This Independence Day, All Classical Portland is commemorating the 246th anniversary of the passage of the Declaration of Independence, by celebrating American composers and musicians on the air.
ON AIR – Throughout the day on July 4th, All Classical Portland’s programming will include works written and performed by American composers, soloists, orchestras, conductors, and musicians.
FRIDAY HAPPY HOUR – On Friday, July 1, 2022 at 5:00 PM PT, hosts Warren Black and Christa Wessel featured new takes on classics by George Frideric Handel, including his Music for the Royal Fireworks Suite. Listen to the episode on demand until July 15, 2022.
SATURDAY MATINEE – On Saturday, July 2, 2022, host Warren Black shared music by American composers, and musicians, including a selection from William Grant Still’s The American Scene. Originally composed in 1957 for the NBC Radio Network, Still’s set of orchestral suites depict different regions of the United States.
THE SCORE – Host Edmund Stone celebrated the birth of the United States of America on The Score on Saturday, July 2, 2022, with music from Lincoln, Born on the Fourth of July,Remember the Titans, and more. Listen to the episode on demand until July 16, 2022.
Five “Can’t Miss” American Pieces for Independence Day
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide
Bernstein‘s exuberant Overture to Candide was originally written in 1956 to accompany a then-unsuccessful Broadway musical. After countless revivals without the composer’s involvement, Bernstein decided to revisit the work in 1988 to produce his ultimate version based on a revival by the Scottish Opera.
The Overture features a dazzling display of musical sparks and fanfare.
Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1
Price‘s iconic work was the first symphony by a Black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. Completed in 1932, her piece was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Frederick Stock in June 1933.
The symphony reflects Price’s experience as a woman of color in the post-Civil War South, and incorporates elements of African-American spirituals, church hymns, and American folk music.
Portrait of Florence Price by G. Nelidoff, courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Aaron Copland’s El Salón México
Copland‘s symphonic El Salón México was written during 1932 and completed in 1933. The work was inspired by the composer’s first trip to Mexico, and its melodies drew on those found on sheet music Copland purchased during the trip.
While visting Mexico, Copland’s friend Carlos Chávez took him to a nightclub called “El Salón México.” The outing inspired Copland to incorporate elements of dance hall and the country’s complexities into his new piece.
Jeffrey Tyzik’s Fantasy on American Themes
GRAMMY Award winner Jeff Tyzik is one of America’s most innovative and sought-after pops conductors. This Independence Day, you’ll hear the Oregon Symphony Pops conductor’s Fantasy on American Themes.
Featuring cascading strings and rhythmic brass and woodwinds, the piece incorporates music from classics such as Yankee Doodle, America the Beautiful, and When Johnny Comes Marching Home.
Image courtesy of Jeff Tyzik’s website.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever
It would not be the Fourth of July without Sousa‘s patriotic march! Written in 1896, The Stars and Stripes Forever was named the official National March of the United States of America by Congress in 1987.
Sousa wrote the memorable march on Christmas Day while vacationing in Europe with his wife, when he became homesick for the USA.
All Classical Portland Program Director John Pitman shares his latest conversation with American cellist John-Henry Crawford. Corazón is Crawford’s second release and reflects the cellist’s own experiences in performing in Mexico and Central America, as well as visiting family members there, such as his brother who is a member of the Peace Corps.
Corazón reunites Crawford with his musical partner, pianist Victor Santiago Asunción in familiar and iconic works by composers including Manuel Ponce, Astor Piazzolla, Heitor Villa-Lobos; as well as some lesser-known composers including Egberto Gismonti. The album reveals the broad range of styles, including popular pieces such as Estrellita, as well as the “edgy” longform work, Le Grand Tango.
Hear John-Henry shares stories of his time spent abroad, learning the languages, customs, culture and yes, food, of the countries of these composers.
2022 marks the 157th anniversary of the emancipation of enslaved African Americansin former Confederate states. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was more than two years since the Proclamation had been issued in 1863, but it took until that day for word of freedom to reach every state.
Beginning in 1986 in Galveston, celebrations of freedom became a tradition on June 19, also known as Juneteenth, Freedom Day, or Jubilee Day (a name inspired by a holy year in the calendar cycle of the Hebrew Scriptures, when prisoners were released, debts forgiven, and slaves freed).
