Dominique-René de Lerma:
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR: TWO HOURS TOWARD REVITALIZATION, REVIVAL, AND RENEWAL
I was led by one of our major leaders, Mike Wright, to a most
remarkable two hours on the internet giving focus on Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor. It is the work of the Longfellow enthusiasts, headed
by Charles Kaufmann, whose penetrating knowledge of the subject and its
implications secured the participation of the major scholars in the
field, including Jeffrey Green, William Tortolano, and Wayne Shirley,
with captivating performances from Rachel Barton Pine, Rodrick Dixon,
Robert Honeysucker, Angela Brown, and some superb choristers.
"This is a truly superb production with some very moving dialogue and some incredibly musical performances. . . . The
last chapters of the film were really enlightening. The performance of
‘Keep Me from Sinking Down’ on the film drew me to tears. . . . The 1911
[Deep River] recording of Maud Powell and the superimposition of Rachel
Barton-Pine’s performance was an amazing technical achievement. . . .
These are my ramblings following my deep appreciation of the truly great
documentary film 'Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912 '... Michael S. Wright, Chair, African to American Music Society, Shebbear, Devon, U.K."
Because the treatment explores the related environment, the subjects do
not stop with the spiritual, but include coon songs, the Marine Band,
Maud Powell, and even some wisdom from the granddaughter of J. Rosamond
Johnson. The sight of documents from a century ago will have one trying
to take notes or hit the pause button repeatedly -- I'll opt for
replay: https://vimeo.com/charleskaufmann/review/91407169/f22c14aad8. But be sure to consult William Zick's alert from last week --
One of my colleagues, a Native American, had originally not been
impressed by CT's dedication to Hiawatha. He did not attempt to
recreate Native music but, unlike his contemporaries Vaughan Williams
and Gustav Holst, he did not look for a vocabulary in British folk
music: he had a nostalgia for what he never experienced -- Africa -- and
with overt sentiment for the suppressed, found nobility in the Hiawatha
story.
When we deal with music from a different time or place, we have always
had to make adjustments to our evaluation. That acculturation pulls us
closer to an understanding why Coleridge-Taylor's standing ranked along
with Mendelssohn and Handel during his life, but why did he fade so
soon? That question is raised in this documentary. I suggest the
answer rests in the fact that he came in the final days of Romanticism.
What followed was a denial of as much of the nineteenth century as one
could manage. In came that non-discriminatory phase termed
neo-classicism. Stravinsky stated that music was "powerless to express
anything at all," that once a structure is in good order, "everything is
said." Shock the bourgeois! Even those Germanics, seduced by Freudian
hyper-romanticism (expressionism) found their delight in palindromic
tone-rows, thereby providing theory students with an abundance of
dissertation topics. Never mind the audience, who were yet to be
disoriented by electronic sounds, if not complete silence from John
Cage. And, as Johnson's granddaughter observed, those up on 125th
Street never heard about Coleridge-Taylor anyway. They knew nothing
about that Washington event when Coleridge-Taylor displayed Black genius
in 1904 -- that was the year in which more than 10% of the Black
citizens of St. Charles, Arkansas, were lynched.
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Dominique-René de Lerma
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