Please join us for the premiere of the Birthday Celebration Film with long time colleagues and friends which I executive produced on the YouTube channel of Theodore Presser Music on April 17th.
The film premiere time is 11:30AM ET, 8:30AM PT, 10:30AM CT, 3:30PM London/ https://youtu.be/c99v0cnHpKU Cordially, Bill Doggett
Dr. Michael Cooper lecture March 24, 2021at the Royal Irish Academy of Music titled “Black Feminism, Margaret Bonds, and the ‘Credo’ of W.E.B. Du Bois” was recorded for posterity. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iyk4ProIu4
Sugar Hill Salon 2021 Concert #3 is this Sunday April 18th @ 4pm! This month's concert will feature flutist Julietta Curenton and oboist Hassan Anderson! This concert will feature duos and trios by Adolphus Hailstork, Alyssa Morris, Shawn E. Okpebholo, Fred Onovwerosuoke, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Hope to see you there!
Ebonee Thomas (flute), Titus Underwood (oboe), and Alex Laing (clarinet), - an IMI Season Finale Concerts event streaming soon, right here on our Facebook page, or on your mobile device!
John Gilhooly announces that the African Concert Series is to join the
Wigmore Hall’s partnership family.
In the year of the
Wigmore Hall’s 120th anniversary, Artistic Director, John Gilhooly
has announced that the African Concert Series, spearheaded by the
Nigerian-Romanian pianist Rebeca Omordia will be joining the Wigmore Hall’s
family of partners. This is an enormous tribute to Rebeca, whose inspiring
leadership over the last three years, has brought together brilliant talents
from the wide diaspora of African art music, which forms a bridge between
Western classical music and traditional African music. Her early CD ‘Ekele’ for
Heritage, featuring the piano music of a number of composers from Nigeria,
including Ayo
Bankole, Fred Onovwerosuoke and Christian Onyeji, proved a hit and prefigured
the success of the concert series.
Rebeca Omordia is an award-winning
pianist of Nigerian-Romanian heritage, being born and raised in Romania during the
Ceaușescu regime. After graduating from the National Music University in
Bucharest in 2006 she came to this country with a scholarship to study for a Masters
at Birmingham Conservatoire, where she won the Delius Prize. It was here that
she met up with Julian Lloyd Webber and soon began a very successful
partnership with him from 2012 till 2014, performing together at Wigmore Hall
and Kings Place.
She also collaborated with cellists
Raphael Wallfisch, Jiaxin Lloyd Webber and Razvan Suma (with whom she toured the UK and Romania), Chineke!, saxophonist
Amy Dickson and pianist Mark Bebbington with whom she recorded piano music by
Ralph Vaughan Williams for two pianos, which reached no. 3 in the UK Classical
Music Chart.
National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) Responds to Latest Excessive Force Incidents
Alexandria, VA. – April 12, 2021 –
Even as police reform measures are being enacted across many
municipalities, as advocacy for reform grows, moreover as our nation is
in the very midst of the trial for the death of George Floyd, with
evidence and excruciating witness testimony bearing out the
circumstances surrounding his death, we continue to be confronted with
examples of excessive use of force, lack of transparency and
understanding of the precept for police engagement fitting the
encounter, and another unfortunate fatality of a citizen of color.
Yes,
a complete picture of the events and actions surrounding the vehicle
stops of Army 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario and Daunte Wright, which ended
tragically, are still being investigated, but it begs the question of
how we keep ending up "here?” How do we keep ending with physical force
exceeding the perceived infraction? And why?
When
will police executives and civic leadership stop having to explain away
failures of those determined to flout the tenet of "serve and protect?”
Our
thoughts and sincere prayers are with those at the center of these
latest tragic circumstances; NOBLE remains committed as a partner for
improved relations between public safety and the community, for
transparency around deployed actions of force, and as importantly,
advocating justice through action.
###
About the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives
Since
1976, The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives
(NOBLE) has served as the conscience of law enforcement by being
committed to justice by action. NOBLE represents over 3,000 members
internationally, who are primarily African American chief executive
officers of law enforcement agencies at federal, state, county and
municipal levels, other law enforcement administrators, and criminal
justice practitioners. For more information, visit www.NOBLENational.org.
It’s not news anymore that
the day has come for a major emergence of neglected Black composers into
the mainstream of concert life. Some of this was underway before George
Floyd’s death kicked the Black Lives Matter movement into a higher
gear, but now it has become a bandwagon, with one orchestra and small
group after another adding historic figures like Florence Price and
Julius Eastman and contemporary voices like Jessie Montgomery to their
pandemic streams. And a convenient way to get a basic handle on the
history of classical music by Black composers is available in one box of 10 CDs.