All Classical Portland is reflecting on and commemorating this day with music by African American composers and musicians of African heritage. Tune in at 89.9 FM in Portland or anywhere in the world via the live player on our website.
Here are a few of the musicians you will hear this Juneteenth on Sunday Brunch with Suzanne Nance, throughout the day, and year round on All Classical Portland.
In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry David Thoreau described friendship:
“They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.”
So much beautiful music has come to the world through the mutual encouragement of friends. In this post, we will explore some historic friendships in classical music, when great artists were kind to each other’s dreams.
Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel
Johann Christian Bach, portrait (1776) by Thomas Gainsborough. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Carl Friedrich Abel, portrait (c. 1777) by Thomas Gainsborough. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782) was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and his second wife Anna Magdalena Wülken. J.C. Bach had a lot of older brothers and sisters, but as a young person he also found time to make friends with Carl Friedrich Abel (1723-1787). Carl’s father, Christian Ferdinand Abel, worked with J.S. Bach at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen. The fathers were such good friends that J.S. Bach was godfather to C.F. Abel’s daughter.
When J.C. Bach moved to London to write opera in 1762, he found his friend Carl Friedrich Abel already established there as a bass viol player. In 1764 the two became roommates, and soon they teamed up professionally as well: in 1765 they began a concert series that became known as the Bach-Abel Concerts. Public, ticketed concerts were still a new idea at the time: in the 18th century, most professional music happened at aristocratic courts, opera houses, or places of worship. Bach and Abel shared the duties of directing and performing their series of ten to fifteen concerts each year. The Bach-Abel Concerts were so successful that they continued until 1781.
J.C. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in E-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 5. Bach performed compositions like this at the Bach-Abel Concerts.
Felix Mendelssohn and Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz, portrait (1832) by Émile Signol. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Felix Mendelssohn, portrait (1830) by Eckart Kleßmann. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
If you were searching 1830s Europe for likely musical friends, you might not expect to find the reserved classicist Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) spending time with a flamboyant, experimental Romantic like Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). However, the two hit it off when they met in Rome in 1831. Soon afterward, Berlioz wrote to friends in Paris,
“I have met Mendelssohn. He is a fine fellow, and his execution is on a par with musical genius, which is saying a great deal. All that I have heard of his music has charmed me; I firmly believe that he is one of the greatest musical intellects of the day.”
Berlioz goes on to write of their odd-couple Italian tourism. Mendelssohn showed Berlioz ancient Roman ruins: Berlioz, the modernist, was unimpressed. Berlioz poked fun at religion, and pious Mendelssohn was shocked. Despite their differences, they clearly enjoyed their time together: Berlioz summed it up, “I owe him the only endurable moments I enjoyed during my stay in Rome.”
Berlioz and Mendelssohn saw each other again at a concert in Leipzig in 1843. Berlioz wrote that Mendelssohn was “charming, attentive, excellent–in a word, a good fellow all round. We exchanged batons in token of friendship.” Felix’s sister, composer Fanny Hensel, described this baton exchange in her diary, hilariously demonstrating that the two friends remained as opposite as ever:
“In return for Felix’s pretty light stick of whalebone covered with white leather [Berlioz] sent an enormous cudgel of lime-tree with the bark on.”
Felix Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, composed after his 1831 visit to Italy.
Clara Schumann and Josephine Lang
Portrait of Josephine Lang, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Clara Schumann in 1853, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Josephine Lang (1815-1880) was a German pianist, singer, and composer. She had the admiration and friendship of many contemporary musicians. Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel both admired her work, and Mendelssohn gave her theory lessons. Robert Schumann also praised Lang’s work in his music journal, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.
Lang taught and composed throughout her life, but her need for work became dire in 1856, when her husband passed away. She was left with only her music career to support her children, while suffering from chronic illness herself. One friend who lent a hand was another single parent, Clara Schumann (1819-1896). Schumann’s husband Robert had died in the same year, leaving her with a large family of children to support. While Clara Schumann was renewing her career as a piano soloist, she found time to arrange a benefit concert for Josephine Lang, in which she performed Lang’s compositions, and helped invigorate Lang’s career as a teacher and published composer.
“Arabesque” for piano, by Josephine Lang
Johannes Brahms and Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II and Johannes Brahms at Bad Ischl in 1894, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Music connected Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) to quite a few artistic friends over the course of his life, including some composers of lighter music than his own. Here he is in 1894, photographed at the spa town of Bad Ischl in Austria with Johann Strauss II (1825-1899). Strauss had a villa in Bad Ischl, where he often invited Brahms to parties.
