Program Notes

Thank you coming tonight!

Tonight's program includes music that is likely new to most of you. Following are some program notes to provide background.

Program

Cesar Franck:

Sonata for Piano and Violin

Clara Schumann:

Nottorno

Amy Chaney Beach:

Dreaming

Florence Price:

Sketches in Sepia

Margaret Bonds:

Troubled Water

Cesar Franck

1822-1890

Born in Liège, Belgium (then part of the Netherlands), Franck showed tremendous promise as a pianist and composer as a young student. He was sent to study at the Paris Conservatoire age 15, and studied there for 7 years. He returned home as a performer, organist and teacher, but returned to Paris two years later to participate in its more vibrant musical life, where he focused his efforts on teaching and perfecting his skills as an organist. It was in this period that he found his more mature compositional style, but his work didn't receive widespread critical acclaim until he wrote the Violin-Piano sonata in 1886 (at the age of 64). He composed his D minor symphony shortly thereafter, the other significant composition for which he's best known.

He has been called the "French Brahms" not only because they were contemporaries, but also because Franck shows a clear influence of both the German Romantic tradition and the French compositional style of his era, stemming from Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Bizet and Massenet.

The Violin-Piano Sonata is is considered one of the finest duets for violin and piano ever written. It is an amalgam of Franck's rich harmonic language with the Classical traditions he valued highly, held together in a cyclic framework more representative of the modern era - all the movements share common thematic threads. Importantly, it is a true duet - the piano and violin are equal partners, frequently sharing the same lyric passages, rather than taking turns with virtuosic solos. It explores a wide range of human emotion from impressionistic contemplation and dreaminess to agitated romantic expression to deeply emotive lyrical harmonic and melodic themes and motifs.

Clara Schumann

1819-1896

Born in Leipzig, Germany, Clara Schumann was a pianist, composer, and piano teacher. Regarded as one of the most distinguished and capable pianists of the 19th century, her career flourished for over 60 years, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital. She also composed solo piano pieces, a piano concerto, chamber music, choral pieces, and songs.

Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was regarded as one of the finest piano and music teachers in Europe and was very ambitious for Clara, who was a child prodigy. She began touring at age eleven to tremendous critical and popular success, and continued touring well into her 60s.

She married Robert Schumann in 1840 after a 2-year legal battle with her father, who had refused to allow the marriage. Theirs was one of the great love stories of classical music - not only did they remain passionately in love for the 15 years of their marriage, they collaborated musically and mentored a generation of younger musicians like Johannes Brahms. She gave the public premieres of many of her husband's and Brahms' works.

She had 8 children in 13 years with her husband, who had acute mental illness and was unable to support the family financially or emotionally. Regarded as the finest and most energizing pianist in Europe, Clara continued to perform and tour during those years in part due to her love of music and in part because it was a financial necessity.

Robert Schumann died of mental illness in 1856, and Clara resumed her career, performing extensively into her 60s and 70 despite an ongoing arm injury. She continued to collaborate extensively with Brahms as well as Joseph Joachim, one of the finest violinists in Europe at the time.

She produced 1-8 compositions every year beginning at age 11, until her output stopped in 1848, producing only a choral work that year for her husband's birthday and leaving her second piano concerto unfinished. Five years later, however, when she met Brahms, she engaged in a flurry of composing, resulting in 16 pieces that year, but she published no original compositions thereafter, and mused "I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?"

Amy Cheney Beach

1867-1944

Born in Henniker, NH, Amy Beach was a child prodigy who composed her first walzes at the age of 4. The great niece of the founder of Bates College, she came from an educated but extremely controlling family who was not comfortable with the range of emotion she expressed in her music.

A piano virtuoso at a young age, she gave her first concerts in Boston in her teens when her family moved there. At 16, she was married off to a prominent Boston surgeon, 24 years her senior, who allowed her to compose, but made clear that her primary obligation was as a society wife supporting his work.

In 1896, The Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered her "Gaelic" Symphony, the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. In 1900, the Boston Symphony premiered Beach's Piano Concerto, with the composer as soloist. It has been suggested that the piece reflects Beach's struggles against her mother and husband for control of her musical life.

After her husband died in 1910, she traveled to Europe for several years to perform there. She returned in 1914 and was commissioned to compose the Panama Hymn for the opening of the Panama Canal, after which she returned to Henniker where she continued composing, and remained for the rest of her life.

