Notes provided by:  David R. Glerum, Music Director – WMFE-FM/NPR, Orlando, FL. (1990-2009); Music Director – WXXI-FM/NPR, Rochester, N.Y. (1980-1990)

Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) –

Celebration &  

Zora! We’re Calling You (World Premiere):

Adolphus C. Hailstork is an African American composer and educator who was born in Rochester, N.Y. on April 17, 1941, but spent most of his childhood in Albany where he joined the choir of the Episcopalian cathedral. He began his collegiate studies at Howard University where he earned a B.M. in Music Theory (1963); completed a Master’s Degree in Composition at the Manhattan School of Music (1964), studying with Nicholas Flagello, Vittorio Gianni, and David Diamond; and spent the summer of 1963 at the American Institute at Fontainbleu, France, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger. After serving in the U.S. Armed Forces in Germany (1966-68), he went on to earn a Ph.D in Composition at Michigan State University at Lansing (1971), where his principal teacher was H. Owen Reed. His career as an educator includes professorships at Youngstown State University in Ohio (1971-1977), Norfolk State University in Virginia (1977-2000), and Old Dominion University, also in Norfolk (2000-present), where he is Eminent Scholar and Professor of Music.

Dr. Hailstork has written with much success in a variety of genres, including chorus, solo voice, piano, organ, various chamber ensembles, band, and orchestra. One of his earliest triumphs was Celebration! (1974). It was recorded in 1976 by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and later performed in 1991 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Maestro Daniel Barenboim.  Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma of Lawrence University Conservatory writes: “Hailstork’s first faculty appointment was at Youngstown State University in 1971. During this time, he attended the 1975 Black Music Symposium in Minneapolis, where Paul Freeman was conducting a series of events, including a reading session devoted to new works. One of these was Hailstork’s Celebration!, a work commissioned by the J.C. Penney Foundation in anticipation of the American Bicentennial. It proved to be exceptional in all respects.”

Many more successes were to follow, including the operas Paul Laurence Dunbar (premiered in 1995 by the Dayton Opera Company); Joshua’s Boots (commissioned in 1999 by the Opera Theater of Saint Louis and the Kansas City Lyric Opera); and Rise for Freedom, about the Underground Railroad, performed in the fall of 2007 by the Cincinnati Opera Company. Dr. Hailstork’s second and third symphonies were recorded by the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra under David Lockington on a Naxos label disc released in January 2007. Other commissions in recent years have included: Earthrise, a large-scale choral work premiered by James Conlon at the Cincinnati May Festival; Serenade for chorus and orchestra performed in 2008 at Michigan State University; and also in 2008 Set Me on a Rock (again for chorus and orchestra) premiered by the Houston Choral Society.

Zora! We’re Calling You (World Premiere) is one of Adolphus Hailstork’s most recent compositions and was written at the behest of the Orlando Philharmonic and the 2012 Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities (Eatonville, FL) for the annual Legacy Concert.” The Pabst Foundation has provided generous funding for this partnership. This project was also made possible through a major grant given by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Who was Zora Neale Hurston? And what was her legacy? Our own Christopher Wilkins, Artistic Director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, gives us this summary: “Zora Neale Hurston was an innovator whose influence on writers, dramatists, and scholars continues to grow year after year. Her writing draws its power from the deep authenticity of her voice, reflecting her experience as a Southern African American woman. Her life, she declared, was as worthy a subject for artistic treatment as that of any American. Through Zora, African-American women of her day found a brilliant and unapologetic advocate. Through her creative work, she demonstrated a resolve to live at the center of the action, not on the sidelines. Increasingly over time, her legacy has assumed a universal resonance for all people and all ages, assuming its place now as an important part of the cultural mainstream – strong, proud, and deeply human.”

