John Malveaux: Guest list for honoring of composer Adolphus Hailstork Feb. 17, 2019

Dr. Hansonia Caldwell Harriford

John Malveaux of 

www.MusicUNTOLD.com 

writes:

MusicUNTOLD guest list for honoring of composer Adolphus Hailstork in the Green Room at Disney Concert Hall immediately following historic Feb 17, 2019  concert will include significant others who purchased tickets prior to availability of MusicUNTOLD group discount. See https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/246/2019-02-17/william-grant-still-the-harlem-renaissance-symphony-no-4/

  

Dr. Hansonia Caldwell Harriford (Emeritus professor CSU Dominguez Hills, author, film producer, archivist, pianist, choral director) and her two guests Sally Anne Payton (child class mate of Judith Still, daughter of William Grant Still) and Dr. Sally Etcheto, retired vocal teacher at CSU Dominguez Hills. To acquire discount tickets with special invitation to Green Room for honoring of Dr. Hailstork or request to attend honoring and you already purchased tickets, please contact JMalveaux@gmail.com or Tel.(562) 436-4352 asap. Limited space.

AaronAsk: Weekly mentoring for a creative life: No Reservations!

http://www.aaronask.com/no-reservations/

Aaron P. Dworkin writes:

Greetings and welcome to this week's episode of AaronAsk, your weekly mentoring session to live a fulfilling creative life!  This week's episode is titled, No Reservations!  Enjoy, we wish you a creative day and see you for next week's session!

Comment by email:

Thanks so much Bill, hope all is well and stay warm! 

Aaron [Aaron P. Dworkin] 

Sphinx Organization: Sphinx performance closes World Economic Forum in Davos!

"The transformative power of the world’s one universal language: may it inspire you to imagine, pursue, and

realize a new world of possibilities...”

These are the words Robert F. Smith - Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Vista Equity Partners and Chairman of Carnegie Hall - used to introduce four young musicians about to deliver the ultimate performance at the world's most notable convening of business, political, and cultural leaders.

The musicians were a Sphinx  quartet brought to the World  Economic Forum in Davos,  Switzerland by Mr. Smith, a  key supporter and  advocate of the Sphinx  Organization. Hear the  remarks and view the  performance here. Sphinx's presence, including  President and Artistic  Director Afa Dworkin,  placed diversity in the arts  at the front and center of  a uniquely influential  global platform. Hannah  White, Randall Goosby,  Sterling Elliott, and  Mira Williams wowed  audiences with multiple  appearances across the   convening before  bringing the event to an  inspiring close with their   final performance.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m9r16AMBUI&feature=youtu.be

Music Kitchen Celebrates 100th Concert with Song Cycle Commission "Forgotten Voices"

Kelly Hall-Tompkins writes:

I cannot believe it, but this month marks the 100th Music Kitchen concert! As I look back on nearly 14 seasons, I am so excited about all that we have accomplished together:  An estimated 17,000 homeless shelter clients reached by some of the top artists in our field! 17,000 voices strong! Over the years, you've read the blue text at the end of my concert narratives with thoughts from the shelter clients about our concerts.  Even as society at large sometimes marginalizes these voices, they have moved us in the Music Kitchen community tremendously.  They have inspired us, they have taught us more about life and loss, about music, about ourselves, about joy, about compassion.  We have listened.  And now we are sharing these voices with you in a whole new, unprecedented way.  I am so incredibly excited to announce our new special project: To celebrate the 100th concert this month and moving into the 15th season in March 2020, Music Kitchen is launching a Song Cycle Commissioning Project, entitled “Forgotten Voices,” to commission 15 of the top emerging and established composers of our time to set incidental comments from homeless shelter clients from past Music Kitchen concerts. Beginning in January with Jeff Scott (from the Imani Winds) “Für Meinen Vater” (For My Father) and continuing each month for 15 months, the project will include works by Jon Grier, James Lee, Tania Leon,  Jessie Montgomery, Beata Moon, Paul Moravec, Kevin Puts, Steve Sandberg,  and many more!  The composers have each chosen one homeless shelter client comment which moves and inspires them most, and set it in song.  Stay tuned for a new composer and a new premiere each month, first in shelter and, beginning in March 2020, for public performances of the Complete Composite Song Cycle "Forgotten Voices." 

