Song of Hope
Boston Conservatory chorus and orchestra welcome guest soloist Karen Slack (soprano) to present the New England premiere of Florence Price's Song of Hope. Written in 1929, Price had recently fled the Jim Crow South only to encounter the uncertainty of the Great Depression. A work of remarkable beauty and inspiring optimism, Song of Hope has, for far too long, been absent from concert stages. Conducted by Stephen Spinelli and William Cutter.
This performance has been selected as part of Boston Conservatory at Berklee's fall 2022 Center Stage collection. Learn more about Center Stage and view all Center Stage performances.
Program Information
Program Notes, Texts, and Translations
ALEXANDRE GUILMANT: Organ Sonata No.1 in D Minor—Movement II: Pastorale
Alexandre Guilmant (1837–1911) was a virtuosic organist, an accomplished composer, and a pedagogue of the highest level. His first organ sonata, perhaps his most famous work, owes its inspiration to the structures of Felix Mendelssohn and the harmonic world of Cesar Franck. He composed it in 1874 at the age of 37, and later rescored it as his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra.
On November 15, 1904, a 16 year-old Florence Price was chosen by the faculty of the New England Conservatory to perform Guilmant’s first organ sonata for the composer himself. Guilmant publicly praised Price for her musicality and technical execution. The experience must have left a lasting impression on a young Price, as she would reference the Guilmant sonata, motivically and structurally, in her first organ sonata.
THOMAS DORSEY (arr. Arnold Sevier): “Precious Lord”
Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–1933) was known as “the father of Black gospel music.” He began his career appearing as pianist “Georgia Tom,” and after studying music more formally in Chicago, he began working as an agent for Paramount Records. Dorsey founded the first Black gospel music publishing company, a gospel choir, and the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses. He wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” after his wife, Nettie, died during childbirth. Just one day later, their infant son passed away. This arrangement by Arnold Sevier has been performed all over the world, most famously by the Aeolians of Oakwood University.
KURT WEILL: “Kiddush”
Among major Jewish American composers who have devoted a significant part of their gifts to Broadway, film, and American musical theater—Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Jule Styne, and Stephen Sondheim, to name only a few—Kurt Weill (1900–1950) was one of the very few, along with Leonard Bernstein, to write even a single synagogue piece. His setting of the Kiddush, however, was his only expression of the Hebrew liturgy outside the context of his Jewish pageants.
In 1943, cantor David Putterman of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue began an annual program of commissioning established and promising younger composers from the general music world—non-Jews as well as Jews—to write for the liturgy. Putterman turned to Weill for one of the commissions for the 1946 special new music Sabbath eve service. After discussing a number of possible texts, they agreed on a setting of the Kiddush—the prayer and b’rakha recited on Sabbath eve (and, with text variants, on the eves of the Three Festivals and of Rosh Hashana) over a cup of wine to affirm the Divine sanctification of the day. This ritual symbolizes, recalls, and celebrates God’s gift of the Sabbath as the first of the holy days to have been designated in remembrance of the creation both of the world and of the Jewish people.
WILLIAM GRANT STILL: “The Voice of the Lord”
William Grant Still (1895–1978) was one of this country’s most prolific composers, leaving behind approximately 200 works that include symphonies, ballets, operas, chamber pieces, solo works, and more than 30 compositions for choral ensemble. Still was the first Black composer to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company, and the first to have an opera performed on national television. A lesser-known but inspiring connection to tonight’s performance is the fact that Still and Florence Price attended the same elementary school and were taught by the same music teacher: Charlotte Andrews Stephens. Stephens began her 70-year teaching career as a long-term substitute at the school at the age of 15 in 1869.
Still’s “The Voice of the Lord” was commissioned by cantor David Putterman for the very same 1946 service at Park Avenue Synagogue. The Boston Conservatory Chorale lovingly prepared tonight’s performance from Still’s own typeset manuscript located in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library.
WILLIAM CUTTER: From a Shaker Hymnal
The remarkable Christian sect known as Shakers were a small band of dissident Quakers from Manchester, England, founded by Ann Lee. Her followers emigrated to New Lebanon, New York in the mid-18th century, where they established a community that became known for their innovative farming methods, furniture building, and unique form of religious worship.
