John interviews Randall Goosby, whose debut on the Decca label, “Roots,” was released this summer (and is being played on All Classical Portland regularly). The disc is an exploration of music written by Black composers and of composers inspired by Black American culture. Randall tells John Pitman about the importance and responsibility of bringing underrepresented composers into the repertoire, finding balance between violin study and sports; and the mentorship of the great violinist Itzhak Perlman, whose summer camp in New York is on, naturally, Shelter Island.
Early musical instruments were designed in the same manner as many other great inventions: by accident. After realizing that ordinary objects could create fascinating melodies, our earliest innovators began testing, shaping, and playing the tangible world around us. Their historic creations have evolved into the unique medleys of science, engineering, and art that exist today.
Below, we’ll peel back the curtain and explore how several of these modern instruments are made!
If we think of music as a mirror of culture, then all music has something to tell us about ourselves and our history.Likewise, the places associated with this music—cities, landmarks, buildings—can teach us about our society and our past, and the powerful and lasting connections between art, architecture, and music.
Countless historic buildings have played a part in the story of music and place: as the sites of premieres, the homes of ensembles, and even as acoustic inspirations. In this list, we’ll take six snapshots of moments in history when music and architecture came together and created something beautiful.
In celebration of World Beard Day (observedevery year on the first Saturday of September), Warren Black, your morning host at All Classical, felt it was time for a retrospective on some great moments in composers’ facial hair. That’s why he teamed up with Emma Riggle, All Classical’s Music Researcher, to assemble this chronological gallery of fine classical beards, bristles, ‘staches, mutton (and/or lamb) chops and more. Here is their hail to the laudablyhirsute mugsof music history, with something for pogonophiles everywhere.
This summer, All Classical Portland welcomes three new Composers in Residence: Lauren McCall, Jasmine Barnes, and Keyla Orozco! These residencies are co-hosted by N M Bodecker Foundation as part of the Recording Inclusivity Initiative, a program designed to change America’s playlist by recording classical works by composers from historically excluded communities.
The station’s three resident composers and their musical works were nominated by community members and selected from nearly 100 submissions!
We recently welcomed Lauren McCall to Portland for her week-long, in-state residency. A composer and educator based in Atlanta, Georgia, Lauren has had compositions performed around North America and in Europe. Watch the video below to hear more from Lauren about her piece “A Spark and a Glimmer,” her sources for inspiration, what she would share with young composers, and more, as she chats with All Classical Portland’s Artist in Residence, flutist Adam Eccleston.
Stay tuned for more behind the scenes footage, and to meet our other two Composers in Residence, Jasmine Barnes and Keyla Orozco, next month!
Recording Inclusivity Initiative: Lauren McCall interviewed by Adam Eccleston
John Pitman, director of Music and Programming at All Classical Portland interviews Portland composer Kenji Bunch about an important world premiere happening a few states away, at the Moab Music Festival in Utah, on September 4.
Inspired by the autobiographical accounts of the incarceration of United States citizens – Japanese-Americans, in World War II – “Lost Freedom: A Memory” is a chamber music piece that is woven with words spoken by a man who, as a boy, was one of those citizens forced from their homes and made to live in desolate camps thousands of miles away from where they had lived: Actor George Takei (Star Trek) will take part in the premiere at Moab Music Festival, reading his own words to Kenji’s newly-composed score. Both Kenji Bunch and George Takei join John for this special Arts Blog conversation about the premiere.
All Classical Portland’s 2019 Artist in Residence Hunter Noack continues to reimagine the concert hall by taking music to the great outdoors through his series In A Landscape. He brings a 9-foot Steinway grand piano on a flatbed trailer to National Parks, urban greenspaces, working ranches, farms, and historical sites for classical music concerts that connect people with each landscape.
As part of CBS’ “A More Perfect Union” series, Jan Crawford shows how his music in the great outdoors is even more timely in the era of COVID. Bravo Hunter!