She was one of the first American composers of her era to succeed without exposure to European musical training, and was known during her lifetime as one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers, and the first American women to receive large popularity for composing symphonic music. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany.

Florence Price

1887-1953

Florence Price was born in Little Rock, AK into a prosperous, bi-racial family. Her father was the only African-American dentist in the city, and her mother was an accomplished music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. Despite the racism of the era, her family was well integrated in their community - all accounts are that she had a very happy childhood. She was a child prodigy who gave her first piano performance at the age of four and had her first composition published at the age of 11.

She graduated from high school at age 14 as valedictorian of her class, and enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music having lied on her application to lead them to believe she was Mexican. She majored in piano and organ and wrote her first compositions there.

In 1912 she married her husband and returned to LIttle Rock, where segregation laws and racist terrorism had so completely infiltrated daily life that she relocated her family to Chicago, where she was able to embark on a new and fulfilling period in her composition career. She published four pieces for piano in 1928, and in 1930, her Fantasie Nègre was premiered at the twelfth annual convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians.

In 1931, she divorced her abusive husband and eventually moved in with her student and friend, Margaret Bonds, where she connected with writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson. Together, Price and Bonds began to achieve national recognition for their compositions and performances.

In 1934, Price won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards, which led her Symphony #1 to be performed by the Chicago Symphony, making her the first African-American woman to have her music played by a major U.S. orchestra. Later in that same season the Illinois Host House of the World's Fair devoted an entire program to Price and her music despite the Fair being tainted by the unmistakable racism that characterized Chicago and the U.S. in general in the 1930s.

She went on to publish more compositions, some commissioned for Marian Anderson, and to play a pivotal role in teaching a new generation of African American classical musicians in Chicago before her death in 1953.

In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in an abandoned house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois, which Price had used as a summer home. In November 2018, the music publisher G. Schirmer announced that it had acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to Florence Price's complete catalog, making her music easily available to the public. As the New Yorker stated at the time, "not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history." She is now regarded as one of America's finest composers.

Margaret Bonds

1913-1972

Born in Chicago in 1913, Margaret Bonds was an acclaimed composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher. She was a trailblazer both for women and for African American classical musicians. She was the first African American woman to perform with the all-white and all-male Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of the first African American women to have her music broadcast on European radio, the first African American woman to have her music performed widely in Africa, only the second African American woman in classical music to be elected to full membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and the first woman, Black or white, to win three awards from ASCAP.

Her parents were both intellectuals, her mother a well known pianist, organist, and music teacher, and her father a physician who was prominent in the civil rights movement. She began her music study with her mother, winning several competitions before the age of 9. At 13, she began studying with Florence Price and premiered Price's noted work, Fantasie Nègre, in Chicago.

At age 16, she entered Northwestern University as one of its first Black students. Despite facing severe, hostile racial discrimination—including being barred from living on campus or using university facilities—she earned both her Bachelor’s (1933) and Master’s (1934) degrees in music. While there, she took comfort in the poetry of Langston Hughes, whom she discovered in the Evanston library, and with whom she collaborated for the rest of her life.

She went on to study composition at Juilliard, one of only 4 documented black women to study classical composition there. She remained in New York for most of the rest of her life, performing widely and building a large private studio of students. She was profoundly affected by the civil rights movement, and much of her composition reflects the pain and complexity of African American life including her vocal setting of Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", which she said saved her during her college years, as well as a choral setting of W.E.B. Du Bois's civil-rights manifesto "Credo".

When she died, she did not have a will. Her husband and daughter gathered papers from her apartment but many of her compositions were lost, and discrimination against black women meant that the majority of her music was never recorded. In addition, the copyrights on her compositions are murky, making public performances difficult.

Margaret Bonds arranged over fifty African-American spirituals for various instruments. Wade in the Water -the basis for "Troubled Water" - is associated with Songs of the Underground Railroad, and was used to warn people fleeing enslavement to get off the trail and into the water to prevent dogs from tracking their scent. It is also a song that uses water as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of life - within the context of the "troubled' waters" of life there are both redemptive waters (baptism, ritual healing) as well as choppy seas.

Wade in the water;

wade in the water, children;

wade in the water
God's gonna trouble the water
See that host all dressed in white,