SUMMER 2021 TRIAGE CONCERT PROGRAM:
“CRIES IN ISOLATION”
Denial: (Spiritual)
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”
Composer: Traditional
In an operatic aria, a singer expresses a singular intense thought or feeling about someone or something. Negro Spirituals are America’s arias. Each one is a narrative experience expounding on a single idea. Negro Spirituals are places where the brutality of racism, history and deep spirituality intersect. There are pleas for God to intervene in real time, and do something about the mental torment and physical pain the person is experiencing.
We are not sure what the song, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” is about. Given the time that the song was written, we know that Black Americans were subject to the horrifying act of lynching. It has been suggested that this piece is a singing testimonial about seeing a lynching first hand. What horrors were reported at a lynching? Lynchings were accompanied by rape, genital mutiliation, burning of the body while the person is alive, and some reports included a fetus being stomped to death right before it could be a newborn. Actions like these and many others were done in public. In full view of crowds of men, women, and children that numbered into the tens of thousands collecting the crime scene evidence as souvenirs.
The twin horrors of the plague (global pandemic) and racial injustice have strong parallels to each other. In both, we experience a level of fear that is all consuming. A fear that is everywhere yet nowhere. A fear so strong that it triggers denial of our own fragile existence. Fragility at the hands of nature and fragility at the hands of each other. We do not know why some have been taken. We do not know why we have not been taken yet. We do not know when our turn will be. It is that terrifying encounter, causes the singer to tell us, “I’m sometimes up. I’m sometimes down. Almost so low to the ground. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Glory Hallelujah.”
Anger: (Classical)
“Lyric for Strings”
Composer: Dr. George Walker (1922 - 2018)
The composer Dr. George Walker was the grandson of slaves. He is the first Black graduate from the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music. He is also the first Black composer to win a Pulitzer prize, earning the award in 1996. The pianist and composer wrote nearly one hundred compositions. His music possesses a voice of individuality but you cannot discern his race from listening to his music. Dr. Walker does use Blues and Jazz elements in some of his compositions but in terms of style, Dr. Walker’s music is in line with other contemporary classical composers.
“Lyric for Strings” is the second movement from his first string quartet. The composer later arranged that section of the string quartet for a full string orchestra. It is his most famous composition. At the time it was written, Dr. Walker was a student at The Curtis Institute. It was written in memory of his grandmother. His grandmother had been enslaved in America. In speaking to her grandson, Dr. George Walker about slavery she said, “They did everything but eat us.” Those words resonated with Dr. Walker all of his life.
The stunning beauty in this slightly dissonant piece of music is found in the range of colors of sound that slowly move and meander through the various instrumental groups. In this collection, it is a contemplative anger. Lower instruments and lower notes provide darker tones. Higher instruments and higher notes provide lighter colors and brighter textures. As the melody is passed back and forth from one section to another approaching the crescendo in the piece, the sound unfolds and grows like a ribbon being unspooled. This mastery in using the string orchestra locks the listener into an emotional roller coaster. From the first three bars of music, it is clear why this piece is so well loved. At the close we are finally met with a peaceful harmonic resolution that allows us to calm our stormy anger and ground all negative energy so that it does not wander freely.
Bargaining: (Jazz)
“Lush Life”
Composer: Billy Strayhorn (1915 - 1967)
The epic Jazz composer William “Billy” Thomas Strayhorn was a master storyteller and picture painter with music. Unlike his longtime friend and creative partner Duke Ellington, Billy was classically trained in piano and composition. Most of Duke’s most famous musical arrangements were done by Billy. The members of Duke’s band called him Sweetpea and made him their chef. Billy had an unusual amount of courage for that era of American life. Like James Bladwin and Bayard Rustin, Billy Strayhorn, was an openly Black Gay man at a time when being and expressing was exceptionally rare.
“Lush Life” is considered an American Art Song. Billy composed it when he was just 16 years old. It was the first song he showed to Duke upon meeting him. It is not an easy piece of music. Singers who have recorded it and musicians who have played it, have all taken a different approach to bringing this story to life. Some singers, like Frank Sinatra, found it too difficult. Some renditions are smokey and somber, others are somewhat lively with broadway-like flare.
This extremely challenging piece of music speaks eloquently about a person who was going about their life relaxing, only to find it interrupted by a fleeting romance. The result of the romance leaves the person feeling betrayed. Picture it as someone spurned by love, sitting at the end of a long dark bar, having a drink alone, trying to come to grips with the world. The mature conversational nature of this piece has the singer/composer bargaining with himself. The hurt and the bitterness expressed at the end shows a particular kind of wrestling with self. Strayhorn closes it by saying, “I’ll live a lush life in some small dive. And there I’ll be while I rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely too.”