Frederick Delius (1862-1934) – Appalachia: Variations on an Old Slave Song with Final Chorus (baritone solo):

Frederick Delius was born in Bradford, England (of German parentage) and raised in Isleworth (near London) and Gloucestershire. He is generally seen as a quintessentially English composer of evocative and nostalgic program music. However, the composer actually spent most of his life abroad. He traveled to the mountainous wilderness of Scandinavia, spent time here in Florida “attempting” to manage an orange grove, and settled for a while amid the delicate beauty of rural France. All of these locations, as well as his British homeland, influenced his music.

Delius wrote in many genres, including opera, concerto and sonata. However, his most successful pieces fall into either of two categories: orchestral tone poems; or works for soloists, chorus and orchestra. The tone poems are descriptive, rhapsodic, and sensuous evocations of natural beauty. The best known of these are: Brigg Fair; In a Summer Garden; The Walk to the Paradise Garden; On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring; and Summer Night on the River. Delius is admired as a superb miniaturist whose gentle and poetic evocation of scene and nature is unsurpassed. He also loved writing for choral forces, which was actually his preferred genre, and these works have proved especially enduring. Delius’s finest efforts in this genre were written between 1902 and 1905 and include three works: Appalachia (1902-3), a reworking of a simpler work written in 1896, exploring his experiences in the American south; Sea Drift (1903-4), inspired by the great American poet Walt Whitman, and considered by many to be his greatest achievement; and A Mass of Life (1904-5), a deeply spiritual work set to texts from Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra,” constituting the composer’s grandest and most ambitious project.

In anticipation of the Delius Sesquicentennial – he was born on January 29, 1862, therefore making 2012 his 150^th anniversary year – the Orlando Philharmonic has programmed for you Delius’s first major choral achievement, Appalachia, which the composer subtitled “Variations of an Old Slave Song with Final Chorus, “ since it incorporates an original slave melody.

Of Appalachia, the composer/musicologist Philip Heseltine (who adopted the pseudonym Peter Warlock) writes: “Here the deep impression made on Delius by his life in Florida, which colors many of his early works, finds its mature utterance.” It is indeed the culmination of the composer’s transformative early-twenties, when he ventured across the ocean to Solano Grove, Florida, in 1884, to oversee an orange plantation on the St. John’s River, just outside of Jacksonville. Delius’s father placed him in charge of the family’s orange grove in an attempt to discourage his son from becoming a composer. Ironically, the scheme failed due to Frederick’s managerial ineptitude and utter absorption and fascination with the sights, sounds, and songs of the ‘Deep South’. The beautiful and powerful singing of the African-American plantation workers inspired him even more to develop his own musical abilities. He later remarked “hearing the Afro-Americans singing in such romantic surroundings, it was then I first felt the urge to express myself in music.” Delius felt profound admiration and respect for the way in which the plantation singers demonstrated “a truly wonderful sense of musicianship and harmonic resource in the instinctive way in which they treated a melody…” Delius wrote several works during this period inspired by these Negro songs and the developing spirituals tradition, including the orchestral Florida Suite; the opera Koanga (which includes the well-known ‘La Calinda’); and the aforementioned Appalachia.

The roots of Appalachia stem from both Solano Grove and the composer’s stay the following year in Danville, Virginia, where Delius was lured to perform, offer private lessons, and teach at a Danville college (1885-6). Here, too, Delius took in the singing and musical idioms of the Negro slaves who worked in the tobacco plants. On his frequent walks, Delius would pause to listen to the slaves singing in the stemmeries; it was not uncommon for as many as three hundred workers to be singing in one room. The management encouraged the choosing of one man or woman to “line out” a spiritual or song, believing that a “singing” bunch was more productive.  A tune Delius heard earlier in Solano Grove he encountered once again in Danville: “Oh Honey, I am going down the river in the morning” is still heard as a hymn tune in African-American churches. Delius adopted it for the theme and variations of Appalachia.

