PROPHECY

saturday, march 11, 2023

= program notes =

In 1892, and after several refusals, Antonín Dvořák at last accepted the directorship of the fledgling National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City. Jeannette Thurber, the Conservatory’s founder and chief advocate, structured her school on the European model of professional music education, and as such Thurber’s school charged little or no tuition, instead seeking support from rich philanthropists (unlike in Europe, where generous state funding was the norm.)

Though the model and director were European in origin, Thurber nevertheless hoped that her school would foster the growth of a uniquely American school of composition. This is why (somewhat ironically) she sought Dvořák for the directorship, since she recognized that, as a composer who regularly mined regional folk material for his art music compositions, he was likely to encourage an analogous approach for composers in the United States.

By the early 1890s, Dvořák enjoyed an international reputation as a composer in the European art music tradition, with a particular knack for incorporating folk material, or invoking a folk idiom, in his works, in the tradition of his fellow Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. We begin tonight’s performance with two such choral works from Dvořák’s collection In nature. The first, Napadly piśnê, describes a dream state of inspiration, while the second, Dnes do skoku a do písničky, describes a peasant wedding scene full of the joys of the natural world.

Dvořák’s rise in fame was accelerated by the support of Johannes Brahms, who recommended Dvořák to his publisher Simrock. Brahms was also a lover of folk material, though it played a less central role in his overall musical output. Many of his shorter choral compositions are inspired by folk idioms, however, and we offer two selections from his 14 German Folk Songs: Abschiedslied, the tale of a sad departure, and Bei nächtlicher Weil, an even sadder hunter’s tale with strong evocations of hunting horns in the melodies and scoring.

It is unlikely that Jeannette Thurber could have anticipated the enthusiasm with which Dvořák embraced the native traditions he encountered during his roughly three years as conservatory director. Undoubtedly his most fruitful personal and professional relationship in this regard was with his young assistant, Harry T. Burleigh. Fortunately in many respects, Thurber was a very progressive figure for her day, insisting that women and musicians of color be offered spots at the Conservatory, and Burleigh was one of many young Black musicians who found a place there. It was Burleigh who introduced Dvořák to indigenous musical traditions of Black Americans, the repertoire most commonly known today as the spiritual, but which also goes by the name of sorrow song.

Burleigh later shared this rich repertoire with the wider world through his singing and his many arrangements for solo voice and piano. Though Burleigh focused on the solo voice, we are fortunate that he also penned several choral arrangements, and we offer his powerful setting of My Lord what a morning, an arrangement that seems to draw out every possible emotional angle from the words and melody, as tonight’s finale.

Dvořák was fascinated by this body of music that told the stories of the enslaved and their descendants. He recognized in this music the full range of human experience: not just sorrow and suffering, but hope, joy, and everything in between. Just like the folk traditions of his native land, he saw in Black indigenous music a lifetime’s worth of material from which American (and other) musicians might draw inspiration, and he seems to have been unburdened, like many white Americans, with the ingrained prejudices that suppressed the progress of Black Americans both before and after emancipation.

The revelation of the sorrow songs led Dvořák to offer up the following in 1893:

“I am now satisfied that the future music in this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States... These are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.”

One can read the verb “must” as both a neutral prophecy (the inevitability of this course) and as an exhortation, a call to action.

Dvořák’s call to validate Black music was enhanced, if indirectly, by the arrival of a British composer of color to American shores a few years later. The son of a doctor from Sierra Leone and a white English mother, Samuel Coleridge- Taylor was trained in the Victorian musical tradition of his day and became a celebrated composer in British circles. Thanks to several successful visits to the United States in the early 20th century, some Black American cultural figures like W. E. B. DuBois saw in Coleridge-Taylor a source of inspiration, a composer of color who found fame and some measure of acceptance in a largely white cultural milieu. Tonight we perform Coleridge-Taylor’s setting of the Thomas Hood poem The Lee Shore, with music that strikingly captures the sea storm imagery with which the poet begins.