Warmth, reflection, and adventure: summer can be a time for all of these and more, and classical music has explored the season in all its expressions. From Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons, to Frederick Delius’s Summer Night on the River, the literature is full of favorites perfect for summertime. In thislist, we’d like to share some lesser-known romantic, modern, and contemporary pieces of classical music for your summer playlist.
Tune in to All Classical Portland at 89.9 FM in Portland or worldwide on our web stream to hear sounds of summer like these—and check out All Classical Portland’s Summer Playlist on Spotify for some of the works featured below.
Cover image: Landscape in Summer by Pierre Emmanuel Damoye, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Summer Day
Photograph of Emma Lou Diemer courtesy of the composer’s website
From Suite for Violin and Piano (2008) by Emma Lou Diemer
American composer and organist Emma Lou Diemer (b. 1927) is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara: she taught music theory and composition there for two decades. She composed her three-movement Suite for Violin and Piano for violinist Philip Ficsor, who premiered the work on May 7, 2008, at the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library. “Summer Day,” the work’s opening movement, is cheerful, lyrical, and tonally adventurous.
July
Image of Fanny Hensel courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
From Das Jahr by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel
In 1841, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847) completed a cycle of piano pieces entitled Das Jahr (The Year). Containing a piece for each month of the year, this set was an interdisciplinary work: Hensel’s score prefaces each piece with a quotation from a German poem or hymn, and her husband, artist Wilhelm Hensel, adorned each piece’s opening page with a hand-drawn illustration. Fanny Hensel prefaced her somber music for July with a quote from Friedrich Schiller:
“The meadows thirst For livening dew; people are languishing.”
Summerland
Image of William Grant Still courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
From Three Visions by William Grant Still
William Grant Still (1895-1978) composed his piano suite Three Visions for his wife, Verna Arvey. She played the work’s premiere in 1936 in Los Angeles. Still’s daughter, Judith Anne Still, describes the suite as “the composer’s explanation of what happens to individuals, regardless of skin colour, when their time on earth is over. All are judged. Noble persons, who achieve in spite of obstacles and bigotry, find blessings and advancement in the realm of the spirit.” “Summerland,” the work’s ecstatic second movement, is a vision of heavenly afterlife, heard here in a version for string quartet.
Summer Dreams, Op. 47
Image of Amy Beach courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By Amy Marcy Cheney Beach
Summer Dreams, Op. 47, is a suite of six pieces for piano duet which Amy Beach (1867-1944) composed in 1901. Like Hensel’s Das Jahr, the suite features poetic quotations at the head of each movement: music and literature enjoyed close ties in the minds of many Romantic composers. As the title implies, Summer Dreams explores fantasies. It opens with “The Brownies,” a dance of fairy sprites prefaced by a quote from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The suite continues with a picture of a “Robin Redbreast;” a movement entitled “Twilight,” prefaced with poetry by Beach herself; “Katy-Dids,” with a quote from Walt Whitman; and an “Elfin Tarantelle,” again inspired by Shakespeare. The suite closes with a “Goodnight,” accompanied by lines from Canadian-American poet Agnes Lockhart Hughes.
Summer: Tone Poem for Orchestra, H. 116
Photograph of Frank Bridge courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By Frank Bridge
British composer Frank Bridge (1879-1941) was a multifaceted musician: he was a violist with the English String Quartet, a conductor of both classical and theater orchestras, and he taught composition to a young Benjamin Britten. Summer: A Tone Poem for Orchestra is one of several evocative tone poems Bridge composed on themes from nature and the change of seasons. Bridge completed Summer in 1915, and he conducted the work’s premiere on March 13, 1916 at the Queen’s Hall in London.
Concierto de Estio
Image of Joaquin Rodrigo courtesy of Joaquin-Rodrigo.com
By Joaquin Rodrigo
Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) is well known for his guitar concertos, but his Concierto de estio (Summer Concerto) is for violin. A neobaroque work, Rodrigo’s concerto takes inspiration from the style and structure of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons; that famous set which first appeared in Vivalid’s Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Op. 8, published in 1725. Rodrigo’s 20th-century take on the Vivaldian formula premiered in Lisbon on April 16, 1944, in a performance by violinist Enrique Iniesta and the Orquesta Nacional de España.