According to a note in the autograph score, Appalachia “mirrors the moods of tropical nature in the great swamps bordering on the Mississippi River, which is so intimately associated with the life of the old Negro slave population.” It continues, “Longing melancholy, an intense love of Nature, childlike humor and an innate delight in singing and dancing are still the most characteristic qualities of this race.” However, towards the end of the piece this romanticized portrait is intruded upon by the universal realities of transience and tragedy – major themes in the composer’s mature works – with a poignant lament for the cruel fate of the slaves, frequently ‘sold down the river’ to another plantation with no consideration for their loved ones:

Chorus

After night has gone comes the day,

The dark shadows will fade away,

To’rds the morning lift a voice,

Let the scented woods rejoice,

And echoes swell across the mighty stream.

Baritone solo

O honey, I am going down the river in the morning,

Baritone & chorus

Heigh ho, heigh ho, down the mighty river…

Aye! Honey, I’ll be gone when next the whippoorwill’s a-calling,

Baritone solo

And don’t you be too lonesome, love, and don’t you fret and cry;

Chorus

For the dawn will soon be breaking,

The radiant morn is nigh,

And you’ll find me ever awaiting,

My own sweet Nelly Gray!

(La la la.)

To’rds the morning etc.

(Ah!)

Aaron Copland (1900-1990):

     In a speech given in 1979, Leonard Bernstein declared that Aaron Copland’s music “can have an extraordinary grandeur, an exquisite delicacy, a prophetic severity, a ferocious rage, a sharp bite, a prickly snap, a mystical suspension, a wounding stab, an agonized howl – none of which corresponds with the Aaron we loving friends know; it comes from some deep mysterious place he never reveals to us except in his music.”

On all accounts Bernstein is right as to the wide range of Copland’s musical universe. But through all this diversity, there is usually present an unmistakable Copland sound. For many, this sound captures our country’s essence so accurately and with such honesty that Copland continues to be regarded as the true voice of the American spirit.

Copland has earned the appellation (pun intended) of “the dean of American music,” through a legacy of outstanding compositions that one can’t imagine being written by anyone born outside this country. But just how does one characterize Copland’s American sound? We can point to the composer’s recurring distinctive qualities of austerity, expanse, and wide-open spaces. Those qualities are almost always to be found in his music, but are especially appreciated in his popular and successful ballet scores written between 1938 and 1944 – Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring. Still, Copland’s sound cannot be fully explained through mere analysis; rather, it is something that resonates inside us on some deeply emotional level. As Bernstein said, Copland’s music does come from “some deep mysterious place.” But it is a place that all Americans seem to know and love.

Because of the Great Western associations of Copland’s above mentioned ballets, some erroneously believe that Copland must have been born far west of the Mississippi into a family of “traditional” Americans. Wrong. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1900 to Russian immigrants, Copland grew up in his words, “on a street that can only be described as drab, that had none of the garish color of the ghetto, or even the rawness of a pioneer street….” With roots such as these, Copland’s sound takes on an ironic dimension. Copland himself was himself amused, remarking “I mention this only because I am filled with wonder each time I realize that a musician was born on that street.”

Without much encouragement from his parents, Copland was determined to become a composer at age fifteen and began studying seriously at first in New York and then in Paris, where he became the first American composition student of the brilliant and highly esteemed pedagogue and organist Nadia Boulanger. In 1929 his career received a boost when he won a competition sponsored by RCA Victor for a symphonic work – his winning entry was a jazz-inspired Dance Symphony. At the outset of his career and fresh from his studies with Boulanger, he tended to write under the influence of European music of the early 1900’s. But he soon became much more concerned and focused on producing music that was uniquely American in style. He also saw it as a high priority to connect with a large number of listeners who would find his music meaningful and relevant. Works like Music for the Theater soon followed which unabashedly incorporated the melodies, rhythms, and tone colors of jazz and popular music.