On one of these occasions, Strauss’s stepdaughter asked Brahms to autograph her fan, and on it he wrote the opening bars of Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, with the inscription, “unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms!”
Brahms has a reputation as a very serious composer, but clearly he wasn’t too dour to admire the infectiously charming music of the Waltz King.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ0fKOpow14
The Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss II
Henry Thacker Burleigh and Friends
H.T. Burleigh in the 1910s, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Antonín Dvořák in 1901, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in 1905, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In 1892, Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) came to the United States to teach at the new National Conservatory of Music in New York. Arts patron Jeannette Thurber had founded the conservatory, and hired Dvořák, because she wanted to encourage the growth of an American musical style. She felt that Dvořák had done so well establishing Czech national music that he could also help American composers find their voice.
Dvořák quickly concluded that African American music was some of the finest material America had to offer. To learn about spirituals, Dvořák turned to Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949), a student at the National Conservatory. Burleigh had learned a vast repertoire of spirituals from his maternal grandmother, who had formerly been enslaved. He recalled the melodies for Dvořák in his beautiful baritone voice, and Dvořák was inspired to create a theme reminiscent of spirituals in his Symphony No. 9, From the New World. Dvořák encouraged Burleigh to create his own compositions based on spirituals, and Burleigh went on to write a classic library of spiritual arrangements for voice and piano, as well as original songs and chamber works.
Burleigh continued to build musical bridges throughout his distinguished career. For more than fifty years, he was a soloist at St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York, where he overcame initial objections because of his color, becoming a beloved and influential musical leader. He also supported the work of English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), accompanying him as a baritone soloist during Coleridge-Taylor’s 1910 tour of the United States.
“Deep River,” arranged for solo voice and piano by H.T. Burleigh
Igor Stravinsky in 1961, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Composer Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was an influential 20th-century modernist, whose music drew on both the Western avant-garde and traditional Japanese music and instruments. One of the works that brought Takemitsu international success was his Requiem for Strings, a piece he composed in 1957 in memory of Fumio Hayasaka, composer for Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashōmon.
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) heard Takemitsu’s Requiem for Strings during a 1959 visit to Tokyo, and he was deeply impressed. In a 1989 interview printed in Perspectives in New Music, Takemitsu recalled the occasion, as well as Stravinsky’s subsequent support of his career.
Takemitsu explained that Stravinsky heard the Requiem for Strings “by accident because, when he was in Tokyo…he asked to listen to new Japanese music. The radio stations arranged it. My music was not supposed to be played, but by chance someone played some and Stravinsky said, ‘Please, keep going.’ He listened to my music along with many other pieces. After that he had a press conference and he mentioned only my name. Then he invited me to lunch … After that he returned to the United States and perhaps he spoke about my music to Aaron Copland or something, so I got a commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation. Then I wrote a piece called Dorian Horizon, which was first performed by Aaron Copland conducting the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.”
Requiem for Strings by Tōru Takemitsu
Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes
Photograph of Margaret Bonds, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph of Langston Hughes, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
American composer Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) discovered the poetry of Langston Hughes (1902-1967) in 1929, while she was a student at Northwestern University. She described the experience in a 1971 interview, quoted in Helen Walker-Hill’s excellent book on Black women composers, From Spirituals to Symphonies:
“I was in this prejudiced university, this terribly prejudiced place…. I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’ and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because in that poem he tells how great the black man is. And if I had any misgivings, which I would have to have – here you are in a setup where the restaurants won’t serve you and you’re going to college, you’re sacrificing, trying to get through school – and I know that poem helped save me.”
Bonds met Langston Hughes in Chicago in 1936, and they became close friends. She recalled, “We were like brother and sister, like blood relatives.”
Bonds and Hughes would forge a deep artistic connection. Hughes encouraged Bonds’s composing and performing, and sent her poems to set to music. More than half of Bonds’s compositions feature texts by Hughes, including musicals like Tropics after Dark and religious works like The Ballad of the Brown King. Bonds also set many of Hughes’s poems as art songs, including “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Bonds felt that this song was her best work: in 1967 she said, “I’ve done more complicated things but I don’t think I’ve ever surpassed it.”