As you know, for reasons of privacy and safe haven, concerts in homeless shelters cannot be made available to the public.  But as this is the most ambitious Music Kitchen project to date, and the only one of its kind, I will invite you each month to buy a virtual "ticket" of support of this endeavor.  Again, it is not for actual attendance, but to support our 15-month long project at the grassroots level of $25.  Larger gifts are also welcome.

Although you unfortunately cannot attend in person, I am very excited to share that the 100th concert will be featured by the NBC TODAY Show with Harry Smith!  More on that to come!

You make this all possible and I am so very grateful for your support!

Warmest Regards,

Kelly

Photo credits: Gregory Routt, June Etta Photography, Richard Termine

Composer Highlight: Jeff Scott

Chosen Text: "The music made me remember my father who died exactly 6 years ago.  He was German and he loved classical music, especially Mozart but also Brahms.  It was always on in the background when I was growing up.  I haven’t listened to Brahms in many years.  The music went straight into my soul.  Thank you"

Bio: A native of Queens, NY, Jeff  Scott started the French horn  at age 14, receiving an  anonymous gift scholarship  to go to the Brooklyn  College Preparatory Division.  An even greater gift came  from his first teacher,  Carolyn Clark, who taught  the young Mr. Scott for  free during his high school  years, giving him the  opportunity to study music  when resources were not  available. He received his  bachelor’s degree from  Manhattan School of  Music (studying with  David Jolley), and master’s  degree from SUNY at  Stony Brook (studying with  William Purvis). He later  continued his horn studies  with Scott Brubaker and  the late Jerome Ashby.   Jeff Scott’s performance  credits are many and varied.  They include The Lion  King orchestra (Broadway,  New York) 1997-2005, and  the 1994 revival of Showboat  (Broadway, New York)  1994-1997. He has been a  member of the Alvin Ailey  and Dance Theater of Harlem  orchestras since 1995 and  has performed numerous  times under the direction of  Wynton Marsalis with the   Lincoln Center Jazz  rchestra.  Jeff Scott is also  the french hornist in  the internationally  acclaimed wind quintet “Imani  Winds”. Mr. Scott has also experienced  good fortune as a studio  musician. He can be  heard on movie  soundtracks scored by  Terrence Blanchard, Tan  Dun and on commercial  recordings with notable  artists such as Chick Corea,  Wayne Shorter, Steve Coleman,  Chris Brubeck, Chico O’Farill,  Freddy Cole and Jimmy Heath,  among others. Additionally, he  has toured with artists  such as Barbra Streisand and  the late Luther Vandross. Jeff Scott’s arranging and  composing credits are many,  and include scoring the  off-Broadway production  of Becoming Something,  The Canada Lee Story, the  staged production of Josephine  Baker: A Life of Le Jazz  Hot!, and many original works  for solo winds as well as wind,  brass and jazz ensembles.   His works are published  by International Opus, Trevco  Music, To The Fore Music and  self-published at  www.MusicbyJeffScott.com. Jeff Scott has been on the  horn faculty of the music  department at Montclair State  University (New Jersey) since  2002. Donate at: http://www.musickitchennyc.org/

SFChronicle.com: African American female composer finds a musical champion in Oakland

Florence B. Price (1887-1953)

The San Francisco Chronicle

Joshua Kosman

January 26, 2019

“If you don’t remember anything else from tonight,” music director Michael Morgan told the audience at the Paramount Theatre on Friday, Jan. 25, “remember Florence Price.”

In truth, there was plenty to take away from the concert by the Oakland Symphony, a lively and sometimes revelatory event devoted to music by black composers. Titled “To Belong Here: Notes From the African Diaspora,” the program ranged from 18th century Paris to the Harlem winningly evoked in the music of Duke Ellington.