Words of the Sun
Image of Zhou Long courtesy of White Snake Projects
By Zhou Long
Zhou Long (b. 1953) is a Pulitzer-prize winning Chinese-American composer, who was educated at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and Columbia University. Dr. Zhou is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance. Words of the Sun is an exquisite work for unaccompanied chorus, setting a poem by Chinese poet Ai Qing. The choir Chanticleer commissioned the work, and it was published in 2002.
A Summer Day
Image of Lena McLin courtesy of African Diaspora Music Project
By Lena Johnson McLin
The Rev. Dr. Lena Johnson McLin (b. 1928) is a composer, a minister of music, and a legendary music teacher in the Chicago public school system. She has been called the “woman who launched a thousand careers.” Just a few of her famous students include Aretha Franklin, R. Kelly, Jennifer Hudson, and Metropolitan Opera baritone Mark Rucker. McLin’s compositions fuse gospel and classical styles, as can be heard in her joyful work for piano solo, A Summer Day.
Summer Shimmers Across the Glass of Green Ponds
Photograph of Jennifer Higdon by Andrew Bogard, courtesy of the composer’s website
From Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams by Jennifer Higdon
American composer Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) composed Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams, a five-movement work for string quartet and piano left hand, in 1999. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society commissioned the work, and Higdon dedicated it to Gary Graffman and the Lark Quartet. In her program notes, Higdon draws a parallel between her eponymous poet and the piano within the quintet texture:
“What kind of dreams would a poet have? Because they presumably work in a world of imagination, would their dreams be different than what others might dream? Or are we all poets in our own dream worlds? The poet might be the main character or s/he might also be just a part of the fabric, observing from the sidelines. This also represents the pianist’s role within a piano quintet, prominent but also just part of the story.”
Higdon goes on to describe the second movement, “Summer Shimmers Across the Glass of Green Ponds:” “…here, the stillness is glasslike, as the dreamer sits by a pond, on a Summer’s eve, at twilight, watching the float, which does not even jiggle in the water, at the end of a fishing pole…even the fish are still.”
The Austin, Texas-based choir, Conspirare, give voice to poets and writers from across the spectrum of nationality and gender in their latest recording, The Singing Guitar. Founder and director, Craig Hella Johnson, commissioned new works from composers such as Reena Esmail, Nico Muhly, and Kile Smith that highlight the words of the Sufi poet Hafiz, pioneer and indigenous women in the 1880s; and of the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore.
Giving “The Singing Guitar” an added literal and figurative quality are no fewer than three guitar quartets: the Los Angeles, Texas and Austin quartets are heard most fully in How Little You Are, by Nico Muhly. Cellist Douglas Harvey joins Conspirare for The Dawn’s Early Light, and Craig Hella Johnson’s The Song that I Came to Sing. Listen to John Pitman’s conversation with Johnson to learn more.
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, cellist John-Henry Crawford has already made strides in the field of classical music, in one case as First Prize winner of the 2019 International Carlos Prieto Competition; and more recently with this debut release, Dialogo. Crawford chose the title after the unaccompanied cello work by Hungarian composer, György Ligeti. In it, the cello portrays both voices, of the composer and the woman he’d fallen for, hence the “dialogue” depicted in the music.
Mr. Crawford also shares the fascinating history of the cello he plays, which has been in his family for over a century. His grandfather, Dr. Robert Popper, saw “the writing on the wall” as Nazism was on the rise in Austria, made a decision that saved both his life and kept the instrument safe. Crawford shares the full story, as well as insight into the cello sonatas of Brahms and Shostakovich, in his conversation with John Pitman. Love seems to flow through each of the pieces that this American cellist plays and makes the voice of the cello a true treasure, rescued from almost certain destruction.
