Cries From OUR Soil
(In Memorial for Jeffery Dahmer’s Victims; their families; Sade Robinson and others that have been lynched)
“Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” ........………...........Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
Instrumentation: 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 4 percussion (suspended cymbal, woodblock, snare drum, bass drum, glockenspiel, xylophone, crash cymbals), celeste, and strings
Performance Time: Approximately 15 minutes
Florence Beatrice Price was born twenty-two years after the Emancipation Proclamation in Little Rock, Arkansas, and passed away in Chicago twenty-two years before the Voting Rights Act. She was born into a prominent Black family in Arkansas. Both of her parents were mixed-race and had been born free, while 90% of the black population of the state around them was still enslaved. Price’s mother (also named Florence) was a bank clerk, and Price’s father was one of only twelve Black dentists in the United States. Her family was very politically active. One of her father's patients was the governor. Her father was also selected to be one of the electors in certifying a presidential election. When Price was two years old, the great intellectual and abolitionist Frederick Douglass stayed at the Price home.
Price was exceptionally gifted, both musically and academically. She gave her first piano recital at four and graduated high school as the valedictorian at 14. After high school, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music, graduating in only three years as the sole student among two thousand to achieve a double major in organ and composition. After college, Price taught music at several different universities and colleges. She was on the faculty of Clark University in Atlanta before returning to her home city of Little Rock. Having grown up surrounded by people who were human trafficking victims of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, Price pulls together the first-hand accounts of slaves and slave ship journals to paint an exceptionally vivid picture for us.
Ethiopia's Shadow in America is a tone poem in three movements written in 1932.
Arrival of the Negro brought here as a slave
In the very opening bars of the clarinet and flute, we hear the moans, groans, cries, and sighs of woe from within the belly of the ship. After a long pause, floating in an abyss of silence, the lower strings and tuba announce that land is spotted. The woodwind section follows by playing the theme of the man. After his name has been called, there is a flurry of thirty-second notes from the first and second violins as chains rattle, symbolizing those still living suddenly waking up. Price orchestrates the sound of a ship moving boldly, increasing energy as it comes ashore. The flutes and oboes play a descending eighth-note figure illustrating the dropping of the anchor. Again, we hear the theme of the man from the woodwinds, which is taken up by the whole orchestra. This is followed by being sold at auction and branded with a hot iron, represented by a scream from the trumpet. After the pain subsides, Price give us a gentle dominant 7th chord symbolizing a new day. At this dawning of a new day we hear woodblock and strings creating the rhythm of working in the fields picking cotton. As the day progresses, we hear somewhat joyous sounds as those enslaved realize they are no longer in shackles because it impedes their ability to work. Late at night, we hear the punctuated rhythms from the trombone as the enslaved have church out in the backwoods.
2. His resignation and faith
This stirring Andante, featuring solos for violin, cello, and others, represents the individual and communal acknowledgement of the enslaved that they are not animals or things. They dwell in the understanding that they are human beings with self agency and divine purpose. The Andante is a suspension of time where we all are raptured up in celebrating our rediscovered humanity.
3. A fusion of his native and acquired impulses.
The final section is somewhat of a return to the first. We hear music and rhythm similar to what we heard earlier that sounds like picking cotton, only this time it’s slightly different. With this new sense of self, there is something different in the air. Only when we hear the barking of a dog in the trumpet line do we realize that a plot to escape the plantation was hatched. This is followed by a slow creeping section that sounds slightly jazzy, before the now escaped slave breaks out into an all out run. As the drama builds and builds, a cymbol crash followed by a pause, and the winds and brass restating the opening theme tell us that the person has fled. The minor pentatonic figure we hear is the ancestors aiding in the flight to freedom.
*Wisconsin Premiere*
“And they Lynched Him On A Tree” .....……………….......William G. Still (1895-1978)
Instrumentation: narrator, contralto soloist, mixed voice choir, 2 flutes (2 = piccolo), 2 oboes, (2= English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, crash cymbals, suspended cymbals, bells), harp, & strings
Performance Time: Approximately 17 minutes
Arkansas bornWilliam Grant Still is known as the dean of Black composers. Out of all the composers of African Descent for Western Classical music, Still has the largest catalog of music. His work encompasses film scores, operas, ballets, symphonies, choral works, chamber music, theater works, pieces for solo voice and pieces for solo instrument. He was not one to shy away from writing about life as a Black American.
Still had seen a lynching take place as a young teenager. He saw a group of white boys dragging a black boy to be lynched. Still and his friend jumped into the bushes for safety to avoid being lynched too. The experience left him extremely shaken and deeply disturbed.