But Morgan was entirely correct in focusing the audience’s attention on the music of Price, who died in 1953 and is only now — well into the following century — receiving some of the attention she’s due. Price’s Third Symphony, a robust and wondrously inventive creation that had its premiere in 1940 in Detroit and was promptly forgotten, emerged as the triumphal high point of the evening — not only a memorable performance in itself but a challenge to other orchestras and conductors who seem to believe that there’s no music worth programming by women or composers of color.

We are, happily, going through a little renaissance of interest in Price’s work. An unknown pile of her manuscripts was rediscovered a decade ago, and last year the music publisher G. Schirmer acquired the rights to her catalog, which means that her symphonies and concertos are only a phone call and a royalty payment away. A world premiere recording of Price’s Fourth Symphony, released this month by the Arkansas Fort Smith  Symphony and conductor John Jeter, revealed a work full of delicate harmonic and rhythmic surprises.

Yet to judge from Friday’s vibrant and resourceful performance, it may be the Third Symphony that provides the most compelling entree into Price’s distinctive orchestral sound world. Like its fellows, the piece is steeped in the harmonies and rhythms of the African American world — the fluid, gapped melodic scales of the spiritual, the vivid syncopated dance strains known as “juba,” even the densely stacked harmonies of big band jazz.

At a first encounter, this can make Price’s symphonies remind a modern listener of Dvorák, especially given the superficial similarities in their orchestral palettes. But where Dvorák is a tourist-ethnographer — mining and exploiting the sounds of the New World for his own European ends — Price turns those musical resources into something periodically new and strange.

In the Third Symphony, that means expanding a seeming straightforward set of melodic themes into a first movement of unpredictable but closely argued musical logic. It means a radiant and rhapsodic slow movement punctuated by plangent bassoon and trumpet solos, and an ebullient dance interlude that piles syncopation atop syncopation until the phrases stretch into wonderful, oddball shapes.

Perhaps most striking is the symphony’s finale, which turns the simple rhythmic profile of a buoyant rondo into something weightier and more shadowy — a bit of expressive sleight-of-hand that Morgan and the orchestra conveyed perfectly.

BBC.co.UK: Errollyn Wallen reviews Sony Black Composers Series on Radio 3

Black Composers Series

Sony Classics

Composer Errollyn Wallen sends this link to the BBC Radio 3 program on which she reviews the Sony Black Composers Series, originally issued on LP in the 1970s by CBS Records:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00027c3

Black History Month “separate but equal” The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson

Separate

The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson

and America's Journey from 

Slavery to Segregation

Steve Luxenberg

Plessy v. Ferguson is synonymous with Jim Crow laws and the unjust doctrine of “separate but equal.” But few Americans know more than the name of the case or have more than a superficial understanding of its origins and outcome. In the myth-shattering  book, SEPARATE: The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (W. W. Norton; February 12, 2019), award-winning author, historian and Washington Post Associate Editor Steve Luxenberg recreates the personalities and debates that informed the Supreme Court’s decision in the Plessy case.

Drawing from letters, diaries, and archival collections, SEPARATE presents  characters from across the United States, such as the resisters from the mixed-race community of French New Orleans, led by Louis Martinet, a lawyer and crusading newspaper editor; Homer Plessy’s lawyer, Ohio-born Albion Tourgée, a best-selling author and the country’s best-known white advocate for civil rights; the Supreme Court justices, including Henry Billings Brown from New England and Michigan, whose majority ruling endorsed separation.  And, John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, the only dissenter whose transformation from slaveholder’s son to a voice for equal rights is nothing short of remarkable.

In the 7-1 decision, written by Justice Brown, the majority ignored or rejected nearly all of the Plessy team’s arguments. Brown was most dismissive of Tourgée’s assertion that separation automatically “stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” a construction that Brown said blacks were projecting onto the situation.

