse.

Hailstork proceeds to a grand finale which is a “barnstormer” prefaced by a brief meditation before the piano flexes its muscles, culminating in rippling passagework up and down the keyboard. A sweeping, overtly Romantic statement follows, before the emotions of the adagio are briefly recalled. With a final flourish, the concerto drives emphatically to the finish.

Here is a performance of Adolphus HAILSTORK: Piano Concerto No. 1 by Stewart Goodyear, Piano with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta from the album Danny Elfman - Violin Concerto “Eleven Eleven” and Adolphus Hailstork - Piano Concerto No. 1.  Naxos


Let’s begin this second hour of today’s Four Centuries of Great Music featuring the music of black composers with  William Grant Still and his fifth symphony  “Western Hemisphere”

Born in Mississippi in 1895 and raised in Little Rock Arkansas, he showed great musical interest and skill as a teenager.  He formally studied violin but taught himself to play the clarinet, saxophone, oboe, double bass, cello and viola.  His mother wanted him to become a physician so he started premedical studies at Wilberforce University in 1911.  At Wilberforce, he conducted the university band, learned to play various instruments, and started to compose and to do orchestrations and transferred to Oberlin Conservatory.  In addition to his studies at Oberlin he studied privately with the modern French composer Edgard Varèse and the romantic American composer George Whitefield Chadwick.

After graduation from Oberlin he moved lived in Harlem to work as an arranger and worked with poets of the Harlem Renaissance.   He met composer/conductor Howard Hanson whose Rochester Philharmonic premiered Still’s Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American" in 1931.   Hanson championed his music.  By the end of 1940s, this work became one of the most widely played works by an American composer.  He was the first African-American to have an opera performed by a major US opera company.   

He moved to Los Angeles to continue composing both art music and to work for the film industry. In Los Angeles he worked extensively with the youth orchestra there facilitating the development of many young musicians.  In 1978, he passed away at the age of 83 in Los Angeles.  He is often referred to as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers.”

Today we will be listening to his Symphony No. 5 written in 1945, subtitled Western Hemisphere.  It is in 4 movements marked Briskly; Slowly, and With Utmost Grace; Energetically and Moderately.  He wrote about his Fifth Symphony: "One day in eternity has come to its close. A mighty civilization has begun, come to a climax, and declined. In the darkness, the past is swept away. When the new day dawns, the lands of the Western Hemisphere are raised from the bosom of the Atlantic. They are endowed by the Great Intelligence who created them and who controls their destiny with virtues unlike any that have gone before: qualities which will find counterparts in the characters of the men who will inhabit them eventually, and who will make them the abode of freedoms, of friendship, of the sharing of resources and achievements of the mind and of the spirit. These are our fellow-Americans in Latin America, Canada, and the islands of the Western Seas, who are today working with us to convert our ideals into realities."

Here is a performance of William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 5 “Western Hemisphere” as performed by

John Jeter & Fort Smith Symphony
Still, W.G.: Symphonies Nos. 4, and 5, and Poem
Naxos Records


Michael Abels: Global Warming
Paul Freeman & Chicago Sinfonietta
African Heritage Symphonic Series, Vol. 3
Cedille Records


Lets open this last half hour of today’s Four Centuries of Great Music featuring the music of black composers with Michael Abels: Global Warming.  

African-American composer Michael Abels is most widely known for his film scores, such as Get Out and Us, but he also composes works for chamber and large ensembles, piano, and voice.  In 2022  the opera Omar, co-written by Abels and Rhiannon Giddens was premiered by the Spoleto Festival (which I attended), and in 2023, Omar won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Abels was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1962. He spent his early years on a small farm in South Dakota, where he lived with his grandparents. Introduced to music via the family piano, he began showing an innate curiosity towards music at age 4.  His music-loving grandparents convinced the local piano teacher to take him on as a student despite his age. At age 8, Abels began composing music, and by age 13, his first completed orchestral work was performed.

Upon graduating from high school, Abels attended the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. Abels also studied West African drumming techniques at California Institute for the Arts, and sang in a predominantly black church choir to further explore his African-American roots.

GLOBAL WARMING (1990) is an orchestral work that uses the term to describe the warming of international relations that was happening in the world at that time. The Berlin Wall had just come down, the Cold War was declared over.  Abels writes “I wanted to write a piece that explored the similarities I heard between music of various cultures.  It begins with a desert scene, a depiction of a futuristic vast desert, with desert locusts buzzing in the background. But soon the piece turns quite uplifting. There are elements of Irish music, African music, Persian rhythms, drones, blended to display their commonalities in a way that is often quite joyous. But rather than end happily, the piece suddenly returns to its original, stark, desert scene, leaving it to the listener to decide which version of global warming they prefer. At the time of its premiere, global warming was not the politically charged term it is today. The piece was not written as a political statement, but its political message has inevitably deepened as climate change has evolved from theory into reality.”


William Banfield  was born in 1961 in Detroit MI.  He received a Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, Masters in Theology from Boston University and a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from the University of Michigan. He has been on the faculty at Berklee School of Music where , Banfield was a professor of Africana studies/music and society and founding director of the Center for Africana Studies/Liberal Arts, and taught in the department of composition.

His music echoes his belief that the juxtaposition of styles in pop music has prepared listeners for similar explorations in art music. That credo is particularly evident in his eclectic, percussion rich Essay for Orchestra from 1994. One conductor has called the piece “. . . a huge, Wagnerian Jazz Romp.”


William Banfield: Essay for Orchestra
Paul Freeman & Chicago Sinfonietta
African Heritage Symphonic Series, Vol. 3
Cedille Records

Chineke! Orchestra, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, piano - Florence Price: Piano Concerto in One Movement
]
Although called by Price a Concerto in One Movement, there are three distinct movements The first marked Andantino is very romantic with the main subject first played by the orchestra and then by the piano is beautiful and warm.  The Second movement marked Adagio cantabile is serene and peaceful and still.  There is a duet between the oboe and the piano.  The Last movement  marked Andantino – Allegretto is a Juba, a traditional African American folk dance.  It is jazzy and fast and lots of fun.

Florence Price:  Piano Concerto in One Movement (D minor)
Andantino, Adagio cantabile, Andantino – Allegretto
JENEBA KANNEH-MASON piano and LESLIE SUGANANDARAJAH conductor of the Chineke! Orchestra
Florence Price: Piano Concerto in One Movement; Symphony No. 1 in E Minor
Chineke! Records, Universal Music