Thank you for helping with editing! Dubois-Feb-23.txt A Note on the Orchestra and our Program The Du Bois Orchestra, founded in 2015, is an orchestra with a mission to make music a means of overcoming social exclusion. Inspired by the namesake Harvard sociologist who combined music, sociology, and philosophy to fight for social equity, the orchestra devotes itself to performing works by historically neglected composers alongside well-known pieces of the classical tradition. In addition, community outreach initiatives for youth and the disadvantaged are an integral part of our understanding that music can unite people across diverse experiences, enriching social discourse through art. Du Bois’s documented interest in music began at Fisk University, where as a student, he called on African Americans to “build up an American school of music which shall rival the grandest schools of the past,” and commenting on a student performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah by the Fisk Mozart Society, of which Du Bois was an ardent supporter, he wrote: “Our race, just a quarter-century removed from slavery, can master the greatest musical compositions.” When he arrived in Cambridge in 1888, calling 20 Flagg Street home, just seven blocks from where you are sitting tonight, Du Bois was eager to share his good singing voice with the Harvard community. He auditioned for the Harvard Glee Club, but was rejected because of his race. Undaunted, he pursued his own musical education, actively seeking out performances of opera and orchestral music, during his studies in Europe and throughout his life. While studying in Germany, Du Bois fell in love with classical music. He went almost religiously to concerts of Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner, and music became an important theme in his life and work. The music critic, Alex Ross writes, Du Bois developed a “great veneration for German culture, German philosophy and literature and music. He detected in it this powerful idealistic energy that he felt could be translated into any context. He felt that it could in fact have great meaning for African-Americans…” The composers featured on tonight’s program all drew inspiration from great works of poetry and literature. The first piece on tonight’s program is a world premier by Japanese-American composer, Sachiko Murata, who is also the Du Bois Orchestra’s principal oboist. She has composed an extraordinary work, a tone poem based on the musical inscriptions of African American spirituals which Du Bois included at the beginning of each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk. These musical chapter headings are one of the most fascinating and enigmatic aspects of Du Bois’s work. What is the significance of music for Du Bois? One scholar suggests that music is a theme running throughout his life and work, a metaphor for emancipation. The next piece on the program, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, is a beloved classic of the orchestral repertoire, a tone poem based on Tchaikovsky’s tragic love story. You will hear the saintly theme of Friar Lawrence, the clashing swords of Mercutio and Tybalt and the themes of Romeo and Juliet, two of the most astonishing musical evocations in the repertoire. After intermission, we are excited to be featuring Thomas Cooper as a soloist tonight in Chausson’s masterpiece for violin and orchestra, Poème. Poème was inspired by a novella by Turgenev, and originally entitled it Le Chant de l'amour triomphant (The Song of Triumphant Love), later changing it to Poème symphonique, and and finally to Poème. Chausson composed this piece just three years before his untimely death. It is a haunting and luminous powerful work of deep melancholy and great beauty. The final piece on tonight’s program, The Overture to Hiawatha by the Black English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, has rarely been performed and recorded. In his day, Coleridge-Taylor was celebrated by the English public, and Edward Elgar. Coleridge-Taylor met Du Bois at the first Pan-African conference in London in 1900, and again in 1904, during Coleridge-Taylor’s first American tour. They corresponded, and Du Bois sent him a copy of his great work, The Souls of Black Folk. In turn, Coleridge-Taylor was deeply inspired by Du Bois’s work and the possibility of a black musical identity. As Du Bois had done in his writing, Coleridge-Taylor sought to create such an identity through music. His music exhibits bluesy harmonies, syncopated rhythms, and pentatonic melodies, merging African-American spirituals with the traditional forms of classical music. He wrote: “(w)hat Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvořák for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for Negro melodies.” Finally, I would also like to note that tonight’s concert has a special significance, since it is the birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois. We dedicate this concert to him, to his life and struggle, and to the inspiration he found in music. Thank you for coming tonight, and please enjoy the concert. ----Nathaniel Meyer, Music Director Du Bois Orchestra February 23, 2019 - 8 p.m. University Lutheran Church in Harvard Square Murata Sorrow Songs Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture Intermission