Depression: (Tango)
“Adios Nonino”
Composer: Astor Piazzolla (1921 - 1992)
Astor Piazzolla was born in Argentina. His love of music was evident as a child. In his late teens, he joined a tango orchestra and started studying composition with Alberto Ginastera. Piazzolla fell in love with modern classical composers of the period like Stravinsky and studied the harmonies of Stravinksy and Ravel. Soon he began composing his own works and shortly thereafter, had his own tango orchestra which later disbanded. The hunger to be even more ambitious in his composing continued. Piazzolla continued to study classical music and started studying jazz. All of Piazzolla’s effort paid off. His musical innovations to tango music made him one of the most significant composers in the history of tango music.
When he was on tour in Central America 1959 Astor received a message that his father had died from a bicycle accident. This news came at a time when Astor was homesick and struggling financially. The tour itself was very unsuccessful. The death of his father coupled with an unsuccessful tour sent Piazzolla into a depression. Immediately after the tour was over, Piazzolla picked up his bandoneon and in 30 minutes composed “Adios Nonino”.
Although it was composed while in deep depression and in memory of the loss of his father, the title translates to “Goodbye Grandfather”. Astor’s father, Vicente, was a grandfather. The title links three generations of the family together in the musical portrait of one person. The structure of this piece moves from stormy frustration, to discontent, to a warm lyrical yet melancholy sadness. With various repeating sections.
Acceptance: (Soul)
“Sunny”
Composer: Bobby Hebb (1938 - 2010)
Bobby Hebb was born into a world of music. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Both of his parents were musicians that were blind. At the age of three Bobby was a street performer tap dancing alongside his older brother in the Hebbs’ Kitchen Cabinet Orchestra, their family band.. By the time Bobby was a teenager, he transitioned his tap dancing over to playing the spoons as part of the all white country music band, Roy Acuff's Smoky Mountain Boys. In the Jazz and R & B Clubs of Nashville Bobby played the guitar and the trumpet, which he learned from his parents who also played those instruments as well as a number of other instruments.
Hebb composed a handful of songs before writing “Sunny” and composed several songs after “Sunny”. None of those songs ever gained the kind of attention that Sunny had.
“Sunny” was composed after the simultaneous deaths of President John F. Kennedy Jr. and Bobby’s brother, who died in a knife fight a day later. Bobby said he wrote it because at the time everything was so negative. In an interview in 2016, Bobby Hebb talked openly about his life and inspiration for writing the song “Sunny”.
“It was dark when I started working on the song. The sun was rising. It was different. The sky was different colors. It was like purple. I felt that the song was good and that it would help but I didn’t know how much. Everybody was feeling really negative at the time and I think we all needed a lift. You go along with the tide. You can’t float but if the tide says you're going this way, you go with it. It’s tough to swim against it.”
In his own words Hebb makes it clear, part of acceptance is making an effort to look on the brighter side of really awful situations.
Faith: (Gospel)
“I Love the Lord”
Composer: Richard Smallwood (1948 - present)
Richard Smallwoood is one of America’s most celebrated gospel composers. Richard was born in Atlanta. His father Chester Smallwood was a preacher. When he was in the eighth grade, he had a young Roberta Flack as his music teacher and mentor. Smallwood is a graduate of Howard University where he studied piano, voice and ethnomusicology. Musicians and singers in gospel music compare his writing to that of another church musician from a different era. Many say that Ricahrd’s writing is like a modern J. S. Bach, the Lutheran church musician from around 1700.
In recent years, Smallwood has opened up about his life. Particularly his fights with depression and suicide. Personal battles were so intense, he had years where he could not compose a single note of music. Smallwood sees the pain from those personal battles as being the inspiration for his song writing. One of his most famous pieces, “I love the Lord”, was composed in 1976. When Whitney Houston was choosing the music for the soundtrack to the film The Preacher's Wife, she recalled singing I Love the Lord in the church she grew up in back in New Jersey. She loved the song so much she instantly wanted it on the album.
Smallwood’s “I Love the Lord'' is about the reclamation of faith hidden or lost. “I love the Lord. He heard my cry and pitied every groan. Long as I live and troubles rise I’ll hasten to His throne.” Faith is the substance of things hope for, the evidence of things not seen. In writing the text to “I Love the Lord”, Richard Smallwood has managed to write a piece of music that powerfully celebrates and uplifts the human capacity to believe in moments when it is not rational to do so.