Ecstatic dancing, or “shaking,” was a regular part of the Shaker communal church services, in addition to the singing of original hymns composed by members of the community. The most well-known of these original tunes is “Tis the gift to be simple,” the beloved melody used by Aaron Copland in his Appalachian Spring and a song that exemplifies the core tenet of the Shaker way of life.
From a Shaker Hymnal contains arrangements of four Shaker melodies scored for SSAA chorus, strings, and harp. “Let Zion move” has the character of a rustic march complete with some foot stomping and rhythmic clapping. “There’s a light” is also considered a march, but I chose to set the melody with a more lyric and meditative accompaniment. “Land of Love,” the only hymn in the set that is unaccompanied, is a lively celebration of the journey toward heaven (“our future home of glory, land of love and endless life”). The set ends with “I will go on my way,” which expresses the same sentiment as “Land of Love” but with a more reflective and reverent musical treatment.
—William Cutter, composer, conductor
RICHARD STRAUSS: “Morgen!”
“Morgen!” (Tomorrow!) is the last in a set of four songs (Op. 27, no. 4) composed in 1894 by Richaed Strauss (1864–1949). Here, Strauss sets to music the poetry of Scottish-born and German-raised writer John Henry Mackay (1864–1933), who also operated under the pseudonym Saggita. Strauss composed this music as a wedding gift to his wife, Pauline. Initially, the song was scored for solo voice, accompanied by piano. The orchestration heard this evening for strings, three horns, and harp was completed by the composer in 1897.
Morgen
Und morgen wird die Sonne wieder scheinen
Tomorrow again will shine the sun
und auf dem Wege, den ich gehen werde,
And on my sunlit path of earth
wird uns, die Glücklichen sie wieder einen
Unite us again, as it has done,
inmitten dieser sonnenatmenden Erde…
And give our bliss another birth…
und zu dem Strand, dem weiten, wogenblauen,
The spacious beach under wave-blue skies
werden wir still und langsam niedersteigen,
We'll reach by descending soft and slow,
stumm werden wir uns in die Augen schauen,
And mutely gaze in each other's eyes,
und auf uns sinkt des Glückes stumme Schweigen…
As over us rapture's great hush will flow.
—John Henry Mackay
Selections from Five Creek Freedmen Spirituals
Pianist, composer, pedagogue, and activist Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) was one of the leading musicians of her day. Born in Chicago, Bonds’ mother, Estella, was a church organist and a close friend of composer Florence Price. As musician mothers know, instructing one’s own child is a tricky business, so Estella sent her young daughter to Price for early studies at the keyboard. By the age of 21, Bonds had graduated from Northwestern University with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano performance.
In 1933, Bonds became the first Black soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her composing career has only recently come into focus, as large quantities of her music were located at the estate sale of her only child, Djane Richardson, who died in 2011 without any named heirs. Four movements of Bonds’ final major work, Credo, were performed by Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic just weeks after the composer’s death in 1972. Bonds wrote hundreds of songs, works for orchestra, musicals, and so much more. She was an accompanist for and champion of the leading singers of her day, including Abbie Mitchell, Etta Motten, Charlotte Holloman, Betty Allen, Adele Addison, and—perhaps most notably—Leontyne Price.
The Five Creek Freedmen Spirituals were written for soprano Hortense Love, who—in 1946—said the following of the arrangements:
“In the Southwest of the United States lies a wildly beautiful and fabulous strip of land, once called the Indian Territory, but now known as Oklahoma. Dwelling there near Muskogee is a group of people called the Creek-Freedmen...who are a mixture of Creek Indian and African…From early childhood, I have heard my grandmother, a Native [American] sing these songs in both Creek Indian and English. So, for my New York Town Hall debut, I asked Miss Margaret Bonds to make arrangements of them. They were immediately acclaimed as the first modern settings of spirituals. But, to me they are more: they are the embodiment, in notes, of the beautiful background that Nature gave the originators of these songs—an authentic portrayal of the souls of the Creek-Freedmen!”
