"VARIATIONS ON AMERICA"  for Voice and Piano

Ira Spaulding, Baritone
John Ferguson, Pianist

Traditional African-American Spirituals
I Got Shoes Traditional arr. Hall Johnson
Witness Traditional arr. Hall Johnson
Little Boy arr. Roland Hayes
Fire arr. Hall Johnson
He's Got the Whole World in his Hands 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

Hollywood and Broadway
Slap That Bass George Gershwin
Send in the Clowns "A Little Night Music" Stephen Sondheim
Maria "West Side Story" Leonard Bernstein
Old Man River, From "Showboat" Jerome Kern

INTERMISSION

American Art Song
Songs My Mother Taught Me Charles Ives
For You There Is No Song Leslie Adams
From' Old American Songs' Arr. Aaron Copland
- The Boatman's Song  
- Long Time Ago  
- I Bought Me a Cat  

19th Century American Piano Music
The Union Louis-Moreau Gottschalk

Piano Music by George Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue George Gershwin

American Opera - Excerpts from "Porgy and Bess" by George Gershwin
Jazzbo Brown Blues  
Summertime  
A Woman is a Sometime Thing  
I Got Plenty of Nuttin'  

 PROGRAM NOTES 'Variations on America' - Duo, Voice and Piano

Ira Spaulding, Baritone
John Ferguson, Pianist

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.
 

Broadway
The Broadway show emerged as an art form in the 1920's, a period of unbridled growth and optimism in America. New York was a vibrant clash of cultures, construction and intense pursuit of the American Dream for millions of recent immigrants. Perhaps no other American composer embodied this era better than George Gershwin whose music reflected Broadway's unique combination of European, African-American and Eastern European Jewish musical influences.

Slap That Bass, from "Shall We Dance", was written for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and suggests that jazz is the solution to a messy world of politics and taxes.
 
Send in the Clowns
Stephen Sondheim (b. 1931) is recognized as America's most revered contemporary Broadway composer. This song is probably Sondheim´s biggest "hit". It is sung by the actress Desiree Armfeldt, the heroine of Sondheim´s modern operetta A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, based on Ingmar Bergmann´s film SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT. After having held her great love, Frederic, "on ice" for nearly 20 years, she finally decides to settle down with him, only to find that he has recently married a very young girl. In this song she regretfully says her goodbye to him.
 
Maria
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was one of the most important musical figures of the second half of the last century. As the most successful conductor of his time, he was often torn between the instant adulation his conducting career brought him, and his wish to attain immortality as a composer. Though Bernstein was sometimes not taken seriously by the classical establishment, he personified the romance and joy of music to several generations of music lovers. Bernstein´s most influential mentor and lifelong friend was the American composer Aaron Copland. It was Copland who encouraged Bernstein to turn his energies to conducting. He provided enormous emotional- and financial-support and offered invaluable advice to Bernstein the budding composer.
WEST SIDE STORY remains the most unequivocally successful of all Bernstein´s stage works. Based on Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet', the musical tell the story of love and violence between rival gangs in New York's West side neighborhoods. In 'Maria', Tony is still in the thrall of having met his new love.

Old Man River is from Jerome Kern's groundbreaking musical 'Showboat', one of the first American musicals to provide a realistic portrait of race relations and daily life in the American South. In this song, the serene majesty of the Mississippi river is contrasted with the difficult life of African-Americans recently freed from slavery.
 

American Classical Composer
Charles Ives
Charles Ives (1874 - 1953) was a mostly self-taught composer whose main occupation was as an insurance salesman. Ives loved to experiment with musical non-conformity and the use of 'street tunes' and gospel hymns in serious music. In the late 19th century Ives was already experimenting with quarter-tones, unusual harmonies and 'musical humanism' based on the Transcendentalist philosophers and poets - Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. Based on Czech folk poetry, 'Songs My Mother Taught Me' is only one of his many vocal masterpieces.
 
Old American Songs
Aaron Copland is considered the most distinguished 20th century American composer. In his two cycles of 'Old American Songs' (1950), Copland arranged traditional folk, religious and minstrel songs of the early 19th century thereby providing a diversified portrait of America itself. 'The Boatman's Song' was sung by workers on ships along the Ohio river and 'Long Time Ago' is a typical 19th century sentimental ballad in the style of Stephen Foster. 'I Bought Me a Cat' is a children's folk song from Oklahoma describing all of the animals of the barnyard.
 
The Union - Louis-Moreau Gottschalk
The first American composer to establish important connections with Latin America, Gottschalk (1829- 1869) was born in New Orleans, the cradle of most innovation in 19th and early 20th century American music. His mother was a French Créole and his father an Englishman. Sent to study at the Paris Conservatory at an early age, he came into contact with Chopin and Liszt who influenced his development of a highly individual 'American exotic' musical style incorporating the Créole, African, French and Latin American influences of his childhood in New Orleans.

While 'The Union' displays the influence of Franz Liszt, many other works of Gottschalk display the impression made upon Gottschalk by Frederic Chopin during his stay in Paris. Gottschalk composed 'The Union' in 1862 during the height of the American Civil War. As a Southerner who was most active performing in the North, he felt obliged to show his sympathies with the North during tragic conflict. A vivid montage of the Civil War, the opening section recreates the clash of battle, which gives away to a melancholy version of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' followed by a triumphal 'Hail Columbia' and 'Yankee Doodle'.
 

The Music of George Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue
In Gershwin, the public saw the breezy, party-going life of a successful Broadway composer, while his more serious and inquisitive side was little known. With the premiere of the Rhapsody in Blue, new vistas revealed themselves to Gershwin in the world of the concert hall. It was in this period, that the diverse threads of his background and youthful experiences on Broadway wove together to create a new sound in American music.

Written on a commission by the Paul Whiteman jazz band, The Rhapsody in Blue was an entirely new departure in the world of American concert music. Written as a concerto for piano and jazz orchestra, the Rhapsody was one of the first American works to successfully integrate the sounds of New Orleans and Harlem with the compositional musical forms of Tchaikovsky and Liszt.
 
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.