Hale Smith (1925-2009)
(ClevelandArtsPrize.org)
(ClevelandArtsPrize.org)
On May 28, 2014 AfriClassical posted:
Hale Smith (1925-2009), an African American composer, pianist and professor,
is
profiled at AfriClassical.com,
which features a comprehensive Works List and a Bibliography by Prof.
Dominique-René de Lerma, www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com.
Marilyn Harris is a former student whose
Hale Smith Tribute is a loving and informative testimonial in a special section of her website
Eric Dolphy's career was in jazz, but he entrusted his musical papers to Hale and Juanita Smith, as is explained in the article on Eric Dolphy in The New York Times:
His musical papers have just been acquired by the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and his music, including pieces never performed before, will be played at a two-day festival in his honor, called Eric Dolphy: Freedom of Sound, this weekend in Montclair, N.J.
The papers were long in the possession of Dolphy’s close friends the composer Hale Smith, who died in 2009, and his wife, Juanita, who later gave them to the flutist and composer James Newton. The cache, five boxes of material, is available to scholars in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room.
It includes several previously unperformed works, as well as extensions
or alternative arrangements of Dolphy pieces, including “Hat and
Beard,” “Gazzelloni” and “The Prophet.”
It
also holds a key to how he thought and what he practiced: his
transcriptions of other music, including bits of Charlie Parker and
Stravinsky; Bach’s Partita in A minor for flute; and a bass-clarinet
arrangement for Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. There are also many scales of
Dolphy’s own devising, which he was using as the basis for
improvisation; practice books and lead sheets; and a page of
transcriptions of bird calls.
No comments:
Post a Comment