American Diversity

Program Notes

With this concert, The Spectrum Singers embark on a journey among works emblematic of the broad diversity of American poetry and composition.

Aaron Copland’s early years found him embracing leftist politics. In 1934, for example, his song “Into the Streets May First” gained him some brief notoriety. And, before that he had written the now rarely-heard An Immorality from 1926, scored for women’s voices, with poetry by the notorious expatriate and fascist collaborator Ezra Pound, of whom Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19ᵗʰ or early 20ᵗʰ century, not to be influenced by Pound would be “…like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold.” Perhaps the dauntingly syncopated piano accompaniment and the deliciously insouciant text of An Immorality conspire to keep this work from regular performance? Pity—it’s so much downright fun, especially the parodied cadenza for coloratura soprano.

Lilyanna D’Amato wrote in an article on composer, pianist, and teacher Florence Price that was published on ClevelandClassical.com in 2020. The following is an edited excerpt from the article:

 In November, 1943, composer Florence Price began a letter to Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky with a painful admission: “to begin with, I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”

 Acutely aware of the classical tradition’s discriminatory leanings, Price was direct. She desperately needed Koussevitzky to program her compositions. The work of a woman composer is [unjustly] predetermined, she said, “to be light, froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility… add to that the incident of race—and I hope you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.”

 At that point in her career, she had already achieved unprecedented success. The first-prize winner of the 1932 Wanamaker music contest and the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, she was a distinguished member of the Black intelligentsia, fraternizing with the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She had received national acclaim for her nearly faultless virtuosity. Yet, she never heard back from Koussevitzky.

 Unfortunately, this lack of critical recognition defined her career. For in her lifetime—and in the decades following her death—she was excluded from the higher, white echelon of the classical canon, although her music continued to be performed, celebrated, and studied in Black classical music and regional communities.

 Born in a racially integrated neighborhood in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, Price grew up in a middle-class household—her father was the city’s first Black dentist and her mother a schoolteacher. At the age of four she played her first piano recital and wrote her first composition at eleven. Encouraged by her mother, she left home at fourteen for the New England Conservatory, one of the few conservatories that admitted Black students at the time, returning three years later to teach and raise a family.

 In 1927 she moved her family to Chicago where she increasingly essayed larger symphonic and concerto forms, winning support from the music director of the Chicago Symphony, Frederick Stock. On June 15ᵗʰ, 1933, she became the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered her Symphony No. 1 in E minor in a concert titled “The Negro in Music.”

In 2009, more than 50 years after her death, a large collection of Price’s work was discovered in an abandoned house which she had used as a summer home. Thanks to this discovery, today Florence Price and her music are in the midst of a much-deserved renaissance.

The three brief choral songs we perform tonight help illuminate some of Price’s prodigious gifts. Of the three—each delightful and enjoyable for what they bring to their texts—Resignation, with text written by the composer herself, is surely the most poignant.

Rosephanye Powell’s personal website recounts that she is one of America’s premier women composers of solo vocal and choral music. She serves as Professor of Voice at Auburn University, and holds degrees from The Florida State University, Westminster Choir College and Alabama State University. An accomplished singer and voice professor, Powell’s ongoing research focuses on the art of the African-American spiritual and voice care concerns for voice professionals. She has received numerous awards from universities across the country.

Powell’s To Sit and Dream first caught my attention in a three-day Choral Racial Equality online seminar entitled “A Space at the Table” sponsored by NATS Boston in 2020. The music’s easy swing and compelling, bluesy, minor-key tang was immediately arresting. Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’s contemplative text is well-matched to her music.

My discovery of Carol Barnett and her music was engendered by Jameson Marvin, an esteemed choral colleague, formerly of Harvard and Conductor Emeritus of the Jameson Singers. Barnett’s music spoke to me immediately—a truly unique and remarkable voice. The Spectrum Singers recently performed her McKay—an ingenious setting of the eponymous Sacred Harp shaped-note hymn attributed to S.M. Denson. Tonight’s offering, The Last Invocation, atmospherically floats Walt Whitman’s poem of deep portent and potent emotion. Barnett’s artful manipulation of duple and triple rhythms and her great gift for creating atmosphere are abundantly in evidence.

Trained as a pianist and a singer, Debra Scroggins has enjoyed a career as a teacher, mezzo-soprano soloist, and professional chorister, having sung with renowned ensembles across the US and Europe. She also serves as Composer in Residence for The Texas Voices and the Plano Civic Chorus.

