[Dr. Timothy W. Holley]
Tania Justina León and Adolphus Cunningham Hailstork are featured at AfriClassical.com:
Dr. Timothy
Holley will present a pair of faculty recital performances on Saturday,
September 29, 7:00 pm, and October 20, 2012 in B. N. Duke Auditorium at 4:00 pm
at North Carolina Central University. The program, titled “Shapeshifters, Bluesmen and Sacred Circles”
will feature the solo cello music of African-American composers.
The
composers featured on this program are John E. Price, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Tania León, Trevor Weston, Noel Da Costa and Adolphus Hailstork—four of whom are
still alive and quite active!! This
majority-group of composers represents the generation that came of age in the
1960s and helped to stoke the fires of change via the Civil Rights
Movement. Their lives and works reflect
that generation’s push for full social and political inclusion, full artistic
appreciation and professional opportunity, and the attempt of laying full claim
to American equality in the greatest possible sense while maintaining their
African-American heritage.
Trevor
Weston represents the younger generation who’ve come of age after the apex of
the Civil Rights Movement and benefited from its forward progress. His work, “Shapeshifter” (The Angry Bluesman) is one of the major works
of the program. Its title draws
more from a “shared” vocabulary--the blues and the vast menu of technologically
produced sounds. The program’s closing
work, Theme & Variations of Adolphus Hailstork uses a Shaker melody (“Draw
the Sacred Circle Closer”) that resembles two other well-known American folk-song
melodies: “Barbara Allen” and “Simple Gifts” (the latter which Aaron Copland
used in his ballet score “Appalachian Spring").
The works
of Price, Moore, Leon and Da Costa explore the varieties of melodic and
expressive capacities through the medium of the blues and other folk music
sources. Each work has its own distinct
sound-world, but each manages to somehow avoid inordinate duplication of formal
structure and expressive gesture. The
most formidable challenge of this program to the listener…might be the absence
of the piano!!
The program
is free and open to the general public.
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