By Dvořák’s proclamation, Burleigh’s witness and evangelism, and Coleridge- Taylor’s inspiring presence, the stage could have been set for a true acceptance of American indigenous music as foundational to the whole American school of composition. Yet what emerged was more like a division, artistic segregation fueled at times by racial and cultural prejudices or merely ignorance of other possibilities. Many Black composers, for example, shut out of the classical music world, turned increasingly to jazz and other quasi-popular genres. Meanwhile, the very notion of highbrow vs lowbrow music began to crystallize after the First World War, further pushing jazz and other largely Black musical genres away from the rarified orbit of the classical concert hall.

A great many white composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (not to mention those of other historical periods) understood their cultural compass as pointing firmly towards Europe. In some cases this included where their folk music interests lay. We can see one such example in the figure of Amy Beach. Beach herself had to fight against entrenched gender stereotypes to make her way as a composer and pianist, but works like her renowned Gaelic Symphony and her organ prelude on The Fair Hills of Eire, O are examples of a Eurocentric cultural orientation that resisted the shift in perspective that Dvořák called for. (To give a sample of Beach’s choral output, we also perform her brief but charming Peace I leave with you, a piece very much at home in the Anglican/Episcopal religious tradition, towards the end of the program.)

As Horowitz articulates in his book, part of the failure of Dvořák’s prophecy to materialize stemmed from the failure of certain influential musical figures of the early 20th century to acknowledge that there was an American musical past worth building upon. Part of a broader trend towards a cultural reboot fueled in large measure by the horrors of the First World War, figures like Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein were hard-pressed to find American composers of interest prior to roughly 1910 (or, in the case of Thomson, didn’t really bother to look). The composer who most dramatically challenges this view (though there are many others if one digs deeply enough) is Charles Ives. Ives’s daring experimentalism was rooted deeply in both European classical traditions and in vernacular musical traditions of his own day, especially town bands and hymnody.

Ives’s musical curiosities were nurtured from an early age. His father would have him sing a tune in one key while accompanied in another. This polytonal approach is exactly what we find in Ives’s setting of the Sixty-Seventh Psalm. The sopranos and altos are given one key signature, the tenors and basses another. Especially in the first and final sections, the harmonies of the respective key areas are quite tame, but taken together there is a sonic quality that is at times disorienting, at other times seeming to prefigure jazz.

Only about eight years younger than Ives, Robert Nathaniel Dett was a key evangelist in the early 20th century for the sorrow songs of Black America. In addition to a wealth of choral and other works that rely on spiritual songs as the point of departure, Dett composed an epic oratorio, The Ordering of Moses, as a grand work that employs spirituals in ways analogous to what Lutheran Baroque composers did with chorale tunes. Dett’s O Holy Lord is richly scored, with the chorus often divided into eight parts. Dett’s choral library included Russian Orthodox music, and the sonic connection seems clear.

If Aaron Copland felt like American composers were starting more or less from scratch, he nevertheless endeavored to create an American sound for American themes, especially as his political interests turned populist. To what extent the Copland sound is a pseudo-history can be debated, but the melodic sweeps and the ring of the accompanying piano are signature sounds in his setting of Zion’s Walls, as arranged by Glenn Koponen.

We follow with examples of choral works by three Black composers, who collectively demonstrate the diversity and richness of approaches to choral music composition among Black composers of the mid-20th century to the present. Although there are traces of the spiritual and jazz in some of the works of George Walker, he was above all a modernist in outlook. His ternary- form setting of the Psalm O Praise the Lord is a strongly declamatory and rhythmically inventive setting, with a use of phrasal cells that at moments recalls Stravinsky.

Rosephayne Powell focuses her compositional energy on solo vocal and choral works, and gears her varied output to many different types of choruses, from student ensembles to professional ones. Powell sets the well-known verse of Psalm 113, Non nobis Domine, with gradually building drive and a constant implied alternation between 3/4 and 6/8 meters.

According to the composer’s website, the compositional style of Zanaida Stewart Robles “can be described as energized, soulful, contrapuntal, harmonically colorful, rhythmically driven, heavily modal, occasionally with African elements and touches of progressive rock.” Every one of those elements, in fact, can be discerned in Robles’s hypnotic Ecstatic Expectancy. Melodic and textual cells overlaid in various patterns, with an irregular and often contravened meter of 7/4, together with percussion accompaniment, combine to create an atmosphere of mystical expectation.

— Michael Barrett