[ABOVE: Out of the Depths: Music by African-American Composers; Spiritual for brass octet (9:36); Out of the Depths for concert band (13:16); Keystone Wind Ensemble; Jack Stamp, Conductor; Citadel 88143 (2002) BELOW: Adolphus C. Hailstork]
As we have noted previously, Out of the Depths: Music by African-American Composers is available from only a few retailers. FoothillRecords.com offers it for $8.99 plus shipping:
Yesterday we quoted from the liner notes, written by Dr. Myron Moss. Today we continue: “Not long after Jim Europe's war, bands began to assemble a concert-music repertoire, emulating the serious music played by symphony orchestras. This recording surveys black composers' contributions to that literature. The pieces range from Clarence Cameron White's Triumphal March, written in 1927, to Gary Nash's 1997 Fraternal Prelude. Many of these performances are premiere recordings, for this music is still little-known.
“Appropriately, the program begins with Adolphus Hailstork's Spiritual, whose genre and thematic material reflect the historical origin of African-American music. Hailstork (b. 1941) has enjoyed recognition for his choral, orchestral, and instrumental music.” “He has been an award winner since the beginning of his career. Mourn Not the Dead won the 1971 Ernest Bloch Award for choral composition. Celebration was among the 1976 J. C. Penney Bicentennial Commissions and was recorded by the Detroit Symphony. Out of the Depths won the 1977 Belwin Mills Max Winkler Award, presented by the College Band Directors National Association.
“Hailstork's Spiritual was written for the four trumpets and four trombones of the Edward Tarr Brass Ensemble. As with several of Hailstork's pieces, Spiritual fuses two apparently disparate styles. The plaintive opening trumpet solo evokes the spiritual at its most fundamental, vocal music unadorned with harmony or accompaniment. The following development is in neo-classic style, with insistent rhythmic energy, sharp, dissonant chords, and fugal passages, all based on melodic material that is related to the opening. Hailstork has stated that spirituals are the source from which black American music emerges, and here he has crafted a fully modern piece that directly traces its roots to that source. In the brass repertoire, Spiritual's antecedent is Infolf Dahl's great Music for Brass, whose treatment of a Bach chorale uses similar compositional devices to respectfully project devotional music of an earlier time into the polystylistic present.
“Hailstork's program note for Out of the Depths explains that the piece traces a life cycle, from its spark of inception through a long ascent to a powerful climax and then a decline into peaceful resolution and silence. The actual sound of the music suggests (as does the title) something rather darker. The opening dwells on barely audible sounds, including slowly built-up clusters of sustained pitches and brief flashes of percussion. The piece gains momentum gradually in a series of slow rises and falls, culminating in music of considerable ferocity. Compositionally, Out of the Depths is largely based on just two melodic ideas. The first, played by the piccolo at the beginning of the piece, consists of an ascending motif of three notes. This rising figure is reprised powerfully at the music's climax. The second idea appears about 3:20 into the piece, when low woodwinds introduce a longer, downward-contoured melody, repeated in the bass and then played by clarinets and saxophones. This melody reappears several times, often as the bass line within a progression of dark chords. The richly dissonant harmonies and the massive effects created by overlapping blocks of instruments create a sense of glacially slow but inexorable movement.” [Adolphus C. Hailstork (b. 1941) is featured at AfriClassical.com]
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