Copland moved on though when he realized that jazz and pop, so in vogue in 1920’s, could only take his music so far. Realizing that to follow such a path would ultimately become confining, he then turned in the mid-1930’s to music steeped in the folk themes and music of our country. He dealt with patriotic or American subjects and even incorporated actual folk songs of the American West in his ballets Billy the Kid and Rodeo. He included the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” into his 1944 ballet, Appalachian Spring. Through the enormous success of that Martha Graham collaboration, Copland proved that he had found a truly American style, spare in harmony, moving, and sensitively colored.

Committed to his desire to reach a wider audience, he also pursued projects providing music designed for radio, for young people, and for film. In cinema, for example, Copland wrote the soundtracks for Steinbeck’s The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and in 1949 he received an Academy Award for his music for The Heiress. Meanwhile, USA’s entry into World War II sparked Copland’s patriotism and led to the much loved Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man. He took this style further in the ambitious Third Symphony of the mid ‘40’s and in his opera, The Tender Land, which came about a decade later. Beginning in the 1950’s, he circled back to his younger days with works of a more modernist and severe nature. Making use of some of the most advanced techniques of twentieth century music, he composed the orchestral works Connotations (1962) and Inscape (1967).

But no matter what style Copland was writing in – popular, jazz, “austere,” folk, mid-century modern, serial – Copland demonstrated throughout his career an extraordinary gift for the continual reinvention of a national music, of an American sound.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) – Appalachian Spring:

     Appalachian Spring is probably Copland’s finest work and is certainly his most enduring and popular. It was composed to serve as the music for a ballet devised by the great dance choreographer and pioneer Martha Graham. With a scenario inspired by Miss Graham’s memories of her grandmother’s farm in turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania, the ballet proved a perfect match for Aaron Copland whose direct and quintessentially American style was in full bloom. Edwin Denby’s description of the ballet’s scenario from his review of the New York premiere in May 1945 was reprinted in the published score:

“The ballet concerns a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century [the nineteenth century]. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end, the couple is left quiet and strong in their new house.”

The actual premiere was given in October 1944 in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the limited space in the theater necessitated that Copland use a chamber orchestra of only thirteen instruments (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano and nine strings). The economy of space actually informed the nature of the original score itself in that Copland was put in a position of being forced to write in accordance with the setting as well as the story. The result is music that is economical – every note seems necessary and perfect – and of remarkable tenderness, austere beauty, and a nobility that is peculiarly American.  Musical lines are clean and pure, varieties of texture and timbre are emphasized in the small ensemble, and the composer makes greater use of counterpoint and irregular meter.

Since the ballet was set in Pennsylvania, why the title Appalachian Spring?  Copland explains: “The title, Appalachian Spring, was chosen by Miss Graham. She borrowed it from the heading of Hart Crane’s poems, though the ballet bears no relation to the text of poem itself. In some strange sense, though, the title does work in that it effectively communicates the composer’s dedication at the time to folk music and folk-sounding music. Most notable is the presence in the final part of the ballet of the well-known folk tune, the Shaker song “The Gift to Be Simple,” which serves as the basis for a wonderful set of variations. Copland’s own melodic style had by this time reached the level of the beauty and simplicity of actual folk music.  What we are left with is music that is coherent and seamless from section to section.

Perfect too were the conditions under which Copland composed the music. He wrote it while he was in Hollywood attending to the score for the movie North Star.  In his book The New Music 1900-1960, Copland wrote: “Most of Appalachian Spring was composed at night at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. An air of mystery hovers over a film studio after dark. Its silent and empty streets give off something of the atmosphere of a walled medieval town; no one gets in or out without passing muster with the guards at the gate. This seclusion provided the required calm for evoking the peaceful, open countryside of rural Pennsylvania depicted in Appalachian Spring.“

In 1945, Copland’s Appalachian Spring won both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award. Perhaps the work’s greatest achievement, however, is the abiding and deep affection that American’s have held for it since its inception some sixty-six years ago.

“The Gift to Be Simple”:

Tis the gift to be simple

Tis the gift to be free,

Tis the gift to come down

Where we ought to be.

And when we find ourselves

In the place just right,

Twill be in the valley

Of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d.

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.