Chausson Poème, Op.25 Thomas Cooper, Soloist Coleridge-Taylor Overture to Hiawatha Du Bois Orchestra Members Violin I Stephanie Atwood, Concertmaster Yip Wai Chow Cinthya Gonzalez Francis Nimick Peter Paetkau Meghan Titzer Bonnie Wong Violin II Jessica Tsang, Principal Nikola Chubrich Shadron Davis Buwen Kang Sarita Powell Brittany Ross Viola Raymond Dineen, Principal Peter Chew Mary Hecht Stephen Jue Cello Aaron Benavidez, Principal Gramm Drennen Max Ellsworth Yiming Li Isabella Liu Bass Alejandro Cimadoro, Principal John Koh Flute Joe LaRocca, Principal Sanuja Goonetilleke* Joshua Hahn ƚ Oboe Sachiko Murata, Principal Michael Ochoa Clarinet Yhasmin Valenzuela, Principal Jeff Li Bassoon Amy Seibel * ƚ Bohdan Shevchenko ˄ ‡ Horn Joe Borgia ƚ * Seann Trull ˄ ‡ Helen Fleisher Kevin O'Brien Trumpet Patrick Mont, Principal Patrick Sanguinetti ˄* Trombone Sam Kruse, Principal Sam Hausman ˄ Levi Schmitt, Bass Tuba Nyle Zafar, Principal Timpani Grace Herzog Percussion Nat Seelen Mike Tucker Ƚ - principal on Tchaikovsky *- principal on Coleridge-Taylor ˄ - principal on Murata ‡ - principal on Chausson Advisory Board Chaya Czernowin, Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music, Harvard University Aaliyah El-Amin, Lecturer on Education, Harvard University Howard Gardner, The John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University Vijay Iyer, Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts, Harvard University Benjamin Levy ’69, Affiliate Lowell House Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Associate, Harvard Music Department. Nathaniel Meyer, Music Director Nathaniel Meyer is an award-winning young American conductor who has already performed across the United States and around the world. Nathaniel was the First Prize winner of the inaugural Vincent C. LaGuardia Conducting Competition, and a finalist and award recipient of the American Prize in Conducting. He has been described as “talented and charismatic...a new, dynamic Leonard Bernstein” and hailed for his “energy and virtuosity” by the Belmont Citizen-Herald. Richard Dyer, former chief of the Boston Globe, described him as possessing, “the musical imagination and the physical gifts of a born conductor.” Growing up in Boston, Nathaniel was trained as a classical trumpeter before beginning his conducting studies. He was the winner of the National Trumpet Competition and the International Trumpet Guild Competition and was acclaimed by the Boston Globe for his “spirit, accuracy, feeling, and beautiful tone”. Touring as a trumpeter in the United States and abroad, he has performed in many of the world’s most acclaimed concert halls, including New York’s Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Smetana Hall in Prague, Brazil’s Sala São Paulo, the Gran Teatro de La Habana in Cuba, China’s Shanghai Oriental Arts Center and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. In Venezuela, he performed with the renowned Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. Nathaniel has received mentorship from some of the world’s revered conducting teachers. He has studied at the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors, the Järvi Academy for Conductors in Estonia, and with legendary Finnish conducting pedagogue, Jorma Panula as well as with Benjamin Zander. Nathaniel began his musical training with trumpeter Albert DiPietro, and went on to receive his B.A. from Yale University. He then earned his Master of Music in Orchestral Conducting at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he studied with David Effron and Arthur Fagen. In addition to his musical studies, Nathaniel studied German language, literature, and philosophy at Yale, and wrote a graduation thesis on the reception history of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies. He is the winner of Yale’s Wrexham Prize in Music and of the Artistic Excellence Award from the Jacobs School of Music. Nathaniel has worked with professional orchestras in Europe, including the Brandenburger Symphoniker and the Thüringen Philharmonie Gotha-Eisenach in Germany, the Camerata Antonio Soler in Spain, and the Philharmonic Orchestra “Mihail Jora” in Romania as well as youth orchestras, including the Portsmouth Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Indiana Youth Musicians, and the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. He has also conducted the Arapahoe Philharmonic in Colorado and Symphony Pro Musica in Massachusetts. Thomas Cooper, soloist Hailed as "delightfully spirited," (Cleveland Classical) violinist Thomas Cooper has appeared as a soloist with several American orchestras, including the Colorado College Festival Orchestra, the Coeur D'Alene Symphony Orchestra, the Credo Baroque Orchestra, the Oberlin Student Chamber Orchestra, and the Middlesex Chamber Orchestra among others. As a competitor, Cooper received top prizes at the Naftzger Young Artist Competition, Colorado College Festival Concerto Competition, American Protege Competition, Arlington National Competition, and was a semi-finalist at the Washington International Violin Competition. Cooper served as a concertmaster of both the Oberlin Orchestra and Contemporary Music Ensemble. He currently serves as the concertmaster of the DuBois Orchestra, and as a member of the Boston Philharmonic. He has also held principal