SUPPORT YOUR SYMPHONY

Dalia Stasevska makes her Seattle Symphony debut conducting Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, streaming March 3 on Seattle Symphony Live.

ADOLPHUS HAILSTORK
Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed: In memoriam: Martin Luther King Jr.
Born: April 17, 1941
Work composed: 1979
World premiere: January 1980, in Baltimore, Maryland, with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Henry Curry

What to listen for:
Hailstork creates a slow and gradual build of the orchestra. This piece, in essence, is one large crescendo, beginning with only the viola and cellos and layering the other voices of the orchestra until its arresting conclusion.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shook the nation and the world. King, a pivotal figure in the American Civil Rights Movement towards racial equality in a divided America, was killed on his hotel balcony in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1968. This flashpoint event and King’s enduring legacy had a profound effect on Adolphus Hailstork, leading him to boldly choose a career in composition and serving as the inspiration for tonight’s opening work, Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed: In memoriam: Martin Luther King Jr.

Adolphus Hailstork was born on April 17, 1941 in Rochester, New York and was raised in the state’s capital, Albany. His musical learning began early, first with the violin and later singing. With the encouragement of his orchestra director, Hailstork started composing when he was in high school – she told him, “If you write it, we’ll play it.” This led him to write several pieces for his high school orchestra and choir. Hailstork then attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C. Against the wishes of his mother who wanted him to major in music education for better job security, Hailstork enrolled in his first music theory course instead, a decision that ultimately led him further down the path towards becoming a composer. His experience at Howard University exposed him to the Black music traditions of the diaspora, which he had not been taught in a formal setting previously. After graduating from Howard University, Hailstork spent a summer at the American Academy in Fontainebleau where he studied composition with the famed pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger. He would later go on to earn a master’s degree in composition from the Manhattan School of Music.

At the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Hailstork had never before considered pursuing a doctorate. With the immense reverence he held for Dr. King, he felt compelled to further his education. Hailstork completed his doctoral studies at Michigan State University in 1971. Now among the most accomplished and sought-after composers, Hailstork has held faculty positions at Youngstown State University, Norfolk State University, and currently Old Dominion University.

Hailstork’s respect for the man who inspired him to further his educational pursuits can be heard in Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed: In memoriam: Martin Luther King Jr. In the score, Hailstork says of the interpretation of his piece, “A great man is being buried. A few mourners ring the gravesite singing a spiritual. Gradually, more bereaved gather and join in (strings). They reflect upon their memories of hopes and dreams inspired by their fallen leader. The service concludes and the bowed heads begin to lift. They will carry on.” The piece opens up with sustained notes in the cellos and moving notes in the violas. The color here is subdued and heavy, evocative of the nation in mourning following King’s assassination. As the piece continues, Hailstork continues to add more voices joining in grief, building upon the opening character. The climax – happening only moments before the end of the work – features sustained notes throughout the orchestra. Hailstork alludes to the weight of King’s legacy, the pain felt when he was assassinated, and the imperative that we must all work to see his dream become reality.

BÉLA BARTÓK
Piano Concerto No. 2, Sz. 95, BB 101
BORN: March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary
DIED: September 26, 1945, in New York
WORK COMPOSED: 1930–31
WORLD PREMIERE: January 23, 1933, in Frankfurt am Main. The composer played the solo part, and Hans Rosbaud conducted.

What to listen for: Bartók scored the opening movement for piano with an orchestra of winds and percussion only. The bright instrumentation, bustling textures, and scale-wise melody over static harmonies we hear at the outset create a festive sound that recalls the fairground scenes in Stravinsky’s ballet Petroushka. The movement builds to a climactic fanfare. After a solo passage for the featured instrument, the piano sprints at breakneck speed to the close.

Béla Bartók was one of the great composers active during the first half of the 20th century, and his creation of a thoroughly modern body of piano music was one of his principal achievements. In addition to many keyboard solos, Bartók left three concertos for piano and orchestra. The second of these works, completed in 1931, unfolds in the traditional concerto format of three movements, but the overall structure is more complex and more original than this description implies. Its opening and closing movements are fast and lively, as we usually find in such compositions. The central movement begins in slow tempo, again as we should expect, but has a scherzo-like section inserted as a contrasting central episode. The concerto’s three movements thereby produce a symmetrical fast — slow–fast–slow — fast design that bespeaks Bartók’s fondness for formal palindromes.

