Opening Night: November 5, 2022
Program Notes
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912):
The Bamboula (Rhapsodic Dance No. 1)
Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer born in 1875 to an English mother and an African father. His father was trained as a physician at King’s College in London, but after graduation, found his race a barrier to maintaining a medical practice. As a result, he returned to Africa permanently. There is conflicting information, but most sources agree that he never knew or had contact with his son.
Samuel was raised mostly by his mother and maternal grandfather who began to teach him the violin at a young age. He showed such remarkable talent, they eventually paid for private lessons. At the age of 15, he began studying at the Royal College of Music where his career choice shifted from violin to composition. Despite racial barriers and financial struggles, Coleridge-Taylor rose to become a successful and popular composer, touring the US in the early 1900s. His popularity even resulted in an invitation to visit President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
Working straight out of school, he was hired to be a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and a conductor for the Croyden Conservatoire. Edward Elgar described Coleridge-Taylor as “far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the younger man.”
He became increasingly interested in traditional African music and began incorporating it into his own works. Much of his music sought to integrate African traditions with Western classical music. The music that made him famous was The Song of Hiawatha, a set of cantatas inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem in 1855 The Song of Hiawatha. It is known worldwide and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. He sold the copyrights to Novello for less than 15 guineas. At the time, he thought it would be better to have the money upfront. Of course, he didn’t realize that the vocal score alone would sell more than 140,000 copies before World War I. His death and poverty prompted musicians to create the Performing Rights Society in England, an organization to protect copyrights for composers and collect royalties.
To understand The Bamboula, it would be favorable to first examine his prior composition entitled 24 Negro Melodies. “What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies.” Coleridge-Taylor lived right at the end of the time when many composers sought to revitalize and emphasize folk songs and motifs from their nations’ history. In 24 Negro Melodies, he succeeded in celebrating the music of Africans. The traditions of these musical melodies helped farmers to labor all day in the scorching heat and taught children to rise above their circumstances. The music united the slaves and gave them the strength to keep going and a way to express their pain, hope, and joy.
One of these 24 pieces is entitled The Bamboula. The bamboula is the name of a drum and a dance that was brought to America and the Caribbean by African slaves. Here, Coleridge-Taylor puts the simple melody into a dance format (fast, slow, fast) and creates many variations to keep it interesting. The piece was commissioned for Mr. and Mrs. Carl Stoeckel, founders of the Norfolk Music Festival in Connecticut. Coleridge-Taylor was invited as a guest in both 1906 and 1909, however, the piece was officially published in 1911.
Interestingly, it is said he was named after the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who curiously, became a great source of inspiration during his short life. He died in 1912 of pneumonia at the young age of thirty-seven but managed to compose nearly a hundred works.
Florence B. Price (1887-1953):
Violin Concerto No. 1
Lucia Lin, Violin
Florence Beatrice Price was born into a middle-class Black family. Full of determined and strong-willed individuals, her family would help shape her musical path and provide privileges that did not afford many Black people at the time. Her grandparents were free Blacks who would eventually own multiple barbershops and were considered part of the Black middle class. As a result, her mother, Florence Irene was born into a beautiful home environment with the ability to have piano lessons. Her mother lived with an aunt who was a dressmaker and another aunt who was a teacher, both strong, influential Black mentors. Florence Irene would become an elementary school teacher, perhaps the only Black teacher in an all-white school, as well as an amateur singer and an accomplished pianist.
Her father was also a free Black, Dr. James H. Smith. He was denied acceptance into dental schools because of his color but pushed forward by continuing to work as an apprentice until he received his certification and was able to practice dentistry. This is considered a tremendous accomplishment because, at the time, there were less than a dozen Black dentists in the entire United States.
Her parents moved to Little Rock Arkansas for a better life and by the time Florence B. was born in 1887, Dr. Smith had a very successful dental business with both Black and white clients. Their home was elegant and lavishly decorated. Her mother often performed piano for guests on her very expensive Ivers and Pond piano made with exotic woods with beautiful ornate designs.
Their home had such rooms as a formal library, as there were no libraries for Blacks at the time. They had carpeted floors, a lavishly decorated parlor, a sewing room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms. At the time, there were only two Black-owned hotels in Little Rock so many people would stay at the Smiths and other well-to-do Black homes. Such influential guests that stayed with the Smiths are Langston Hughes, a great reviver of Black culture, including music, dance, art, theater, and literature, John Blind Boone, one of the first black concert pianists to gain national reputation, and Frederick Douglass, a Black social reformer, abolitionist, and statesman.
Florence B. Price, like many in her family, was a strong, determined, and gifted individual. She gave her first recital at age four and was valedictorian of her graduating high school class at the age of fourteen. When she was attending high school, racial segregation was allowed and Black schools were inferior to white schools. They were often understaffed and stocked with inferior books. She then went on to graduate from The New England Conservatory with two diplomas (piano and organ) in just three years, as opposed to the normal four years for just one degree. These were incredible accomplishments for any individual, but especially for a Black woman pursuing a music career.
After graduating from the New England Conservatory and despite her talent and ambition, she was unable to find employment so she returned home to Arkansas. In 1912 she married Attorney Thomas J. Price and largely devoted her time to her daughters and teaching. However racial tensions were strong and lynchings were routine so she and her family moved to Chicago where her success started to flourish.