Launched around the same time as “Strange Fruit” the idea for a choral ballad on lynching in America originated with Charlotte Mason, the "Godmother" of the Harlem Renaissance, and Alain Locke, a leading figure in the New Nergo movement and the head of the philosophy department at Howard University. Mason suggested that her niece, the poet Katherine Garrison (Biddle) Chapin, be approached about writing a libretto and Locke recommended that the great African-American composer William Grant Still compose the music. There was a great deal of concern about the piece among its creators. The conductor who premiered the piece, Artur Rodzinksi, was very worried about the ending: "A long dark shadow will fall across your land!," and suggested that it be changed to predict an "apotheosis of humanity." Rodzinski' s concerns were as much personal as political, his sister-in-law and niece were applying for U.S. visas, and he feared they would be denied should he conduct a work viewed as anti-American. A suitable compromise was reached for the premiere, and the chorus sang Biddle's original text, while the program reproduced a more optimistic ending ("O trust your brother and reach out your hand ... And clear the shadow that falls across your land!"). Rodzinski's personal concerns were also addressed, and Biddle's husband, the Solicitor General, was able to secure passage for his family out of Poland.
*Wisconsin Premiere*
“7 Last Words of the Unarmed” .………………...................Joel Thompson (1988 - Present)
Instrumentation: 4-part mixed chorus, 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, marimba, harp, piano and strings
Performance Time: Approximately 15 minutes
Composer, pianist, conductor and educator Joel Thompson holds a doctor of musical arts degree in composition at the Yale School of Music. He received a bachelor’s degree in 2010 and a master’s degree in choral conducting in 2013, both from Emory University. From 2013 to 2015, Thompson was the director of choral studies and an assistant professor of Music at Andrew College in Cuthbert, Georgia, and from 2015 to 2017 he taught at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta. His teachers include Eric Nelson, William Ransom, Laura Gordy, Richard Prior, John Anthony Lennon, Kevin Puts, Robert Aldridge and Scott Stewart. As a fellow at the Aspen Festival, Thompson worked with Stephen Hartke and Christopher Theofanidis. He and Dr. Eugene Rogers won an Emmy Award in 2017 for Craft Specialty—Musical Composition/Arrangement” for their work on Love, Life & Loss, a documentary performance of Seven Last Words of the Unarmed from the Michigan chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Thompson, who comes from a Jamaican family, was born in 1988 in the Bahamas and moved with his family to Houston when he was 10, then settled a few years later in Atlanta.
“There was everything about me in there; there was no need to censor myself. It was as honest as possible.” This is what Atlanta-based composer Joel Thompson said of the cantata he composed in 2014, Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, in a 2020 interview with The New York Times. The work is an intensely personal one, born of the grief, sadness and horror Thompson felt as the composer and the world witnessed the highprofile police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014. Thompson also found inspiration from visual artist Shirin Barghi’s #lastwords project, which turned the last words spoken by 15 different Black men and boys murdered at the hands of police and armed vigilantes into a series of simple black and white drawings. The words of seven of these men—Kenneth Chamberlain, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, John Crawford, and Eric Garner—serve as the text of each of the cantata’s seven movements.
Once the work was completed, Thompson put it away with no intent of hearing it performed, fearing there would be no one willing to listen to a piece with such sensitive subject matter. Spurred by friends, a read-through of the score was organized, after which Thompson was persuaded to send the score to Dr. Eugene Rogers, director of choral activities and associate professor of choral conducting at the University of Michigan. Despite the way Dr. Rogers was able to connect to Thompson’s work, he too was hesitant to bring it to life. In a 2020 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, Dr. Rogers relates: “I loved it and it resonated with me. But I didn’t know how I was going to do it with an historic group of mostly non-African American singers. I worried how it might be received by this community. It took me a long time, but I couldn’t put it away, I kept coming back to it.”
Eventually, Dr. Rogers was able to find an avenue to be able to introduce the piece to his musicians, saying that “...the idea of focusing on a universal theme—of love, loss, and humanity...helped me figure out a way to get my students to consider the piece as not just a political piece of music, because it never was intended to be political. Whatever you thought about the different cases surrounding these seven individuals, we could all come together and unite around the value of human life.” Dr. Rogers made a concerted effort to ensure that his musicians educated themselves on each of the individual seven men and their cases to ensure that his students could “form their opinions based on the facts.”
Dr. Rogers and the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club premiered Seven Last Words of the Unarmed in fall 2015. The fears that both Thompson and Dr. Rogers had about performing a work of this nature were not completely unfounded. At the time of its premiere, Dr. Rogers’ dean received letters. Several audience members stormed out of the auditorium in plain view of the choir, destroying their programs as they left. But in the intervening years since, Seven Last Words of the Unarmed has gained popularity and critical acclaim, as the United States continues to grapple with the continued killings of innocent, unarmed Black men, women and children at the hands of the police. “Here we are years later, and it’s still frighteningly relevant,”
Thompson weaves the melody of L’homme armé, an anonymously composed 15th-century secular French song, throughout Seven Last Words of the Unarmed. Within just a few years after its emergence, L’homme armé had been used as a cantus firmus in dozens of masses. Its only surviving verse warns of the dangers of the armed man:
The armed man should be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That each man shall arm himself
With a coat of iron mail.
The armed man should be feared.