The orchestrations heard tonight are still unpublished, and were prepared from manuscripts held in the Margaret Bonds Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library. It is unclear when they were last performed, though they most famously sounded at the 1990 Spirituals in Concert performance featuring Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, and the New York Philharmonic. An attribution to Margaret Bonds, both as arranger and orchestrator, were conspicuously absent from the concert program that day.
FLORENCE B. PRICE: Song of Hope
Florence B. Price (1887–1953) was a composer, pianist, organist, and teacher, who shattered glass ceilings as a Black woman working in classical music. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was one of three children. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a music teacher who provided Price with her earliest instruction. Price offered her first public performance at the age of four, and she published her first composition at age 11.
This prodigious trend would continue with Price’s graduation as the valedictorian of her high school at age 16, which was followed by her acceptance to New England Conservatory (NEC). At the urging of her mother, and in hopes of avoiding the racial prejudice she was likely to encounter, Price applied as a Mexican student, listing her hometown as Pueblo. She received scholarships to study with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse. At NEC, she was the only double major in her class, receiving degrees in piano pedagogy and organ performance. Upon her graduation in 1906, she returned to Arkansas, where she taught privately before assuming a faculty position at Shorter College. In 1910, she joined the faculty of Clark University in Atlanta, where she quickly became chair of the Music Department.
Florence returned to Arkansas in 1912 to marry the lawyer Thomas J. Price. The couple had three children, one of whom died in infancy. As the Jim Crow laws took root in Little Rock, the couple bore witness to repeated acts of racial violence. In search of a better life, the family moved to Chicago in 1927, during the epoch now known as The Great Migration. We all know what happened in 1929: the stock market collapsed, and our country entered The Great Depression. Price’s husband lost his law job, turned to alcohol and became abusive, and Price divorced him in 1931.
Price’s Song of Hope was initially located within the holdings of the University of Arkansas’s Florence Price Collection, inside an unopened envelope dated 1930.
Price wrote both the text and music for this work, which represents her first known attempt at orchestral writing. The poem, when considering the surrounding circumstances of racial violence, job loss, and divorce, is a remarkable statement of faith:
I dare look up. The heaven’s blue is mine!
Held in contempt and hated, still, Lord, I am Thine.
Tho’ torn asunder, poisoned arrows reach my soul.
Because Thou livest do I know that Thou shalt make me whole.
I dare look up through flames that, mounting high,
Consume my flesh. In faith I see Thee. Thou art nigh.
I would not that my anguish to Thy throne ascend,
For pain and sin and sorrow doth Thy mercy, Lord, transcend.
I dare look up! Thy promise made to me—
A humble creature, groping, will yet make me free.
Thy mighty plan, beyond my simple ken, assures
Thy love, surpassing human hope, protects me; still endures!
Musically, Song of Hope is a pastiche of Price’s multifaceted lived experience and musical career. In it, we hear the late Romantic influence of Brahms that stems from her European-rooted training, particularly in the D Minor sturm of drang used to present the text “I dare look up!” We hear Price’s career as a solo organist in the extended, orchestral interludes that evoke the sound of great cathedral organs like the one featured tonight. We experience the influence of her work in the silent film industry in the clever changes of mood guided by the orchestra. It is almost as though a Hammond organ appears as Price presents the text “Because Thou livest do I know, that Thou shalt make me whole,” in the manner of a congregational hymn. We reflect on her upbringing as a Black woman in the South through allusions to the African-American Spiritual, setting the text “In faith I see Thee.” If you listen closely, you may hear elements of “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”
Tonight’s performance represents the New England premiere and only second known hearing of the Song of Hope. It is not believed that the piece was performed in Price’s lifetime, and the first performance occurred this past March, in Ithaca, New York as a part of the ONEcomposer initiative’s efforts to disseminate the stories of musically excellent, historically excluded legacies. You, the audience for this New England premiere, are part of this remarkable work’s journey from a sealed envelope to stages around the world, and Boston Conservatory is grateful for your presence today.
Boston Conservatory thanks audience members for viewing this program information online. This paperless program saved 400 sheets of paper, 42 gallons of water, and 36 pounds of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions.