A Mighty Chinful: Great Moments in Composer Facial Hair

In celebration of World Beard Day (observed every 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 laudably hirsute mugs of music history, with something for pogonophiles everywhere.

Get to know Composer in Residence Lauren McCall

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!

John Pitman Review: Kenji Bunch debuts “Lost Freedom” with George Takei

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.

Learn more about he Moab Music Festival

Kenji playing his earlier piece, Minidoka:

Our 2019 Artist in Residence Hunter Noack on CBS This Morning

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!

Check out the video below, and learn more at inalandscape.org

Classical Sounds of Summer

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 this list, 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

John Pitman Review: Conspirare’s The Singing Guitar

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.

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Dialogo: Debut by cellist John-Henry Crawford

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.

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Music Exploring Queer Experiences

This Pride Month, we would like to share with you a short playlist of 20th and 21st century music exploring queer experiences. In this list, you’ll find songs, operas, and a symphony: some by LGBTQI+ composers, some exploring LGBTQI+ characters. You can also listen to a similar selection of music in this article’s companion playlist on Spotify.

Juneteenth at All Classical Portand

Saturday, June 19th was the 156th anniversary of the day news of emancipation finally reached the westernmost area of the former Confederate states in Galveston Bay, Texas. On All Classical Portland, we’re honoring this Juneteenth with music by African-American composers, and other composers of African heritage. Here are a few of the works you can look forward to hearing this Juneteenth.

Dream Variation

By Margaret Bonds

American composer Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), a student of Florence Price and William Levi Dawson, was particularly prolific as a composer of vocal music. “Dream Variation,” from her cycle Three Dream Portraits, is a setting of the poem “Dream Variations” from The Dream Keeper, a 1932 collection by her friend and frequent collaborator Langston Hughes. Hughes and Bonds also collaborated on a musical, a cantata, and many more art songs.

Umoja: Anthem of Unity

By Valerie Coleman

The orchestral version of Umoja, by contemporary composer Valerie Coleman, was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and premiered in 2019. In her program note, Coleman explains that “Umoja” is “the Swahili word for Unity and the first principle of the African Diaspora holiday Kwanzaa.” Of the orchestral version, she adds, “This version honors the simple melody that ever was, but is now a full exploration into the meaning of freedom and unity. Now more than ever, Umoja has to ring as a strong and beautiful anthem for the world we live in today.”

Mephisto Masque

By Edmond Dédé

Edmond Dédé (c.1827/9-1901) was born in New Orleans but emigrated to France to attend the Paris Conservatory and build a career as a composer and conductor. He composed Mephisto Masque in 1899, shortly after a concert tour in America, during which he’d faced much greater racial prejudice than he was used to in France. Mephisto Masque is a satirical piece with a prominent part for mirlitons, or kazoos – Dédé dedicated this snarky piece “aux Bigotopgonistes,” a pun which can mean either “to kazooists” or “to bigots.”

Violin Concerto in G minor, Op. 80

By Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was one of the first composers of color to achieve international fame in classical music. He composed his Violin Concerto, Op. 80, for one of several visits to the United States. American violinist Maud Powell played the work’s premiere in Norfolk, Connecticut in July of 1912, less than three months before the composer’s untimely death in September of that year.

Negro Folk Symphony

By William Levi Dawson

William Levi Dawson (1899-1990) was an American composer and teacher. During his long tenure at Tuskegee University, he transformed the Tuskegee Choir into an ensemble of international acclaim. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony premiered in 1934 in a performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. Dawson’s program note from the premiere explains, “The themes are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals. In this composition, the composer has employed three themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother’s knee.”

Treemonisha: Act 3 Finale: “A Real Slow Drag”

By Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin (1867/1868-1917) is well-known as the King of Ragtime; he was also one of the first African-American composers to write operas. His second opera, Treemonisha (1910) is a magical tale celebrating the power of education for African-American women and men. The opera remained unperformed during Joplin’s lifetime. In 1976, a year after the belated professional premiere of Treemonisha, Joplin was a awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Mother Nozipo

By Dumisani Maraire

Zimbabwean composer and mbira virtuoso Dumisani Maraire (1944-1999) spent much of his career teaching ethnomusicology at universities in Washington State, and introducing the Pacific Northwest to African musics. He composed Mother Nozipo, a musical tribute to his mother, in 1990 for the Kronos Quartet. The work is scored for string quartet and percussion, and Maraire appears as the percussionist in the work’s recording, from the Kronos Quartet’s 1992 album Pieces of Africa.

Dancing Barefoot in the Rain

By Nkeiru Okoye

Nkeiru Okoye is a contemporary American composer who grew up in New York and Nigeria. In 2020, she became the inaugural recipient of the Florence Price Award for Composition. “Dancing Barefoot in the Rain” comes from Okoye’s African Sketches, a four-movement piano suite completed in 2008. The suite has found a place in the international repertoire of contemporary concert pianists.

Symphony no. 3 in c minor

By Florence Price

American composer Florence Price (1887-1953) is perhaps best known as the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra: her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, which the Chicago Symphony premiered in 1933. She composed her Third Symphony in 1940, for the Detroit Civic Orchestra, a branch of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Music Project. Eleanor Roosevelt visited Chicago in 1940 and heard a rehearsal of Price’s symphony. In an article recounting her visit, she praised both the WPA orchestra and the composer, saying, “They played two movements in a new symphony by Florence Price, one of the few women to write symphonic music.”

Afro-American Symphony

By William Grant Still

William Grant Still (1895-1978) is often called the “Dean of African American Composers,” and with good reason: he was the first African-American to have an opera premiered by a major opera company; he was the first African-American to conduct a major American orchestra; and in 1931, his Symphony No. 1 in A-flat Major, “Afro-American,” became the first symphony by an African-American composer premiered by a major orchestra. Built on a single blues-inflected motif that appears in the first movement, Still’s symphony explores African-American history in four movements, which he entitled “Longing,” “Sorrow,” “Humor,” and “Aspiration.”

Nancy Ives x AUXART

In a continued effort to support collaborative relationships between artists in the local community, on Saturday, June 12th, All Classical Portland facilitated an artistic collaboration between visual artist Philip Krohn and cellist Nancy Ives.

The AUXART sculpture and sound work grew from Philip Krohn’s 9 week residency in Portland’s new creative space Building 5. AUXART is a play on the idea of using an installation space and large scale structural sculpture to amplify various creative inputs across artistic disciplines. As an exclamation point and project finale Nancy Ives played her cello from the heart of the sculpture. Nancy’s performance combined the work of Bach and works of her own composition she felt were harmonically tuned to the spirit and feeling of the sculptural environment.

Nancy Ives’ program included —

Prelude from Suite for cello and Vocal Obligato
J.S. Bach: Prelude from Suite in G Major for Violoncello Solo
Nancy Ives: Allemande from Suite for cello and Vocal Obligato
J.S. Bach: Allemande from Suite in G Major for Voloncello Solo
Nancy Ives: Sarabande! from Suite for Cello and Vocal Obligato
J.S. Bach: Sarabande! from Suite in G Major for Voloncello Solo
Celilo Fisherman by Nancy Ives, poem by Ed Edmo (used with permission)
On the Root Glacier by Nancy Ives