The use of L’homme armé in religious masses allowed composers to imbue their works with complex layers of meaning. Its inclusion here not only provides thematic unity throughout the piece, but also a stark reminder that man has perpetrated horrifically violent acts against fellow man for centuries.
The composer’s description
Originally scored for tenor and bass choir, strings and piano, the work is heard this week in a newly revised version scored for soprano, alto, tenor and bass choir and orchestra, with bass singer Marcus Simmons as soloist in the third movement, “Mom, I’m going to college.” The composer has provided the following descriptions of the cantata’s seven movements.
I. “Officers, why do you have your guns out?” Encapsulating the sense of gloom that arises upon the news of the death of another unarmed black man, the chorus rises from the funereal piano ostinato singing Kenneth Chamberlain’s last words interpolated with the medieval tune, L’homme armé doibt on doubter - “The armed man must be feared.” After the final iteration of the 66-year old’s dying breath, the chorus repeats one important word: “why?”
II. “What are you following me for?” This movement uses the classical form of the fugue not only to portray Trayvon Martin’s last moments trying to escape death, but also to sonically capture the daily paranoia of the black experience while driving on roads, walking on sidewalks, and congregating at various social gatherings. Quotes of L’homme armé in the strings underneath the imitative counterpoint in the voices lead to a climactic yell of surprise at the movement’s end.
III. “Mom, I’m going to college.” In New York, February of 1999, four police officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea. The undulating pattern in the piano simultaneously yields a sense of calm with its simple harmonic underpinning and unease with its odd 5/4 meter.
IV. “I don’t have a gun! Stop shooting!” Of the seven movements, this one contains the most anger. Through the use of agitated rhythms and multiple harmonic exclamations on the word “stop,” the target of the rage is media portrayal of black men on the news, in comedies, and in dramas. Even in the aftermath of such tragedies, the rhetoric and images used to describe the deceased was markedly appalling across all media. This was the case, especially, for Michael Brown.
V. “You shot me. You shot me!” Oscar Grant III’s exclamations of surprise and incredulity were caught on several cellphone recordings in the BART station in which he was murdered. The movement honoring his life is a sonic representation of this epidemic. Aleatoric spoken exclamations of the last words crescendo alongside the humming of L’homme armé in the style of the Negro spiritual. Underneath the cacophony, the pulsing C of the piano, violin, and viola persist unflinchingly like a heart monitor until the end.
VI. "It’s not real.” Although they were referring to the BB gun he was carrying in the Walmart where he was killed, John Crawford’s last words escape the lips of thousands of African-Americans. Thus, the movement’s beginning is the soundtrack to my mental utopia. Saccharine sweet and soaring, the voices and strings are joined by the piano “heart monitor” which persists and gradually infects the strings, like reality interrupting a reverie.
VII. “I can’t breathe!” The decision of a Richmond County grand jury to not indict the officer responsible for Eric Garner’s death was the impetus for this entire work, and it is only fitting that his last words end the piece. After using a mournful Byzantine texture for the first half of the movement, I tried to capture the panicked death thralls of asphyxiation in the music. - Program notes taken from the Minnesota Orchestra
**New Commission & World Premiere**
“Cries from OUR Soil”................. Composer Autumn Maria Reed, Poet Brit Nicole, Soloist Michaela Usher, Vocal arrangement Lee Stovall, Visual Artist Brooklyn Lloyd Dixon
Instrumentation: 4-part mixed chorus, 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, marimba, harp, piano and strings
Performance Time: Approximately 5 minutes
This soul stirring collaborative work is a song for orchestra, choir and soloist. The vocal soloist expresses their own individual grief and questions how they should cope with the loss. The choir functions as the spirits of those who have passed. These ancestral voices respond to the soloist by saying, “ Remember me. Speak my name.” By speaking the names of those who have passed on regardless of circumstance, we keep the memory of who they were alive.
“Symphony #4 Autochthonous”......………………...............William G. Still (1895-1978)
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3 = piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons (2nd = contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets,
3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, military drum, triangle, gong, glockenspiel, resonator bell, cymbals, suspended cymbals), harp, celesta, & strings
Performance Time: 26 minutes
William Grant Still wrote this symphony in 1947. It is written in 4 movements. Still’s original program note states that the symphony “speaks of the fusion of musical cultures in North America.” This image of cultural pluralism marked a significant conceptual departure from the Harlem Renaissance aesthetic underpinning his Afro-American Symphony, which was intended to describe African Americans from the outset. Still’s daughter Judith explained that the Fourth, in contrast, “is praise for people who came ‘from the soil,’ abused and enslaved, and recognizes the power of those who had been so mightily put upon when they triumphed with honor over a difficult past. Out of the soil of oppression and forced degradation they rose up and acquitted themselves, bringing along their unique songs, humor, and distinctive, vibrant culture.” Rather than being set apart in this work, an African American musical identity springs to the fore within the context of a broader, more complex American cultural fabric. These vital cultural combinations are immediately apparent in the music.
Moderately
Slowly
With a graceful lilt
Slowly and reverantly