Justice Harlan, one of the court’s two Southerners denounced the majority decision in clear and powerful language, declaring that the Constitution was color-blind, that the court had brought dishonor to itself by using color and race as a dividing line, and that the Plessy case would one day be as infamous as the court’s Dred Scott decision.

22nd annual Sphinx Competition Finals Concert Saturday, February 2 at 7:30 PM

Ifetayo Ali-Landing

(Kevin Kennedy)

You're invited to a musical celebration of diversity and excellence in Detroit! The 22nd annual Sphinx Competition Finals Concert Saturday, February 2 at 7:30PM

Watch top young musicians compete for $50,000 Robert Frederick Smith prize Vote live for $5,000 Audience Choice Award See performances by EXIGENCE vocal ensemble & Sphinx Symphony Orchestra

All are welcome! Optional $5 donation: reserve seats here

John Malveaux: MusicUNTOLD honors Adolphus Hailstork at Disney Concert Hall Feb. 17

Henrietta Forston and John Malveaux

John Malveaux of 

www.MusicUNTOLD.com 

writes:

MusicUNTOLD will honor composer Adolphus Hailstork in the Green Room at Disney Concert Hall immediately following February 17, 2019 concert to include world premiere of STILL HOLDING ON.

See https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/246/2019-02-17/william-grant-still-the-harlem-renaissance-symphony-no-4/. A vital source of scholarships and performance opportunities in Los Angeles for aspiring classical and jazz talent is Georgia Laster Branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians. See pic with Georgia Laster President Henrietta Forston who purchased a group discount ticket to concert and placed on Green Room guest list  to meet and honor Dr. Hailstork. To be a guest of MusicUNTOLD at concert and  meet Dr. Hailstork in Green Room, please contact jmalveaux@gmail.com or Tel. (562) 436-4352.

Harlem Chamber Players at Newark School of the Arts, Noon Saturday, February 9

 

Flutist Julietta Curenton, violist Amadi Azikiwe, and harpist Ashley Jackson will perform a FREE family concert of music by Debussy, Arnold Bax and Miguel del Aguila at the Newark School of the Arts. 

Our 11th Annual Black History Month Celebration takes place at the Schomburg Center and will feature two world premieres by the noted African American composer Adolphus Hailstork. Pianist David Berry, violinists Ashley Horne and Curtis Stewart, violist Amadi Azikiwe, and cellist Wayne Smith will perform Hailstork's Piano Quintet "Detroit" and "Nobody Know," a work for baritone and string quartet with text by Herbert Martin featuring baritone Kenneth Overton. This work was commissioned by The Harlem Chamber Players to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the importation of the first black slaves to America. The evening will conclude with Dvořák's String Quartet in F Major "American." Host Terrance McKnight of WQXR will also read poetry by Langston Hughes. This concert is part of the Harlem Renaissance 100 Celebration.

This concert is FREE and open to the public. RSVP is required. Registration will open February 14, 2019.

Hear the highly acclaimed students from Opus 118 Harlem School of Music and meet the founder and master teacher Roberta Guaspari, the inspiration behind the award-winning documentary “Small Wonders” and Miramax’s film, “Music of the Heart,” starring Meryl Streep. 

Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran

(Photo by Dawoud Bey)

The Harlem Chamber Players will join Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran, Joseph Joubert, Imani Winds, and a host of other amazing artists in this Carnegie Hall production. Tickets are going fast! 

We will close our 11th Anniversary Season at Columbia University's Miller Theatre with a Gala orchestral concert. The concert will feature Met Opera soprano Janinah Burnett, violinist Ashley Horne, and violist Amadi Azikiwe in an evening of great music, including the Sibelius Violin Concerto, Adolphus Hailstork's Two Romances for Viola and Chamber Orchestra, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Sinfonietta No. 1, and Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Maestro Ariel Rudiakov will conduct. 

Donations of any amount are much appreciated.

Thank you to all who have supported us in the past.

You may also donate by check:

The Harlem Chamber Players, Inc.

191 Claremont Avenue #25

New York, NY 10027