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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Fela Sowande African Suite Arguably the best-known African composer of music in the European classical vein, Fela Sowande was the son of an Anglican priest and professor who taught at the missionary institute, St. Andrew’s College. After receiving musical instruction from his father and from organist T. K. Ekundayo Phillips, Sowande continued his musical studies in the choir of Christ Church Cathedral while his formal education took place at Kings College ( Lagos). An accomplished pianist and organist when he graduated from college, he was able to supplement his early jobs at a mission school and in the civil service with performances. During the early 1930s, Sowande began to play jazz professionally as the music gained popularity in Nigeria through short-wave radio broadcasts from Europe and the United States. Sowande moved to London in 1935 with plans to become a civil engineer. He quickly formed a jazz group with some Caribbean musicians of his acquaintance, and it was not long before he decided to devote his life to a career in music. While his advanced study led him to the University of London and Trinity College of Music, his keyboard talents led him to the London stage where he performed with Fats Waller, Paul Robeson, and Adelaide Hall. During World War II, Sowande worked for the BBC Africa Service, joined the Royal Air Force, and then served with Nigeria’s Colonial Film Unit, where he composed music for documentaries. He returned to London after the war and served as organist and choirmaster at the West London Mission of the Methodist Church for seven years. Sowande moved back to Nigeria in 1953 upon accepting a post with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In the early 1960s Sowande was teaching at the University of Ibadan but traveling regularly to the United States. He joined the faculty of Howard University in 1968. He spent many years on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh and retired from teaching after a stint in the Department of Pan-African Studies at Kent State University. Sowande became a United States citizen in 1977. Most of Sowande’s music came from a period of marked nationalism within the African continent. He, however, argued against “uncontrolled nationalism in which case nationals of any one country may forget that they are all members of one human family with other nationals.” He added, “We are not prepared to submit to the doctrine of apartheid in art by which a musician is expected to work only within the limits of his traditional forms of music.” His African Suite from 1944, therefore, presents a blend of traditional and popular music from the continent in a European orchestral setting. The opening movement, “Joyful Day,” is a setting of a melody by the Ghanaian composer Ephrain Amu. The second movement, “Nostalgia,” is an original reminiscence by Sowande. “Lullaby” is based on a folk melody Sowande reportedly heard just before leaving Nigeria in 1934. Sowande turned again to the work of Ephrain Amu for the theme of the movement “Onipe.” The finale, “Akinla,” comes from the dance-hall style known as “Highlife” – a bouncy West African translation of colonial military and dance tunes. “Akinla” was heard regularly on broadcasts around the commonwealth for decades and became one of Sowande’s most popular works. Joseph Schwantner New Morning for the World Chicago composer Joseph Schwantner played tuba and guitar as a teenager and earned early recognition with a jazz piece called Offbeat that won the National Band Camp Award in 1959. He went on to earn a degree from the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago and completed his M.M. and D.M. degrees at Northwestern University. After a few short-term teaching appointments, Schwantner joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music in 1970. He was the first composer-in-residence with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, where he worked for three years with Leonard Slatkin. Schwantner’s compositions generally feature percussion and are organized with tonal centers defined in ways that allow the music to fall between the atonal and traditional harmonic systems. New Morning for the World is probably Joseph Schwantner’s best-known work. It was commissioned by the AT&T Corporation for the Eastman Philharmonia under conductor David Effron. The heart of the work is a spoken text distilled from the many speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Schwantner called Dr. King “a man of great dignity and courage whom I had long admired.” The orchestral setting is one of great drama and pathos, reflecting both the power of King’s struggle and the world’s loss at his assassination. Richard Freed provided the following sketch of the music for a recording on the Nonesuch label: The eruptive opening phrase and the sharply contrasting passage that follows evoke at once the violence of King’s death and the sweetness of the dream that was his life’s quest. The contrast is reiterated frequently throughout the work, providing continuity and underscoring the idea of determination. Extended passages of slow, quiet music in the middle of the piece might be said to reflect the spirit of quiet endurance, of confident reliance