Let’s go back to the 1970s when some major record labels were still fronted by enlightened visionaries like Goddard Lieberson,
who came out of retirement in 1973 to resume his old position as
president of Columbia Records after the firing of Clive Davis. It was in
Lieberson’s second term that Columbia Masterworks joined up with
Afro-American Music Opportunities Organization (AAMOA) to start the
Black Composers Series, a sequence of albums that would give major-label
exposure to a whole lineup of neglected figures.
Columbia spared nothing to
give the project every chance to succeed, enlisting top-flight
orchestras — the London Symphony in five of the albums, the Detroit and
Baltimore Symphonies and Helsinki Philharmonic in the others — the
Juilliard Quartet, violinists Jaime Laredo, Sanford Allen (the first
Black member of the New York Philharmonic), and Aaron Rosand, cellist
Janos Starker, and the label’s roster of producers and engineers. Paul
Freeman, one of just a few working Black conductors of classical music,
served as artistic director and conductor. The first four albums in the
series came out in March 1974, four more followed in June 1975, and the
original plan was to keep on releasing four albums per year through
1978.
Alas, something fell
through — funding? disappointing sales? — and only one more album
emerged in January 1978, delayed for two years after the recording date
(Lieberson had retired for the second and final time in 1975). The
series had a rather short shelf life; the last five albums went out of
print before the decade was out, while the first four hung on for a
while into the 1980s until they, too, got the deletion axe. Decades
later, Freeman rerecorded several of the pieces with his Chicago
Sinfonietta for Cedille’s smaller-scale, three-volume African Heritage
Symphonic series, but otherwise, most of the music returned to
obscurity.
It’s hard to imagine any of
the three “major” corporate labels coming up with such an adventurous,
systematic project today. But Sony — the current owners of the Columbia
archive — did the next best thing two years ago by reissuing all nine
Black Composers Series albums in a handsome, compact, inexpensive box,
adding as a bonus another Freeman album, Symphonic Spirituals, made after the project was over for Columbia’s red pop label.
What Columbia uncovered
here is a little-used, not as carefully maintained highway running
parallel to the main expressway of the classical-music repertory,
passing through mostly the same neighborhoods, used by the same vehicles
(symphony orchestras, choruses, a string quartet, etc.). Now and then,
the highway veers off to serve some urban neighborhoods that the main
expressway bypasses, but always remaining parallel.
Some musicians and writers
have insisted upon calling jazz “Black classical music” — always an
aggrandizing misnomer to me; jazz is jazz, and there’s nothing wrong
with that — but this box contains literally, and more accurately, Black
classical music if we accept the form as music with European roots
composed by Black musicians. Not much could be said to be ahead of its
time, even the most gnarled modernist pieces — nor out of its time.
Inevitably, the set
launches with the first historically significant Black composer, Joseph
Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whose delightful Symphony No. 1 is a
slice of Haydn classical language that could grace any
socially-distanced chamber orchestra program. The Juilliard Quartet
performs the Chevalier’s polite String Quartet No. 1 in C; the Symphonie
Concertante is given a lush orchestral treatment by Freeman and the
LSO; period-performance practices had not yet taken a vise-like grip on
all 18th century music performances in the 1970s. Another historical
figure based in Europe, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, is represented at his
most Romantic in an aria from Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and at his most light-hearted in the Danse Negre from his African Suite.
As you go through the set,
you can find several worthy pieces that can be easily punched into the
general repertory by alert impresarios. George Walker’s Trombone
Concerto wears well after a number of listenings, a viable modernist
work of considerable contrast and a winning finale (unlike the
disagreeably severe Piano Concerto), a gift to curious trombone soloists
faced with a dearth of solo material. José Mauricio Nunes Garcia’s
Requiem Mass is good enough to substitute for Mozart’s well-trodden
Requiem — try a blindfold listening test on people and see who they
think wrote it — as Walker’s increasingly-played Lyric for Strings could stand in for Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
Roque Cordero wrote his Violin
Concerto for Allen, who revels in its abstract, twisting, turning
lines, while on the other hand, José White Lafitte’s Violin Concerto is a
virtuoso piece straight out of the middle of the 19th century, done to a
spectacular turn by Rosand. A greatly underrated violinist with an
unshakable dark-colored tone, Rosand, who was white and Jewish, has
written that this was the only record that he was allowed to make for
Columbia mainly because more famous violinists on the label didn’t want
to learn the Concerto due to its technical difficulties. He did not
mention racism as a reason.