positions in the New England Conservatory Philharmonia, the Colorado College Festival Orchestra, and the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. He has attended and performed at several summer music festivals, including the Keshet Eilon International Mastercourse, the Colorado College Summer Music Festival, Festival Orford Musique, the Mozarteum Summer Academy, the Bowdoin Music Festival and Nagold Sommermusik, receiving additional instruction from Vadim Gluzman, Itzakh Rashkovsky, Ilya Kaler, Christian Tetzlaff, Per Ennokson, and Michael Malmgreen. Cooper is currently earning his Master's Degree at the New England Conservatory with Malcolm Lowe and Soovin Kim, and received his Bachelor's Degree from the Oberlin Conservatory under Milan Vitek. A native of Lincoln, MA, he received his early musical training from Susan Gottschalk, Dubravka Sajfar, and the late Stephen Erdely. Additionally, he volunteers as a member of Help!ComeHome!, a non-profit aimed at helping Americans in need. Image result for sachiko murata oboe Sachiko Murata Sachiko Murata is an oboe player, educator and composer based in Boston. Praised for her “Nicely tuned and highly accurate in execution.” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), Sachiko Murata has distinguished herself as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral musician. She is currently Principal Oboe with The Claflin Hill Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts. Recent concerts include appearances at Sanders Theatre, Jordan Hall, Hanover Theater in Massachusetts, Soka Performing Arts Center in California, Hakodate Performing Arts Center in Hakodate, Japan and Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre of Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris in Paris, France. Winning first prize at the Ralph Gomberg Oboe Merit Award Competition led to numerous concert appearances, including a début recital with pianist Edmund Arkus at Hakodate Performing Arts Center, Japan and performance at Pickman Hall as a soloist with Longy Chamber Orchestra. Ms. Murata has a keen interest in contemporary music. She was invited to perform John Harbison’s “Supper at Emmaus” (world premier) as an English Horn player at the Cantata Singers 50th Anniversary Concert in Jordan Hall. As a composer, her most recent work Kyo-Sen, was highly acclaimed at the 12th Annual Ikeda Forum for Intercultural Dialogue at the Ikeda Center of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ms. Murata studied the oboe in middle school under the instruction of her father, a former principal oboist of the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra. She took first prize at the Hakodate City Music Youth Competition. Ms. Murata continued her studies in Tokyo with Yoko Kojima, a member of Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, and then on full scholarship at Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied with Keisuke Wakao of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Other mentors have include Peggy Pearson, Robert Sheena, Ray Still, Maurice Bourgue and Roger Tapping. Program Notes Murata Sorrow Songs from the composer: I have played in the Du Bois Orchestra for several years as the orchestra’s principal oboist. I am also a composer, and the Du Bois Orchestra has given me the opportunity to write a new piece, Sorrow Songs, especially for them. This project, and this orchestra, are very meaningful to me, and I am fully committed to them. This orchestra is very special. It is not just a typical local orchestra, because we have a mission based on humanity. We send a message that goes beyond standard music. We celebrate W.E.B. Du Bois and what he represents. Since I have been involved in this composition project, I've gotten to know about this important person in American history. I read The Souls of Black Folk, written by W.E.B. Du Bois, and it really struck me. I am from Japan and came to the United States as an immigrant. This opportunity to know more about the history of this country, for me has been very meaningful, because it reminds me of what I can contribute. Sorrow Songs, the title of my piece, is also the title of the last chapter in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois put many folk songs in the book, and musical notations as well, which are woven into my piece. Du Bois used his whole life to promote equality and fight against racism. His message is still so strong and appropriate in this time: “Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?” -W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk I composed this piece to be played by this orchestra, and believe it is a great way to share a message with people through music. It will be a great opportunity for people to know about the issues we as a country are still working on, and which Du Bois worked on as well. The movement is still going on - the work is not done, and my piece can be material to help awaken people. I am very grateful for this opportunity. -Sachiko Murata Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture Tchaikovsky composed Romeo and Juliet between October 7 and November 27, 1869. The first performance was given on March 16, 1870, in Moscow. The composer revised the score in 1870 and again in 1880; the final version, completed on September 10, 1880, has become the standard one. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, harp, and strings. Performance time is approximately twenty-one minutes. No other play by Shakespeare has inspired as many composers as Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the romantic era in particular, the drama held an enormous—and sometimes nearly fatal—attraction. After Berlioz saw Romeo and Juliet in a Paris theater and fell desperately in love with Harriet Smithson, who played Juliet, he announced his intention to marry the actress and to write a dramatic symphony (now known as the Symphonie fantastique) based on the play—and did both within a decade. The marriage was a mistake, however, and they later separated, but the symphony is one of his greatest works. More than twenty operas have been written on Romeo and Juliet, including Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, with a mezzo-soprano as Romeo (in the tradition of trouser roles), and Gounod’s enduring treatment, with the ending rewritten so that the lovers die at the same moment, singing in unison. Bernstein’s urban West Side Story suggests that the fascination with this subject hasn’t waned in our own time. And Prokofiev’s 1940 ballet is now recognized as a twentieth-century classic, although the composer originally wrote a happy ending because he couldn’t imagine how dying lovers could dance. But none of these works has surpassed the popularity of Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture. The Russian composer Mily Balakirev apparently first suggested the play to Tchaikovsky as early as the summer of 1869. He continued to push the subject and, when Tchaikovsky wavered, he prodded him. In a letter dated October 6, 1869, he offered literary observations, suggested general guidelines for treating the subject, and even dictated four measures of music to open the work. Before Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet was finished (and it was another ten years before it reached its final form), Balakirev had approved and rejected a number of themes, recommended a new introduction in the style of a Lisztian chorale, and presented his preferred tonal scheme, based on a fondness for keys with five flats or two sharps. Surprisingly, Tchaikovsky found his own voice with this work; Romeo and Juliet, a “Fantasy-Overture after Shakespeare,” is his first masterpiece. The original version, composed in just six weeks, was performed in March 1870, with Nicolai Rubinstein conducting. A new version, completed that summer, incorporated Balakirev’s idea of a slow chorale at the beginning. It was played in Saint Petersburg in early 1872. Although Tchaikovsky and Balakirev had a falling out that year, Tchaikovsky continued to turn to Shakespeare for inspiration: in 1873 he fashioned a symphonic fantasy from The Tempest and late in 1876 he complained of losing sleep over Othello, which he was determined to turn into an opera. He dropped the project early in the new year—two years before Verdi and Boito first conceived their Otello. (Hamlet was the last Shakespearean subject to interest Tchaikovsky: he composed a fantasy-overture on it in 1888 and three years later contributed incidental music to a staging of the play in Saint Petersburg.) In 1878, while he was recuperating from his failed marriage at his brother Modest’s house, Tchaikovsky turned to Romeo and Juliet and was struck by its potential as a great operatic subject. (One night that May, when Modest and Sasha went to the theater to see Romeo and Juliet, Tchaikovsky stayed home, put his nieces and nephews to bed, and then read the Shakespeare play for himself.) “Of course I’ll compose Romeo and Juliet,” he wrote to Modest from Brailov in June, excited by the prospect of writing a new opera. “It will be my most monumental work. It now seems to me absurd that I couldn’t see earlier that I was predestined, as it were, to set this drama to music.” But instead of writing an opera, Tchaikovsky put the finishing touches on the fantasy-overture two years later. (It’s this last version that is now regularly played.) The idea of composing the opera cropped up in 1881 and again in 1893, and on one of those occasions he sketched a duet for the lovers based on material from the fantasy-overture. But he never orchestrated it and ultimately gave up on the project, perhaps realizing how difficult it would be to surpass his orchestral work on the same subject. Seldom in Tchaikovsky’s music are form and content as well matched as in Romeo and Juliet. The contrast between family strife and the lovers’ passion ideally lends itself to sonata form, with two dramatically contrasted themes; the conflict assures a fierce and combative development section. Tchaikovsky begins as Balakirev recommended, with solemn and fateful chords that suggest the calm, knowing voice of Friar Lawrence. The street music is noisy and action-packed. The famous love theme begins innocently in the english horn and violas; it was one of Tchaikovsky’s boldest moves to save the big statement of this great melody, fully orchestrated and greatly extended—the way most listeners remember it—for much later, at the climax of the recapitulation. The lovers’ music returns once again in the coda, signaled by the timpani’s dying heartbeat, but there it sounds cold and lifeless. -Phillip Huscher Chausson