Pianist Awadagin Pratt makes his NWS debut performing the world premiere of Alvin Singleton's Time Past, Time Future. This special chamber music concert also features Dvořák's beloved Wind Serenade  and works for brass quintet.

 

NWS thanks its 2020-21 donors.

 

Program

Alvin Singleton

Time Past, Time Future for Piano and String Orchestra (2020; world premiere)
Approximate duration: 13 minutes

The stylistic diversity of Alvin Singleton’s music is a product of his tremendous receptivity to different inputs, a quality that was already active when he was growing up in Brooklyn, equally captivated by arranging charts for his own jazz ensemble and devouring the symphonies of Mahler. After completing degrees at New York University and Yale, Singleton used a Fulbright Scholarship in Italy to launch a career in Europe, a time of great growth and exploration that led him to acknowledge, “I learned more about what it is to be an American living abroad than I did in America.” An offer to serve as composer-in-residence for the Atlanta Symphony brought him back to the United States in 1985, and Atlanta remains his home base for a career marked by major performances and residencies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Time Past, Time Future was commissioned by The Art of the Piano Foundation for Awadagin Pratt. In a program note that accompanies the score, Singleton’s colleague Carman Moore writes, “Dynamic contrast, traditionally used to spice up and influence music with variety, here becomes the principal theme and engine of the piece, alternating back and forth in the work. Big, small, crazy-loud, distantly-soft, coming and going, taking over, but all the time achieving a balanced musical effect… Time Past, Time Future is a work of extremes that seeks and ultimately finds balance. Even the title is a balancing act.”

Adolphus Hailstork

Fanfare on "Amazing Grace" (2003)
Approximate duration: 4 minutes

As he celebrates his 80th birthday this April, Adolphus Hailstork is proving that he is still in the prime of his musical life, adding major new works to a substantial catalog that stretches back to the 1960s. During his student years at Howard University, Manhattan School of Music and Michigan State University, Hailstork gained notice for his finely crafted scores for large and small ensembles, including a master’s thesis work performed by the Baltimore Symphony. A succession of teaching posts brought him to Virginia, where he joined the faculty of Norfolk State University and then Old Dominion University. He still serves as Professor of Music and Eminent Scholar, and current projects such as his Fourth Symphony—a tribute to George Floyd—show his continued engagement with concert music that reflects his perspective on Black life in America.

The Fanfare on “Amazing Grace” that Hailstork composed in 2003 recently had its most high-profile performance to date, when “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band played it as part of the festivities surrounding the inauguration of President Biden. The melodic source material, long associated with the hymn “Amazing Grace,” began as an anonymous folk tune that originated in Appalachia, where it was adopted as a hymn melody known as “New Britain.” Hailstork’s treatment weaves fragments of that soaring theme within bright and festive fanfare figures from the brass and timpani. 

Tania León

Saoko for Brass Quintet (2009)
Approximate duration: 3 minutes

The 24-year-old Tania León left her native Cuba in 1967 with dreams of living in Paris and touring as a piano virtuoso. Immigration restrictions led her to New York instead, where her talents as a dance accompanist got her recruited to serve as music director of the newly formed Dance Theater of Harlem. She branched out into composing and conducting, and over time she found ways to bring her own Cuban heritage into her music, especially after she made her first return visit to Cuba in 1979.

The score for her 2009 brass quintet Saoko offers three definitions for the title, a Spanish noun pronounced “sa-OH-koh”:

1. The name given to a traditional mixed drink on the island of Cuba, consisting of rum or aguardiente with coconut water.
   
   
2. An idiomatic expression in the Spanish-speaking cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America:

                Tiene Saoko! It has great taste!

                Tiene Saoko! It has duende! (a genie)

                Tiene Saoko! It has soul!

3. A musical work in which grooves emerge like the brief patterns formed when stirring a drink. As the sonic concoction swirls toward its conclusion, the players let out a “Saoko!” celebratory toast.

François Couperin

Concert royal No. 2 in D major (c. 1722)
Approximate duration: 12 minutes

Born into a famous family of musicians, François Couperin distinguished himself as “Couperin the Great” through his work as a keyboard player for both the royal court of Louis XIV and one of Paris’ major churches, where he held the organist post once held by his uncle and father. Taking advantage of the emerging market for published sheet music, Couperin secured a royal license in 1713 to begin printing his influential compositions, including four books of harpsichord music containing over 200 pieces.

In his third book of harpsichord pieces, published in 1722, Couperin included a series of four works labeled as Concerts royaux. These “royal concerts” were structured as dance suites in the typical French style, each beginning with a prelude. Couperin wrote the music on treble and bass staves and specified that they could either be played by harpsichord alone, or by an ensemble with treble instruments (flute, violin and/or oboe) sharing the top line and bass instruments (cello, viola da gamba and/or bassoon) sharing the bottom. The second concert is distinctive in that only the Allemande references a specific dance style, in this case a fast “German” dance. It is followed by a “tender air” and an “air with fugue”—air being a general term for a tuneful song. The final selection plays with echo figures, using quiet repetitions of phrase endings to approximate that natural phenomenon.

Antonín Dvořák

Serenade in D major for Winds, Op. 44 (1878)
Approximate duration: 23 minutes

Dvořák composed the Serenade for Winds in 1878, the same year the Slavonic Dances became the Czech composer’s first international hit. As in his previous Serenade for Strings from 1875, the title referenced those light-hearted works from Mozart’s time that functioned as entertainment at evening gatherings.

Dvořák’s Serenade opens with march-like music, a fitting tribute to the outdoor origins of the wind ensemble, which traditionally entered and exited a performance playing a march. The minuet that follows is full of playful echoes and melodic counter-lines, making the most of a quick descending motive in the outer sections and an even quicker shaking gesture in the contrasting trio section.

The Andante con moto third movement rolls out beautiful, patient melodies over a lively accompaniment. Operating in the middle ground for most of the movement, the three horns almost steal the show with their infectious off-beats and regal commentaries. The finale features overtly “Slavonic” music, showing off Dvořák’s most marketable asset during that early stage of his international career.

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.