A series of virtual experiences celebrating the lives and works of
underrepresented composers will be showcased at the State University at
Fredonia School of Music’s second annual Robert Jordan Piano Festival
during April.
Named in the memory of Professor Emeritus Robert Jordan, who taught
at the School of Music from 1980 to 2004, the festival will feature solo
and collaborative piano music written by diverse/underrepresented
composers, including women, African Americans and members of the LGTBQ
community.
Special guest William Chapman Nyaho will be featured in the festival’s first session, “In and Out of Africa: Exploring Piano Music of Africa and its Diaspora,”
on Monday, April 12, at 7 p.m. Dr. Nyaho, who teaches at Pacific
Lutheran University, will discuss the diversity of styles of piano
music, the influences of traditional musical forms, such as dance, jazz
and blues, as well as Western European compositional practices on
compositions in Africa and African diaspora.
Fr. Sean Duggan, SUNY Fredonia School of Music professor, said he
considers Nyaho, who he knew when both were living in Louisiana, to be a
wonderful pianist and musician who has been doing the musical world a
great service by bringing together wonderful piano compositions by
various underrepresented composers.
“His excellent five-volume anthology
published by Oxford University Press, ‘Piano Music of Africa and the
African Diaspora,’ is going to be a featured part of his presentation in
our festival,” said Duggan, coordinator of the Piano Area.
When the Handel and Haydn Society began in 1815, America was still
four decades away from abolishing slavery. H+H would play concerts to
support the Union Army, celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation and
mourn the death of Abraham Lincoln. But H+H’s upcoming world premiere of
a newly commissioned work by composer Jonathan Woody marks a profound
milestone.
“The source material (for the commission) came from a formerly
enslaved Black man, and I have a personal connection to that as a
descendant of enslaved people in the United States,” Woody told the
Herald. “It’s important to tell this story on a stage like Handel and
Haydn’s stage.”
“Handel and Haydn was founded in 1815 in a United States that was
still in the practice of enslaving Black bodies,” he added ahead of the
April 18 and April 20 streaming concert. “For an organization to have
lived that long and to find itself in the 21st century programming work
by a living Black composer based on the work by a Black composer from
the time of slavery, I think there is something special about that and
important about that. I wish it had happened sooner, but I’m glad it’s
happening now.”
Woody, who is also an in-demand soloist as a singer, composed his
commission, Suite for String Orchestra, based on works by Charles
Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780). Born on a ship carrying enslaved people,
Sancho was sold into slavery in a Spanish colony in South America. As an
adult, Sancho lived in England as a free man, becoming an abolitionist,
composer and business owner, and is considered the first Black man to
vote in a British election and the first person of African descent to
publish classical music.
“I find his life very fascinating, especially the fact that he was
the first Black man to have voting rights in a British parliamentary
election because he was a property owner,” Woody said. “He made history
for something as mundane and quotidian as owning a bookshop.”
Sancho’s dynamic achievements extended to music, but as a composer he
left behind no great opuses, no grand symphonies or operas. This made
turning his pieces into something fitting for H+H a challenge, a welcome
one, for Woody.
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Student Registration Fee: FREE (must include link to picture of Student ID)
Presenter Registration Fee: $25
General Registration Fee: $50
Registered attendees will receive an email with a link to our password-protected festival page later in the summer.
We at PriceFest work hard to keep the festival affordable. Please help us spread the word by sharing this flyer on social media and posting about your registration using the hashtag #newblackrenaissance or #PriceFest2021.
Album: WILD BLUE YONDER Artist: Eleanor Alberga Label: Navona Records Release Date: April 23, 2021
"Eleanor Alberga explores the whole gamut of the human
experience in WILD BLUE YONDER, an equally diverse and coherent set of
four contemporary chamber music pieces. While written over the course of
twenty-two years, these pieces burst the limits of both space and time.
No-Man’s-Land Lullaby reaches back over a century to World War I; Shining Gate of Morpheus enters the realm of the mystical; Succubus Moon explores the dark sides of the human psyche; and The Wild Blue Yonder offers
a glimpse into a world that is at once alien and wonderful.
Undauntedly, positively unsettling album; perfect listening for these
unsettling times and a worthy addition to the much hailed album of
Alberga's three string quartets from 2019."
