Name: Wallcast Concert: I Dream a World: Symphonic Persuasion
Start: 2023-02-04T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2023-02-04T00:00:00.000Z
Location: New World Center, Michael Tilson Thomas Performance Hall

Organization

Conductor

William Eddins

Soprano

Louise Toppin

New World Symphony

Wallcast Concert: I Dream a World: Symphonic Persuasion

Miami Beach

United States

New World Center, Michael Tilson Thomas Performance Hall

Wallcast Concert: I Dream a World: Symphonic Persuasion: Concert

Public

Concert

Approved

Program
Will Marion Cook
(1869-1944)
Arranged by James Lamb
Overture to In Dahomey (1902)
Traditional
(1888-1982)
Arranged by Camille Nickerson
“Gué, Gué, Solingaie” (1942)
Traditional
Arranged by Robert Nathaniel Dett
"Ride on, Jesus"

Louise Toppin
Wesley Ducote, NWS Piano Fellow

Amanda Aldridge
(1866-1956)
Lazy Dance (1913)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
(1875-1912)
Overture to The Song of Hiawatha, Op. 30 (1900)
Intermission

Scott Joplin
(1868-1917)
Arranged by T.J. Anderson
Overture to Treemonisha (1911)
Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)
Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1923-27)
II. Blues: Moderato

Ayrton Pisco, NWS Violin Fellow
Noah Sonderling, NWS Piano Fellow

Harry T. Burleigh
(1866-1949)
Lyrics by Arthur Symons
"The Grey Wolf" (1915)
Louise Toppin

James P. Johnson
(1894-1955)
Edited by Nicholas Hersh
Harlem Symphony (1932)
Subway Journey
Song of Harlem
The Nightclub
Baptist Mission

SYMPHONIC PERSUASION
On the evening of Saturday, May 16, 1903, Will Marion Cook's In Dahomey, featuring George Walker and Bert William, opened at The Shaftesbury Theatre of London's West End. Earlier that day, The Daily News ran an interview with the composer. Among the topics discussed was London's thirst for "genuine negro compositions." To this, Cook spoke about the Afro-American desire to make themselves artistically seen and heard, and if that meant extending beyond the bounds of the United States, then so be it. "We are no longer content to live in New York," the composer revealed. "We are coming over to London, Paris, Berlin and Rome."

In Dahomey was a musical first—after its success at home, it went on a seven-month tour in England, including a Command Performance for King Edward VII on the occasion of the ninth birthday of Edward, Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII). It would return to the United States, but the export of Black American art had begun.

You can hear folk and popular traditions in Cook's Dahomey, and the richness of that influence is deepened when other composers' musical inspirations are taken into account. It's as if every creator is contributing a tile to the grand quilt that is the story of Black Music in America.

Camille Nickerson, for example, returned time and again to the cultural fountain of her Louisiana Creole heritage and made it a cornerstone of her academic work. As a graduate student at Oberlin Conservatory, she published her master's thesis "Africo-Creole Songs of Louisiana." She collected dozens of songs through her research in Louisiana; it was a testament to her mission to preserve and transmit Creole sound. Equally important was not only her arrangements of those songs, but also passage to a wider audience. "Gue, Gue Solingaie" is one such song. It's a Creole lullaby, reminiscent of French art song, of soft a texture as the gossamer ambience of a humid summer evening. Here, the baby is lulled into a dreamland, full of talking tortoises, singing crocodiles and—surprise!—bobcats ready to pounce from the thickets. Like Nickerson, R. Nathaniel Dett is also representative of the composer who reached unabashedly into the seemingly endless bag of cultural folksong (in this case, Negro Spiritual) to apply knowledge learned in academies that taught Western Classical traditions.

Across the Atlantic, in London, Amanda Aldridge was born of a union that was itself multicultural. Her mother Amanda Brandt was Swedish; her father, the Black New York-born legendary Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge. Amanda, the younger Aldridge daughter (not to be confused with her older sister, contralto Luranah) studied at the Royal College of Music with "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, but a bout of laryngitis ended her concert career. Instead, she turned to teaching and composition, writing under the pseudonym Montague Ring such pieces as Lazy Dance, a light orchestral work with a bit of a march flair in its step. After an intro that seems to tumble in from the rafters, that dotted eighth-sixteenth syncopation propels the music along, but it's in the trio that the swing takes on a characteristic of a drift, sans souci, along waters riverine.

Among Aldridge's close relationships in the United Kingdom was one with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Hiawatha's Wedding Feast received its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in 1898. Coleridge-Taylor would soon write sequel cantatas to Wedding Feast, establishing The Song of Hiawatha as a trilogy. In addition, he would add an overture replete with sweeping drama and crashing symbols that melt into natural majesty of Longfellow's poem. Born in Britain, Coleridge-Taylor reached back to the United States for inspiration—Longfellow was the inspiration, and the Overture contains reference to "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." Hiawatha was so well received, in fact, that from 1927 to 1939 received an annual performance at Royal Albert.

Back in America, the famed ragtime composer Scott Joplin had ambitions of his own for the concert hall, or rather, the opera stage. Treemonisha was Joplin's dream project, a kind of morality tale that emphasized the triumph of reason and intellect over superstition. However, his popularity did not transfer to his operatic pursuits; Treemonisha was a departure from the ragtime for which he was known. Early attempts at a production were shambolic affairs; he died shortly after its failure. The world premiere did not arrive until 1971.

The exchange of musical cultural conventions runs deep at this time. In the 1920s French Composer Maurice Ravel indulged his admiration for Black American music—namely, the Blues. You can hear his approximation in the sliding pitches and nostalgic moans; the latter part of the movement is played with a pizzicato action that evokes the sound of the banjo, that most jet-setting of instruments. Compare this cross-reference to the sound of baritone and composer Harry T. Burleigh, whose tormented and anxious "The Grey Wolf" sets British writer Arthur Symons's poem of the same name. In turn, during Burleigh's time at the National Conservatory, the school’s director Antonin Dvořak learned from the student a great deal about the "negro melodies" that fascinated him so.

But through all the back and forth across borders terrestrial and maritime, real and imagined, the New York City's Harlem (itself named for a city in the old-world Netherlands) retained its status as a global cultural center. James P. Johnson celebrated those magnificent blocks his Harlem Symphony. The piece begins in Harlem, with a sparkling fanfare heralding the magnificence of old Penn Station. We board the subway and hurtle north towards Harlem, with changing melodic figures and rhythms signaling passage through Jewish and Latin neighborhoods, the bustle of shopping on 125th street, the wide street of seventh avenue, and final arrival in the historically Black section of town. An oboe introduces the slow second movement, "Song of Harlem," an ode to the place that is at turns sensual, nostalgic and romantic. Later we visit a nightclub in the throes of its irresistible swing, with an energy that becomes increasingly harried and frenetic. Finally, the hedonism of a Saturday night is washed away on Sunday morning; at the Baptist Mission presents a series of variations on a plaintive hymn, spiritual in nature. Fittingly, he concludes his celebration of Harlem with a nod to "Go Down Moses," the orchestra straining in the final bars, "let my people go."

—James Bennett II

James Bennett is a full-time reporter and some-time critic who lives and works full-time in Boston and some-time in Brooklyn. Music and food are most important to him. At any given point in time, you can find him frantically catching up on bookclub reading, sacrificing to the zeitgeist, cataloging records, or thinking about the next time he'll eat pâté.

English

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