Soul of America

Black History Month Concert

Ira Spaulding, Baritone

John Ferguson, Pianist

Program to be selected from:

 "The Life of Christ "     Roland Hayes

Prepare Me One Body

Sister Mary Had-a But One Child

Little Boy, How Old Are You?

Live a-Humble

Hear the Lambs a-Cryin'?

The Last Supper

They Led My Lord Away

He Never Said a Mumblin' Word

Did You Hear When Jesus Rose

Were You There?

African-American Art Songs

 Minstrel Man     Margaret Bonds
Compensation     Charles Lloyd
For You There is no Song    Leslie Adams
A Death Song     Howard Swanson

African-American Spirituals:

Fire!       Arr. Hall Johnson
City Called Heaven     Traditional
Hold On!      Arr. Ira Spaulding
Motherless Child     Arr. John Carter
He’s Got the Whole World    arr. Margaret Bonds

Ragtime and Popular Piano Styles

Maple Leaf Rag     Scott Joplin
Rhapsody in Ragtime    Eubie Blake
Dizzy Fingers     Zez Confrey

Contemporary American Composers

The Serpent’s Kiss     William Bolcom

 American Opera - Excerpts from “Porgy and Bess” by George Gershwin

Summertime
A Woman is a Sometime Thing
I Got Plenty of Nuttin’
It Ain’t Necessarily So

Program Notes

African-American Spirituals

Hall Johnson, Roland Hayes and Margaret Bonds are among America’s foremost African-American composers and arrangers. These arrangements of traditional spirituals reflect the pain and suffering of the African-Americans brought to the United States as slaves. The songs also reflect the belief in better times to come in the afterlife as well as hidden messages of the ‘underground railroad’ – the passage to freedom in the north.

Three Ragtime Pieces

Ragtime is perhaps the first truly American music to emerge from the melting pot. It can be described as the meeting of Europe and Africa on American soil – the popular music of Europe (Military Marches, Salon Music, etc.) is transformed by syncopated African rhythms into a delightful new sound. The first ragtime composers were the children of African-Americans freed from slavery after the Civil War and most were born between New Orleans and St Louis along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Ragtime quickly developed into Dixieland and Jazz and can be seen as the musical forefather of almost all of today’s popular music in America.

Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” of 1898 was his first big ragtime success. Joplin was one of  the first African-American composers to have received classical training and he went on to write not only dozens of ragtime hits, but also an opera,  “Treemonisha”.

Eubie Blake was born in Baltimore and lived to be 100 years old. His long musical career included association with not only Scott Joplin, but also later in life, contemporary composers such as William Bolcom. His ‘Rhapsody in Ragtime’ was composed at the age of 95 at the request of William Bolcom.

Zez Confrey was typical of the New York school of white ragtime composers often referred to as “Tin Pan Alley’ or “Novelty” composers. Dizzy Fingers, one of his best-known works, is a ragtime ‘moto perpetuo’ .

The Serpent’s Kiss William Bolcom (b. 1938)

The eclecticism at the heart of American music takes a vital new twist in the work of contemporary composer, William Bolcom, for whom non-specialization has become a raison d'être. A composer of songs, operas, and instrumental works, a pianist of distinction who frequently accompanies his wife mezzo-soprano Joan Morris in recital, an artist who has worked in a variety of idioms from classical to cabaret, Bolcom is a fresh voice on the American music scene. Bolcom studied at Stanford University, with Darius Milhaud in 1958 and with Olivier Messiaen in Paris afterwards before settling in New York in the 1960's, where he immersed himself for a time in the ragtime of Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake. Since 1973 Bolcom has taught at the University of Michigan.

The Serpent’s Kiss is from a cycle of Ragtime-inspired piano pieces telling the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Bolcom incorporates the sounds of early Rock ‘n Roll, Broadway (quotes from West Side Story and South Pacific), tap dancing music and silent film music into his own unique version of the Old Testament story.

George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
Gershwin’s folk opera,‘Porgy and Bess’, ranks as one of his most complex and popular compositions. The plot turns around daily life of the Gullah living on Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina. Where the folk and popular musical idioms of the South – jazz, blues, spirituals, traditional drumming – combine with the increasingly sophisticated musical language Gershwin began to develop in the 1930’s after contact with Arnold Schoenberg and Maurice Ravel.

 ‘Jassbo Brown Blues’ functions as the overture to Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess.
While Jassbo Brown plays, the characters in the opera sway to the biting syncopations and quartal harmonies of this gem of the Gershwin piano repertoire.

The opening aria, ‘Summertime’, is a blues lullaby sung by Clara as she tries to get her child to go to sleep on a hot summer’s night. “A Woman is a Sometime Thing’ is Jake’s comical response to Clara’s Summertime, telling the baby to never trust what a woman tells him as he becomes a grown man.  ‘I Got Plenty of Nuttin’, is in the style of a minstrel song accompanied by banjo and the great love duet.
Roland Hayes – The Life of Christ (1887-1977) was a famous black American lyric tenor and composer. His song recitals gained him an international reputation. However, racial barriers excluded him from the opera career for which he would have been well suited. Hayes was born in Curryville, Georgia, and attended Fisk University. He gave his first concert in 1916 and later appeared with leading orchestras in Europe and America. Hayes won the 1924 Spingarn Medal.Biography Text
As a Tenor Roland Hayes was acknowledged as a masterful interpreter of both classical songs and black spirituals. In a career that spanned more than thirty years, he performed throughout the United States and Europe. Hayes shattered the color barrier in the world of classical music, becoming one of the highest paid musicians of his time and paving the way for later African American singers. Summing up Hayes's career, Marva Griffen Carter wrote in the Black Perspective in Music: "Hayes's life of almost ninety years reveals a remarkable story of a man who went from the plantation to the palace, performing before kings and queens, with the finest international and American orchestras, in segregated communities before blacks and whites alike....
The song cycle, The Life of Christ, tells the story of Jesus’ life through the use of traditional Negro Spirituals in a classical Art Song arrangement.

Program Notes by John Ferguson  www.americanvoices.org