She wrote many pieces during this time and even became the first Black woman to have a work performed by a major U.S. orchestra when the Chicago Symphony presented her Symphony in E minor in 1933. But regardless of her brief moments of accomplishment, she was still frequently denied opportunities. After her death in 1953, many of her almost 250 works fell by the wayside until 2009 when Vicki and Darrell Gatwood would find a collection of scores in what used to be Florence’s summer home just outside of St. Anne, Illinois.
Price’s Violin Concerto No. 1, composed in 1939, along with Violin Concerto No. 2 and dozens of other scores that had been thought lost, were found by the couple in the home that has since been vandalized and ransacked. The Gatwoods got in touch with the University of Arkansas Special Collections department, which acquired the collection.
An interview with violinist Er-Gene Kahng reveals an overwhelmingly positive opinion about the concertos:
“It was, as you can imagine, a thrilling experience to perform these concertos! It undeniably stretched me as a violinist and artist; without being able to have an actual conversation about the concerto, I developed a closer relationship to the manuscript. Because of this pioneering aspect with regard to both the work being rediscovered and its fully orchestrated performance being its first to our knowledge, I found myself asking performative questions I never thought I’d ever find myself asking. There was a freshness that created a welcome jolt to my normal methods of interpreting works (and developed my skills as an interpretive artist), and the simple pleasure of discovering something new is always significant, valuable, and emotionally fulfilling for me. I feel more complete now having had the opportunity to interpret, share and perform Florence Price’s violin concertos.”
In an article, violinist Samuel Thompson revealed his experience with the concertos:
"We're talking about a woman who was very well aware of what was going on in the world, compositionally, as well a woman who had by this time developed her own musical language," Thompson said. "There are a few places in the cadenza and the coda of the first movement that, one could say are reminiscent of the Tchaikovsky Concerto. But even with that, there is still Ms. Price's own language; these references are not made in a manner that would make one assume that Ms. Price was not a composer of consequence.”
Violin Concerto No. 1 is written is three movements. The first is both lyrical and virtuosic with challenging double stops and interesting call-and-response statements. The second movement is more spiritual, emulating a hymn. The third movement is even difficult for the orchestra, finding it demanding to discern a harmonic direction, but held together with a floating, pentatonic-like (5-note whole step scale) theme. The piece ends with a flourish when the soloist and orchestra merge to conclude with the pentatonic-like theme.
Thompson had the privilege of consulting with Er-Gene Kahng, getting some performance advice from her as the manuscript still left many questions. Together, they both wondered that since the piece was never performed, did Florence Price have a ‘Joachim,’ someone whom she could send questions to for some violinistic advice as she was composing?
William Grant Still (1895-1978):
African American Symphony
William Grant Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi to parents who were teachers and musicians. His father died at a very young age and he and his mother moved to Little Rock, Arkansas for a better opportunity. There, his mother taught English in high school and William’s musical education began. He started with violin lessons from a private teacher and was later inspired by the many recordings bought for him by his stepfather, who greatly encouraged and nurtured William’s musical interests. He taught himself to play the clarinet, saxophone, oboe, bass, cello, and viola.
To please his mother, he pursued a pre-med degree at Wilberforce University, but spent most of his time, conducting, composing, and arranging. He eventually left Wilberforce without a degree and moved on to study music at the Oberlin Conservatory. He entered the world of popular music and after graduation found himself playing in orchestras and orchestrating. He worked with such notable artists as W.C. Handy, Don Voorhees, Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman, Willard Robison, and Artie Shaw. While in Boston playing oboe in the Shuffle Along orchestra, he applied to New England Conservatory and had the privilege of studying with the ultra-modern composer, Edgard Varese.
Some may argue that, while many extraordinarily talented Black musicians have contributed to the classical music repertoire, William Grant Still may be the greatest of them all. His impressive list of “firsts” quantify him as a pioneer in musical history. In the 1930’s he was arranging popular music for two NBC radio shows and befriended Dr. Howard Hanson who in 1931 led the Rochester Philharmonic with Still’s Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American.” This was the ‘first’ time a major orchestra had performed a complete score by an African American composer.
The symphony blends jazz, blues, and spirituals into a traditional classical form, which elevates the music by those who would offer jazz some respect in the concert hall, but would traditionally see blues as low-class and vulgar music. The symphony brings together a lifetime of musical experiences for Still. He incorporated the spirituals he heard as a child sung by his grandmother, the influence of mentor George Chadwick at the New England Conservatory, and the pride and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Another balance Still found between European and African music lies within the titles. Each title has a traditional classical name, Adagio, Moderato assai, Animato, and Lento, but Still’s notebooks reveal the alternate titles as, Longing, Sorrow, Humor, and Aspiration.
More “firsts” in his lifetime include the conducting of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the 1936 Hollywood Bowl, and becoming the first African American to conduct a major American orchestra of his own music. In 1949, his opera, Troubled Island, was performed by the New York City Opera, becoming the first opera by an African American to be performed by a major company. In 1955, Still conducted the New Orleans Philharmonic, making him the first African American to conduct a major orchestra in the Deep South. Three years after Still’s death, his A Bayou Legend became the first opera by an African American to be performed on national television.
Still wrote over 150 compositions, including operas, ballets, symphonies, and chamber works, and even arranged music for movies including the Bing Crosby film Pennies from Heaven (1936) and Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). Although he was hired for Stormy Weather, which included appearances from Lena Horne and Cab Calloway, he quit 20th Century Fox for their treatment of people of color. Still also wrote a song for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York but wasn’t allowed to attend without police protection – unless he came on “Negro Day.” He received many honorary degrees and on December 3, 1978, died in LA.