Poème Few composers of the 19th century wrote music that was as sheerly voluptuous as Ernest Chausson’s, and few of his works are as effortlessly melodic and sensuous as the splendid Poème. Written immediately after 10 years of arduous labor on what he hoped would be his magnum opus—the opera Le Roi Arthus—Poème probably did seem effortless by comparison. Painterly Inspirations Languishing in Florence and its environs during the spring and early summer of 1896, Chausson felt inspiration afresh. “There are many things which I am tempted to write,” he wrote. “Pure music this time, which has been inspired in me by the landscapes or works of art here. I had such a low opinion of my musical talents that I was surprised when I saw what ideas certain paintings awaken in me. Some of them give me the entire outline of a symphonic piece.” It seems reasonable to assume that the Poème, composed during this spring, was one such piece. Completed in June 1896, it was first performed by its dedicatee, the Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, in Nancy on December 27; its success at a subsequent Parisian performance in April 1897 was an unexpected surprise to all involved. For years Chausson had struggled for recognition in Paris, where even in the 1890s his music was found to be too “experimental.” It was Chausson, whose earlier music had owed such enormous debt first to César Franck and then to Richard Wagner, who had advocated that French composers abandon the pervasive Wagnerism and create an individual Romanticism. With Poème he not only asserted an artistically independent style but also created a miniature jewel that combined poignant sentimentality with the declamatory lyricism that had always characterized French melody. Chausson originally titled the piece Le Chant de l’amour triumphant (Song of Triumphant Love), suggesting an initial programmatic intent; one writer has pointed out that this is the title of a short story by Ivan Turgenev, and as such, attempts have been made to point out parallels between story and music. But Chausson’s later suppression of the title in the printed score seems to make clear that his final intentions were to create a work free of extramusical associations. A Closer Look Poème is a straightforward and plaintive dialogue between violin and orchestra, cast in a single continuous gesture. The soloist intones the deliciously bittersweet melody in the opening section; the orchestra, taking up the violinist’s urgency, builds toward a nervous animato passage, leading toward the climactic allegro and a return to the opening tempo (lento). A reflective reiteration of the opening theme concludes the work with a hint of nostalgia. —Paul J. Horsley Coleridge-Taylor Overture to Hiawatha Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was just 22 and recently graduated from the Royal College of Music (RCM), London, when he completed Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. Hiawatha, a cantata for chorus, orchestra, and tenor, is based on a section of The Song of Hiawatha, the epic poem by noted American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The piece was an instant hit from its first performance at the RCM on November 12, 1898, and during the beginning of the 20th century gained the young composer wide acclaim, if not financial security. Insecure in his own abilities, and a novice in the music publishing business, Coleridge-Taylor sold the Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’s copyright to music publisher Novello’s for a mere 15.15 British pounds, in today’s terms the equivalent of 1,855.18 GBP or $2,404.64. During his 1910 visit to the United States Coleridge-Taylor remarked more than once: “If I had retained my rights in the Hiawatha music I should have been a rich man.” Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was Coleridge-Taylor’s most successful production, in its time rivaling Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah in popularity. After the cantata’s premiere, Sir Hubert Parry, a contemporary composer, pronounced it “one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history.” The work was received enthusiastically not only in England, but also in South Africa, New Zealand, and the United States. Despite the popular success of Hiawatha (more than 200,000 copies of the music sold during his too-brief lifetime), Coleridge-Taylor struggled to make a living for himself and his family and his extraordinary efforts to write original commissions, to conduct his and other composers‘ works, and to teach contributed to his premature death from pneumonia at the age of 37. From 1904 until his death in 1912 he was principal conductor of the Handel Society of London, and professor at Trinity College of Music, at the Crystal Palace School of Art and Music, and at the Guildhall School of Music. At the time of his death, Coleridge-Taylor had produced 82 numbered compositions and some 25 other works. Unlikely Musical Career Coleridge-Taylor’s humble origins and dark skin would not necessarily anticipate his illustrious musical future, even if his unmarried white English mother named him after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge-Taylor’s black African physician father (Daniel Hughes Taylor) returned to his native Sierra Leone before the child’s birth and, apparently, never