on patient and peaceful means. With the words, “We’re on the move now,” the pace picks up and the orchestra begins to rumble with awakening energy. Following a sustained outburst of exuberance there is a brief elegiac passage leading to a still briefer apotheosis, and the work ends in delicate, dreamlike textures, with members of the orchestra humming (an effect Schwantner calls the “celestial choir”). Since receiving its premiere on the anniversary of Dr. King’s birth in 1983 in Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Arts with retired Pittsburgh Pirate Willie Stargell as narrator, New Morning for the World has earned a special place in the repertoire of many of our nation’s orchestras. Richard Strauss Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24 Richard Strauss grew up in Munich, where he studied a liberal arts curriculum at the Ludwigsgymnasium and University. His musical talents were recognized and developed by his father, Franz Strauss, who was the principal horn player with the Munich Court Orchestra for almost fifty years, and Franz’s colleagues and acquaintances in the city. Richard left the university after only two terms, but his career as a composer had already begun. Many of his country’s orchestras were regularly performing his music before he reached the age of twenty-one. Richard Strauss was also an extremely popular conductor. As Michael Kennedy observed, “The musical life of Germany and Austria in the 1890s and 1900s was dominated by three conductors: Gustav Mahler, Felix Weingartner, and Richard Strauss.” In his 2005 book, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition, Charles Youmans argues that the first three tone-poems Strauss composed (including Death and Transfiguration) were exercises along the way to the composer’s real goal, which was writing music-dramas, i.e. operas in the style of Richard Wagner. Strauss described how he had come to write programmatic pieces for orchestra: My upbringing had left me with some remaining prejudices against the works of Wagner and, in particular, of Liszt, and I hardly knew Wagner’s writings at all. [Alexander] Ritter patiently introduced me to them and to Schopenhauer until I knew and understood them. He demonstrated to me that the path onwards from Beethoven ‘the musician of expression’ … led via Liszt who, like Wagner, had rightly recognized that sonata form had been extended to its utmost limits with Beethoven. … New ideas must seek out new forms for themselves: the basic principle adopted by Liszt in his symphonic works, in which the poetic idea really did act simultaneously as the structural element, became thenceforward the guiding principle for my own symphonic works. Having written that, however, he made up a new term for his compositions, Tondichtungen, to differentiate them from Liszt’s symphonische Dichtungen. Youmans argues that the only difference in reality is the final goal: Strauss wanted to write music for the theater. In his earlier works, Strauss assigned his main characters (Till Eulenspiegel, Don Juan) musical themes and wrote out the drama within the compact realm of a concert piece, following standard practice among Romantics wanting to unite literature and music. But in Death and Transfiguration, Strauss uses Wagner’s formal principal, the leitmotif (a musical theme or fragment with objective significance), and applies it in an orchestral narrative. Using the sonata form as his outline, he describes the final moments of a man’s life. This framework provides the linear narrative. Because the plot elements are represented as being in the subject’s mind, there is fragmentation that allows for development and synthesis. In the exposition, we are introduced to thematic fragments above dramatic murmuring. We also hear the heartbeat in the drum, a musical effect some of Strauss’s contemporaries found to be just a bit too graphic. These fragments represent past happiness (often labeled “childhood”) mixed with struggle and disease. Having introduced the elements that form the reality of his subject, Strauss uses the central section to link the nobler fragments together. This takes place against a backdrop of increasing drama as the physical body starts to fail. Strauss brings his motives together in a recapitulation as the subject actually dies and the heartbeat stops, but the narrative is not complete. Although not a spiritual person, Strauss did recognize that the complete nature of our personal existence cannot be judged until we have passed on. Thus, it is only at the very end of the work (more dénouement than coda) that Strauss gives us his theme in a complete statement. Death and Transfiguration proved to be extremely popular for Strauss and showed the musical world that he might be the successor to Wagner (a fact he, himself, had no doubts about at the time). There is also a touching story from the end of the composer’s life that relates to this work. Michael Kennedy records that Strauss was confined to bed and on oxygen. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he called his daughter-in-law to him and said, “I hear so much music.” She started to hand him some music paper but he declined, saying, “No. I wrote it sixty years ago in Tod und Verklärung. This is just like that.” © 2007 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth |