2021 MUSIC PROGRAM NOTES

Summer 2021 Program Notes Introduction

The two Triage Concert programs for 2021 were developed with attention to the twin horrors of the plague (COVID-19) and pervasive racial injustice culminating in modern lynchings. There are strong parallels between each of these situations. In both, there is an all consuming fear that something hideous is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In both, the saturation of fear triggers denial of our own fragile existence. A fragility born out of our daily fight at the hands of nature (COVID-19) and a fragility at the hands of each other (racism). The resulting collective fallout of our failure, produces a mania where we would rather die to save our humanity than to continue to live without it. These selections for 2021 have been derived and assembled in response to the horrors above. They sit as a recognition of this tension ever dominating our current state of affairs.

On a more specific level, the two Triage Concert programs differ in one major aspect. The first Triage Concert program, “Cries in Isolation”, is a musical scream from the depths of the confinement of our experience. It is an emotional retching of our human anguish born out of inexplicable torture. The second Triage Concert Program for 2021, “Together in Our Brokenness” addresses the combination of the plague and racism as a collective experience. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his letter from Birmingham Jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” This second Triage Concert program gives the threads of our garment a musical voice. In this way, we are all tailors of this incomplete future. Time is of the extreme essence in crafting a world that not only fits us, but one that our children can gaze upon and decide that it is fashionable enough to wear.

Summer 2021 Triage Concert Program:

“Cries in Isolation”

Denial: (Spiritual)

“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”

Composer: The Ancestors

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 mutilation, 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 Baldwin 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 smoky 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 Stravinsky 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.

Summer 2021 Triage Concert Program:

“Together In Our Brokenness”

Denial: (Spiritual)

“My Lord What A Mourning”

Composer: The Ancestors

There are two spellings for this Negro Spiritual. “My Lord What A Morning” and “My Lord What a Mourning”. In either case, the details in the lyrics stay mostly the same. “My Lord what a mourning when the stars begin to fall. You will hear the trumpet sound, to wake the nation underground. Looking to my God’s right hand. When the stars begin to fall.” The reference is Biblical in nature. Revelation time where we grapple with our collective fate through the lens of judgement. This Negro Spiritual has some bearing in scientific ties. Our sun is a star. Comets are called shooting stars. For the stars to fall might mean comets as fire and brimstone from heaven. Or for the sun to extinguish. Morning and mourning the composer has us living the dawn of total destruction.

For those who had to move through a global pandemic and navigate racism, the fire of destruction falls constantly and everywhere. Due to its relentless nature, denial of the situation at hand is impossible. Where do we go? Where do we turn? Is this really happening now? Those questions are embedded in the composer's line that says, “you will hear the sinner shout, to wake the nations underground”. The dead coming up from within the Earth invite denial further into a dominant position.

Anger: (Classical)

“Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes”

Composer: Florence B. Price (1887 - 1953)

Florence Beatrice Price was born in Arkansas. She began composing music at the early age of four. When she was nineteen, Mrs. Price entered the New England conservatory of Music and graduated with degrees in both piano and organ. In 1932 she won two first prizes in the Lewis Rodman Wanamaker competition for her “Symphony Number 1 in E Minor” and her “Piano Sonata in E Minor”.

“Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” is an interesting choice for her to include in her collection of Five Negro Folksongs for string quartet. It is an English folksong, not an American folksong. Other pieces of music she uses for thematic material seem at first glance to be familiar to Black Americans of the Time. “Calvary”; Shortnin Bread”; “Clementine”; and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” would most certainly have been known at that time. “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” moves and dances in an almost waltz like - seesaw fashion. It does not play with syncopated rhythms like the other pieces in her collection.

Why did F. B. Price, choose this piece? In a letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she says, “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” The ad “You Love Me” from Beats by Dre, speaks to a particular frustration and anger experienced by Black and Brown people. This frustration and anger arises when a group of people are loved for what they produce but not who they are. The balance of the life of Florence B. Price saw lynchings and the constant fight to get her music heard despite it being popular to the public. “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes”, could easily be the classical soundtrack to the ad by Beats by Dre. As a representation of the anger and frustration of that, Mrs. Price has taken lemons and made sonic lemonade for us to listen to and think about what love means between all of us.

Bargaining: (Jazz)

“Black and Blue”

Composer: Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller (1904 - 1943)

As a composer of over 400 pieces of music, Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller was a pianist, violinist, organist and singer. He cemented the style of the stride piano and made it popular in Jazz music. Waller was the seventh child of eleven children. His father was a pastor and he played organ at his father’s church. In his mid teens, he went on to play organ at a theatre in Harlem. Within one year of being there, he wrote his first ragtime tune.

The swinging “Black and Blue” was originally written for Edith Wilson to sing as part of a minstrel show called Hot Chocolate. The show was financed by a Dutch mobster Dale Schultz to make fun of the life condition of Black People. The lyricist Andy Razaf writes, “Browns and Yellows all have fellas. Gentlemen prefer them light. Wish I could fade. Can’t make the grade. Nothing but dark days in sight. I’m white inside, that don’t help my case. Cause I can’t hide what is in my face. My heart is torn. Why was I born? What did I do to be so Black and so blue?”