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” by Margaret Bonds, text by Langston Hughes
Takemitsu, Tōru, Tania Cronin, and Hilary Tann. “Afterword.” Perspectives of New Music 27, no. 2 (1989): 206-214. Accessed August 28, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i234538.
On Saturday, May 7, 2022, All Classical Portland presented a live, bi-coastal broadcast of the world premiere of Damien Geter’s An African American Requiem in collaboration with WQXR in New York. All Classical Portland and WQXR are now offering the hour-long event as a syndicated program to radio stations across the country free of charge. This syndication will give stations the opportunity to share Geter’s important and timely work with listeners regionally and throughout the United States.
Please enjoy this post by All Classical Portland’s 2022 International Arts Correspondent Sophie Lippert! Sophie is a multi-talented Portland musician and artist who has been given the opportunity to live in Tel Aviv, Israel for the next 12 months. She’ll be sharing her journey with us online and on the air with a series of blogs and performances. Stay tuned as we learn more about Sophie as well as the rich music, food, and culture of this region Sophie will call home for the year.
Part 1: Venturing into the Unknown
Music has always been an anchor for me.
Whether I’m tickling the keys of the piano, bowing or plucking my cello, or listening to recorded tracks or live performances, music serves as a constant; a place of refuge, comfort, joy, emotion, and trusted companionship.
My connection to music is especially important when life takes turns toward the unexpected—and it certainly did when I took a monumental leap into the unknown, and relocated to Tel Aviv, Israel in December 2021!
Taking in the view from the Monument to the Negev Brigade in Be’er Sheva, Israel.
From left: Sophie Lippert, Stephanie Schneiderman, Marina Albero, and Amenta Abioto share the stage at The Old Church during Connections Concerts’ September 2019 show.
This transition was a big surprise to everyone in my life—including me. For the previous 10 years, I’d established a life in Portland as a performing pianist, teacher, and entrepreneur. I’d played as a concerto soloist with the Seattle Philharmonic and Olympia Symphony, performed at venues such as the Keller Auditorium and the Portland Art Museum, and collaborated with many of the Pacific Northwest’s finest multi-genre musicians as founder of Connections Concert Series. I’d recorded my first full-length solo piano CD, worked as resident recording artist with Classic Pianos, and played several thrilling Thursdays @ Three programs right here on All Classical Portland.
On Saturday, May 7, 2022, All Classical Portland will present a bi-coastal broadcast of Damien Geter’s An African American Requiem. The live broadcast will begin at 5:50 PM PT (8:50 PM ET) on 89.9 FM in Portland, WQXR 105.9 FM in New York, and streaming worldwide via our live player.
Beach’s immersion in poetry went beyond texted music. Poetry also influenced music for the instrument Beach played the most: the piano. In honor of National Poetry Month, we present a selection of piano works by Amy Beach, all inspired by poetry. Beach inscribed the scores of the first six selections with poetic quotations, which we’ve reproduced here for you. In the last two selections, the titles themselves are quotations from one of humanity’s oldest surviving books of poetry, the Book of Psalms.
All Classical Portland is proud to announce 16-year-old double bass player Maggie Carter as the 2022 Young Artist in Residence. A home-schooled high school junior, Maggie began music lessons with former Oregon Symphony bassist Nina DeCesare at age nine. She currently studies with Jordan Anderson, Principal Bass of the Seattle Symphony, and performs regularly with the Portland Youth Philharmonic.
“I am deeply honored that All Classical Portland has chosen me and my uncommon instrument,” says Maggie. “I am filled with excitement for everything this position entails. This residency is significant for me because with it, I will grow as an artist and have the chance to share the beauty of classical music. I am particularly looking forward to showcasing solo double bass music with the wider music community.”
Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot were two of the bel canto era’s greatest mezzo sopranos. Sisters, and daughters of the imposing Spanish pedagogue Manuel García, Malibran and Viardot each left an indelible mark on nineteenth-century opera. Each was also a composer, a quality less celebrated during their lifetimes. Malibran, who died tragically young in 1836, was widely lauded for her singing, but her compositions were less noted. Viardot, who lived until 1910, survived long enough for the Western music world to become more accustomed to the notion of a woman composer. Both left exquisite compositions that offer insight into nineteenth century bel canto – and offer fascinating listening for any music lover.
In this two part series, we’ll explore the careers and music of these two remarkable sisters. We began in Part I with the elder sister, Maria Malibran. Here in Part II, we’ll meet the younger sister, Pauline Viardot.