Bartók commences the second movement with a chorale-like melody intoned by the strings, which heretofore have been silent. Their music sounds austere, almost ethereal, in part because the score instructs the players to use mutes and withhold vibrato. To this hymn, the piano and timpani give answer with music that is, in its own way, equally austere. Suddenly, though, the music changes tempo and character, breaking into a swift scherzo replete with repeated-note figures and frantic scales and tremolos. The frenetic motion continues until cut off by a clarion note from the trumpet, after which the hymn-like music resumes, with the piano’s repeated-note figuration from the scherzo held over.

The initial theme of the finale has about it a rough energy that sets the tone for what ensues. Soon we hear a recollection of the melody from the opening movement. During the remainder of the piece, Bartók develops these two subjects in tandem, with several episodes from the first movement reprised in varied form. In doing so, he uses his full complement of instruments for the first time.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”
Born: September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, Bohemia
Died: May 1, 1904, in Prague
Work composed: 1893
World premiere: Carnegie Hall in New York, on December 16, 1893. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Dvořák’s friend Anton Seidl.

What to listen for: Dvořák precedes the first movement with an introduction in slow tempo. In the first movement proper, the main theme is a robust idea given out by horns and woodwinds. The second movement features one of the composer’s most famous creations, a deeply poignant melody sung by English horn. But the beauty of that theme should not distract us from the strange power of the brass chords that frame the movement, nor from the melting poignancy of the second subject. That later idea presents melancholy phrases in the woodwinds against tremolo figures in the strings that sound like wind rustling through tree branches in a bleak autumn sky. We also hear a recollection of material from earlier in the symphony and a quietly dramatic faltering of the music near the close.

Antonín Dvořák was born in Bohemia, the country we now know as the Czech Republic, and during the 1870s rose to prominence as his homeland’s foremost composer. In the years that followed, his fame spread throughout Europe and even across the Atlantic, where it attracted the notice of a Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, who had established a new conservatory of music in New York. In 1891 she invited Dvořák to become the director of this school. He would be well compensated and his duties light, leaving plenty of time for composing. After some negotiating, Dvořák accepted the position and, in September 1892, sailed for America. For much of 1892 through 1895, the composer lived in New York and in Iowa, where he spent a summer in a community of Czech emigrant farmers.

It was during his first year in America that Dvořák composed his Symphony No. 9, which bears the subtitle “From the New World.” Dvořák declared that he intended that moniker to mean “Impressions and greetings from the New World.” This is far from the musical panorama of America and American life some commentators have heard in the piece. Moreover, the form and developmental procedures at work in this symphony are very much within the mainstream of European musical tradition. Still, Dvořák stated that the work’s American provenance would be obvious “to anyone who ‘had a nose’,” and he told a correspondent: “I do know that I would never have written [it] ‘just so’ had I never seen America.”

This ambivalent perspective applies the symphony’s thematic material. On more than one occasion during his American sojourn, Dvořák expressed interest in African-American spirituals and native American tribal music, and he once alluded to the “peculiarities of Negro and Indian music” in the themes of this symphony. But, as he also emphasized, there are no actual quotations of any American music in the “New World” Symphony. Moreover, some of the “peculiarities” of its melodies are also those of Czech folk song.

And so we return to Dvořák’s title, which offers what is no doubt the most helpful perspective on the question of the symphony’s nationality: that it was written by a Czech musician under the influence of his experience of life in the United States. To be sure, the symphony’s form, orchestration and much of its character is typically central-European. Yet Americans can be proud that this composition was born on their soil, and that certain aspects of American legend, literature and folk song undoubtedly influenced it in ways we cannot precisely define, yet nevertheless strongly intuit from its music.

The ensuing scherzo balances fierce energy with a relaxed and folkloric central episode. This third movement also recalls themes from the opening part of the composition, and Dvořák extends this idea to the finale. Here recollections from each of the preceding movements provide, in the concluding minutes of the symphony, a comprehensive and exciting conclusion.

© Kathryn Brown
© Paul Schiavo