This piece of music takes a serious turn away from its original intent. Jazz trumpet player Louis Armstrong recorded and performed the piece. However, he changes the focus of the piece by omitting the first line, removing any reference to gender, slowing the music down, and emphasizing the pain inherent in the lyrics of the Black experience. This transitions the song away from an upbeat joke to serious and solemn contemplation. The overtly stated suggestion in the song becomes, that if Black people had been born different or had been born someone else entirely or if the world was different, life would be better. “Black and Blue” becomes a conversation bargaining with the core convictions of racism embedded in the American consciousness and subconsciousness. Navigating the reality of life as one is, is a series of trade offs about what is allowed and permissible versus what is not. For America, bringing those questions to the surface display the confrontational bargaining nature of this piece.

Depression: (Ballad)

“Why? The King of Love is Dead”

Composer: Calvin Eugene “Gene” Taylor (1929 - 2001)

Gene Taylor was born in Toledo, Ohio. His music career did not begin until he moved to Detroit, Michigan. As a bass player, Taylor was heavily involved in the Jazz scene before joining Nina Simone’s band. Previously, he had played with Horace Silver’s band.

This piece of music is particularly significant to American history. It was written three days after the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. making it the first piece of music written about King in the immediate aftermath of his death. It has been called the saddest song ever written. Dr. Nina Simone debuted this piece at the Westbury Music Festival on Long Island, New York. She and her band learned it the same day of the concert.

Before launching into the song, Dr. Simone tells her audience, “you know they are killing us one by one now. I hope you know that.” The lyrics capture the hopelessness and depression that gripped the United States. In our present moment, echoes of that hopelessness and depression resonate loudly off the walls of our history and find its way permeating our now. The High Priestess of Soul, Dr. Nina Simone, closes the piece by asking us, “What’s going to happen now that the king of love is dead?”

Acceptance: (Soul)

“What’s Going On”

Composer: Marvin Gaye (1939 - 1984)

Marvin Gaye was born in Washington, D.C. to a father who was a preacher and a mother who was a domestic worker. Marvin started singing in church at the age of four while his father accompanied him on the piano. It was not until he got a singing role in a school play that he was encouraged to pursue music as a career. He did not start taking music seriously until junior high school. In his late teens, after serving a brief time in the U.S. Air Force, Marvin started forming his own singing groups and began working as a session musician.

The music composition, “What’s Going On” was inspired by a friend of Gaye’s who saw police brutality at an anti-war protest. It is written in the surprisingly bright key of E Major. The flurry of sixteenth notes at the beginning followed by the glissando sliding down, sets the stage for the lyrics. That introduction is a musical sensation of emotional panic headed towards a crash. The interlude between sections where Gaye sings not words, but sings syllables over suspended chords and moving rhythmic figures, musically strengthens our sense of a world in disarray.

This year, “What’s Going On” turns 50 years old. The message in “Whats Going On” calls us to recognize the problems that exist in society but to not let those problems shackle us to depression. Marvin reminds us that we all have the capacity to be change agents for each other's circumstance. Marvin tells us this by singing, “We’ve got to find a way to bring some lovin here today.” We are called to be empowered to set the climate for the treatment of our fellow persons on Earth. It is this message of acceptance of our own capacity shown through human agency, that propels us forward. It allows us to we turn hope into action and remake the world around us so that it embraces everyone.

Faith: (Reggae)

“One Love”

Composer: Robert “Bob” Nesta Marley (1945 - 1981)

Bob Marley is an iconic legend of Reggae music. Born in the Jamaican village of Nine Miles, Bob’s father was a White man who was a captain in the british government. His mother was a Jamacian born Black woman. She met the captain at the age of seventeen. The captain married her and left her soon after she became pregnant. It was in the move to Kingston, that Marley encountered American R&B through his affiliation with street gangs. Over time, Jamaicans started infusing American R&B with musical ideas and styles created on the island. As a result, Reggae was born.

Bob Marley’s group, The Wailers, recorded “One Love” for their album titled ‘Exodus’. This album is considered to be the most important Reggae album of all time. “One Love” was written during a time of upheaval in Jamaica. Both of Jamaica’s political parties were run by White elites. The island nation of African people, wanted to govern themselves. Bob Marley had denounced politicians as doing the work of the Devil. Bob’s fame and popularity made him a public force that could sway people’s voting decisions. So much so that there was an assassination attempt before a peace concert to unify the people of Jamaica. It was not the assassin’s bullet that killed Marley but cancer. This year is the 40th anniversary of Bob Marley’s death.

The idea of love as a uniting human experience is a current that runs through all music no matter what the style of music is or the genre. In “One Love” Marley implores us to spiritually see each other as all part of one human family and to celebrate together all the aspects of our humanness both good and bad. “One Love” is a lesson in how to heal and be whole. A lesson that teaches us that no matter who we are, how we are, or why we are, we all come from the source.

It all started when…

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