knew of his existence. The composer experienced racism in England, although not as extreme as the racism in the United States. In his early childhood, Coleridge-Taylor lived with his mother in his maternal grandfather’s modest household in the London suburb of Croydon. This grandfather sparked Samuel’s musical gift when he gave the five year old a small violin and his first music lessons. In addition to his violin mastery, Coleridge-Taylor was an in-demand boy treble soloist at several churches. His musical talent recognized, Coleridge-Taylor in 1890 at age 15 entered the RCM. The young man soon showed promise as a composer and in 1892 was accepted as a student to RCM composition teacher Charles Villiers Stanford, at the time a noted composer. By the age of 20, Coleridge-Taylor had already scored nearly 30 vocal and instrumental works. Inspired by Johannes Brahms’ Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, Coleridge-Taylor wrote his own clarinet quintet, leading Stanford to acclaim the originality of his student’s work. Thus Coleridge-Taylor became the RCM’s star student in composition, and in 1893 he received the RCM’s only composition fellowship. Referring to young Coleridge-Taylor, the music critic Auguste J. Jaeger wrote to his future wife that “I have long been looking for a new English composer of real genius and I believe I have found him.” Mr. Jaeger became a champion of Coleridge-Taylor’s music and pressed music publisher Novello’s to publish Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. Coleridge-Taylor in 1897 completed his studies at the RCM where several of his student compositions (mostly small group chamber pieces) were performed. Edward Elgar, even in Coleridge-Taylor’s lifetime considered a top English composer, was among the music luminaries of the time who were impressed by Coleridge-Taylor’s work and promoted it. Elgar urged the directors of the prestigious Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester to perform Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A Minor for Orchestra in 1898. Hiawatha Longfellow’s poem, completed in 1855, adopted the trochaic tetrameter [a rapid meter of poetry consisting of four feet of trochees; a trochee is made up of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable] of the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala. When he chose to set the poem to music, Coleridge-Taylor acknowledged his attraction for the characters’ curious-sounding Indian names such as Nokomis, Chibiabos, and Iagoo, and that “The essential beauty of the poem is its native simplicity, its unaffected expression, its unforced realism”. Furthermore, Coleridge-Taylor was a great admirer of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, and of that composer’s Symphony from the New World which, some experts say, was inspired in part by Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The unusual rhythms of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast are said to be a reflection of Coleridge-Taylor’s admiration for Dvořák’s music. African-American Influence Although many of Coleridge-Taylor’s works resemble the style of white English composers, even from his student days he was interested in reflecting his African heritage. In this last pursuit, Coleridge-Taylor looked to African-Americans. He found inspiration from the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a gospel chorus from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, that had toured in England. Coleridge-Taylor also partnered with African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, whom he met in London in 1896, to set some of Dunbar’s poems to music. And he composed some African-themed orchestral works. The overture to Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast even incorporates strains from the African-American spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and the composer used melodies of African-American spirituals in his “Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, P. 59” for piano. Contemporaries reported that he advocated for black classical music. U.S. Reach Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was performed in the U.S. before Coleridge-Taylor’s tours here in 1904, 1906, and 1910. The Ann Arbor, Michigan Argus-Democrat of December 15, 1899 announced a December 18 performance by the Choral Union with the Chicago Festival Orchestra. The Chicago Apollo Club on April 15, 1901, at the Chicago National College of Music, presented the premiere Chicago performance of the cantata which “is creating quite a furore both in England and in this country”, the monthly magazine Music reported. Also in 1901, the African-American Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of the District of Columbia was founded specifically to perform Hiawatha and it invited the composer to conduct the piece when he would tour the U.S. which he did for the first time in November 1904. In an unusual honor at the time for an individual of African descent, President Theodore Roosevelt received Coleridge-Taylor at the White House during the composer’s 1906 visit. The composer was well-known and respected among African-American communities in the early 20th century, much as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X are well known today. Schools were named after him, including The Historic Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland, and Coleridge-Taylor Montessori Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky. In a spring 1908 letter to Coleridge-Taylor, the honorary treasurer of the S. Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society summed up African-Americans’ high regard for the composer and his cantata: “In composing Hiawatha you have done the coloured of the U.S. a service which, I am sure, you never dreamed of when composing it. It acts as a source of inspiration for us, not only musically but in other lines of endeavor. When we are going to have a Hiawatha concert here, for at least one month we seem, as it were, to be lifted above the clouds of American colour prejudice, and to live there wholly oblivious of its disadvantages, and indeed of most of our other troubles.” During his visits to Chicago in late November/early December 1904 and 1906, Coleridge-Taylor conducted a program of his shorter pieces but not Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. Although the composer’s 1904 Chicago concert was arranged with only 10 days’ notice, the hall was full. Reportedly, the Chicago concert pleased him more than the others: “My best time was in Chicago. The audience was made up almost entirely of those whom you would call really musical people, and there was no mistaking the immense German element among the listeners. Coloured people always put in a large attendance, and they were most enthusiastic.” Song of Hiawatha Trilogy Following Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’s success, Coleridge-Taylor completed two more sections in 1899 and 1900, The Death of Minnehaha, and Hiawatha’s Departure, respectively. The trilogy, published as The Song of Hiawatha, was first performed in its entirety in 1900 at the Royal Albert Hall. The last two parts never attained the success of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. However, from 1924 until the beginning of World War II, the complete trilogy and the Hiawatha Ballet Music were performed with costumes, scenery, and up to 1,000 performers at the Royal Albert Hall for two weeks annually. The famous English conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent recorded Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in 1929 and again in 1961. While in modern times Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, and Coleridge-Taylor’s music, had declined in popularity, interest in black composers has grown most recently spurring new performances and recordings. On the 100th anniversary of the work’s premiere, it was revived in Boston in 1998. The Colour of Music Festival in Charleston, South Carolina scheduled a performance for October 21, 2017. On August 24, 2017, during Chicago’s classical radio station WFMT’s Mid-Day program, host Lisa Flynn played a cut from a new release (Music by Composers of African Descent, or Violin Gems from Black Composers issued summer 2017) by Hungaro-Ethiopian violinist Samuel Nebyu playing Coleridge-Taylor’s Romance, Op. 39. Again on September 6, 2017, WFMT aired Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet in A. Rachel Barton, Chicago’s own star violinist, in 1997 released a new recording under the Cedille label of Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th and 19th Centuries including Coleridge-Taylor’s Romance in G Major for Violin and Orchestra. The British paper The Guardian in a June 2, 2015 article titled “Ten black composers whose work deserve to be heard more often” says of Coleridge-Taylor: “Even better [than Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast] are Coleridge-Taylor’s works for violin and orchestra, which are elegant pieces of fin de siecle romanticism.” -Miriam B. Scott Acknowledgements We deeply appreciate the support from the Harvard University Lutheran Church, Jayms Battaglia, Kathleen O'Keefe Reed, Kari Jo Verhulst and the UniLu community who have allowed us to rehearse and create our musical community within their parish since we founded the orchestra. We are also grateful for the support of our Advisory Board members, as well the Harvard School of Education and Kevin Boehm. This program is supported in part by a grant from Cambridge Arts, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. Our post-concert reception is supported by Insomnia Cookies and Wegmans. Your generosity also helps make these events possible. Donations Our concerts are free and accessible for everybody. Our concerts as well the outreach are based on volunteering, and the expenses are covered by our own funds. Therefore the orchestra relies on donations, and our activities are not possible without your support. If you enjoyed tonight's concert and would like to donate to the orchestra, you are welcome to place a donation in the orchestra donation baskets in the lobby. We have provided envelopes in the program for your convenience. If you would like to make a donation to the church, you are welcome to place a donation in the church donation baskets in the lobby. Thank you very much to everyone who has already donated. Stay in touch If you want to stay in touch with us and receive information about upcoming concerts and outreach, please send us an email (duboisorchestra@gmail.com) or leave us your email address after the concert.