 A Dream Within a Dream for chorus and piano was published in 2009, and has, fittingly, a dreamlike feel to it and a charming and pleasant homophony. The verse is by Edgar Allen Poe. While Poe is best-known for his eerie stories and poetry, this 1849 verse is of a more contemplative nature.

Scott Joplin had already mastered many musical genres, most notably the explosively popular rage of ragtime, before he had begun writing, composing, and choreographing his opera Treemonisha. Not content to merely imitate European traditions, Joplin worked to create a uniquely American opera, and one that would have broad public appeal. Published at his expense in 1911, Joplin also personally funded a piano-accompanied reading of Treemonisha in 1915. Despite these early efforts, Treemonisha unfortunately lay dormant until it was revived in Atlanta in 1972 to great acclaim. Treemonisha is the story of the life of an orphaned little Black girl, discovered lying under a tree, just after the Civil War. Named “Tree-Monisha,” after both her adopted mother and the aforementioned tree (with which she exhibited a mystical kinship) “Tree” grows up to battle three folk-sorcerers who hold the local Black community in their thrall. Victorious over these conjurers, she leads her people forward out of ignorance toward education and helps empower them for self-advancement.

Joplin’s present popularity stems from his ragtime compositions, which in the 1970s were rediscovered by Hollywood and others. In Treemonisha, however, ragtime is rarely heard. It does appear in dance ensemble numbers, though, two of which we offer this evening: the brief but infectious Aunt Dinah Has Blowed de Horn and the opera’s wonderful finalé in which Treemonisha and her compatriot Lucy lead the opera’s entire ensemble of characters in a final exuberant and celebratory dance entitled A Real Slow Drag.

William Schuman was a highly regarded and busy professional musician for much of his life. A world-class composer, he wrote ten symphonies, four string quartets, and a host of other works. He was Director of Publications at music publisher G. Schirmer before assuming the two most important roles of his administrative calling—first as President of The Juilliard School of Music from 1945–1962, then as President of The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York until 1969, when he retired to spend more time composing. He continued to be very active in many important musical and advisory capacities until his death in 1992.

Schuman’s Carols of Death, set to the evocative words of Walt Whitman, form a perfect triptych of mood. The first carol starkly paints the hold that earth and the power of love exert on departed souls. The second depicts the struggle of the soul to “go over,” and once there, shows us the timelessness of the continuum. The third gently resigns and releases us to that which is inevitable in all our lives. Alternately calm, dissonant, rhythmic, gentle, and ultimately very moving, this set of “carols” (an unusual and poignant use of a term generally associated with lighter-hearted compositions) brings us close to our own time on Earth with a powerfully refined purity of expression.

William Bolcom, one of our country’s most gifted pianist/composers, first gained attention with the recitals of American popular song he and his wife Joan Morris have given to great acclaim throughout the U.S. and Europe. His development as a major composer ultimately took root with a sprawling setting for orchestra, vocal soloists, and multiple choruses of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, written between 1956 and 1981. Since then, Bolcom has embraced virtually all of the musical forms, and has exhibited a special affinity for opera—MacTeague and A View from the Bridge were both written for the Chicago Lyric Opera and given widely noted performances there and later in several other cities. Clearly, an interest in the human voice and an intrigue for history pervade his consciousness.

The more one studies William Bolcom’s The Mask—a challenging 1990 work for chorus and piano soloist—the more complex and deeply layered it reveals itself to be.

First, there is the composer’s note printed opposite the last page of the music:

Several years ago, Natalie Hinderas¹ asked me for a group of pieces for The Philadelphia Singers with an important piano part for herself. Upon returning to the United States from Europe the following year, I learned Natalie had died. I hope this cycle is close to what she had in mind, even though there are texts.²

I asked T. J. Anderson III (son of the famous composer, and a prizewinning poet himself) to select the texts, with the stipulation that he contribute a poem himself.

1. A pianist (1927–1987) and noted advocate of music composed by Black Americans.
2. Hinderas had asked Bolcom for a concertlike work for piano and wordless chorus.

Then there are the poems, five in all, written by Black Americans, all of which offer glimpses into troubled circumstances. The rich brew of vibrant verse in T. J. Anderson III’s selection of poets and poetry would ultimately inspire the composer to create deeply engaging music.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, born of enslaved parents in Dayton, Ohio in 1872, achieved a modicum of fame from his 12 published books of poetry and from his friendships with the family of aviation pioneers the Wright brothers, and the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. His extraordinarily evocative “We Wear the Mask” begins Bolcom’s explorations, and the poetic image of a mask worn to hide life’s sorrows is underscored by an almost bluesy melody, interrupted by angry discords, as if depicting reality intruding upon a synthetic, feigned contentment with life’s lot.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902–1981), an early participant in the heady 1919–1939 Harlem Renaissance, was born in Texas. At age seven she was kidnapped from her mother by her father and taken, after stays throughout Pennsylvania, to New York City where she attended the Pratt Institute and Columbia University. Something of a renaissance woman of the arts, she painted, taught design, studied in Paris, and wrote poetry, her writings appearing in many of the important journals of the day. Her “Heritage” mirrors her African forebears with rich Nubian imagery. Bolcom artfully juxtaposes what might be an imitation of local tribal music with one of its North American descendants: ragtime.

Richard Bruce (1906–1987)—full name Richard Bruce Nugent—adopted his two-part nom de plume to avoid embarrassing his socially prominent Washington, D.C. parents with his unapologetically flamboyant lifestyle, very much that of the ultimate bohemian. Embraced and encouraged early on by Langston Hughes, Bruce’s artwork and writings were published throughout the Harlem Renaissance. His short story, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” was the first literary work on a purely homosexual theme that had been published by a Black American. Bolcom’s third movement, “Shadow,” is punctuated by violent chromatic arpeggios as Bruce’s verse tells metaphorically of the umbral existence of dark-skinned people forced to live on life’s outer edges.

Charles Cyrus Thomas’s “Worn Faces” tells either of an overworked hillside despoiled by years of environmentally insensitive farming—probably by forced labor—or, more likely, and therefore more poignantly, the worn, tear-dampened visage of a work-wearied, impoverished female field hand—or perhaps both of these. Bolcom’s music is especially attuned to the heavy burden borne by the verses’ protagonist(s).

Finally, in an especially artful conflation of two worlds, T. J. Anderson III’s “Portrait” paints with a palette of vibrant and colorful African images a vivid portrait of a pianist (Bolcom himself?) in recital.

The Mask can be analyzed many ways, and the above is only one person’s “take.” What ultimately matters is the overall effect the music and verse have on the listener and performer. Bolcom’s music and the verse it entwines offer powerful and memorable musical and verbal images not soon forgotten.

Ned Rorem, one of this country’s most prolific and celebrated composers, passed away on November 18, 2022. His lyric and approachable 1955 hymn/anthem Sing, My Soul, His Wondrous Love first crossed my radar when I was singing as a boy soprano in the Christ Church Episcopal Choir in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. I’ve loved it ever since. Its three-minute span contains much that is treasurable of this composer—easygoing, pleasant melody, excellent matching of text to music, and the occasional harmonic “curve-ball” that my choirmaster said “…keeps things interesting.”

Robert Frost’s 1943 poem “Choose Something Like a Star” was selected by Randall Thompson as the closing text for his seven-movement song cycle for chorus titled Frostiana. It was written between June 15 and July 7, 1959 while the composer was summering in Gstaad, Switzerland. The song cycle was commissioned by the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts to celebrate its 200ᵗʰ Anniversary. It was premiered there on October 18, 1959, with the composer conducting and the poet present.

For this remarkable poem, Randall Thompson—a renowned Harvard University-based composer and music professor—adopts a spare, pulsing, almost ascetic tone, with many an upward rising scale in the piano accompaniment suggesting the Star’s astronomical height.

At one particularly telling moment, the chorus echoes the poet’s increasing crankiness with the Star’s refusal to join into a conversation. The poet demands of the Star: “…Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’” The music then rises to its only marked fortissimo at “…But say, with what degree of heat. Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. Use language we can comprehend…It gives us strangely little aid.” Indeed, the Star speaks no more than those two words—not really an answer at all. Frost seems to ask: is this all humanity can expect when it asks for reassurance from a higher entity?

At the poem’s end, Frost brings a bit of alliterative wordplay: “We may choose something like a star to stay our minds on and be staid.” Note the multiple “s” sounds in that final line (sibilant descriptors of “I burn” perhaps), and especially the poet’s final touch of invoking the similarity between the sound and meaning of “stay” and “staid.”

One might be surprised that Thompson chose this somewhat abstruse finale to end his choral set of seven Frost poems, but I think he must have meant to honor the poet’s muse, whose sometimes craggy and often quite deep philosophical prose can ultimately say much more than when first read.

Thank you so much for joining The Spectrum Singers tonight! Our hope is that you may have gained a deeper appreciation of the wide diversity of American choral music and its embrace of significant American poetry.

~ Program Notes © 2023 by John W. Ehrlich