Philharmonic Convert: 'Home'

carthage music department presents

Home Carthage Philharmonic Dr. Etsushi Edward Kawakami, director

Saturday, May 9, 2026 | 7:30 p.m.

A. F. Siebert Chapel Kenosha, WI

program From The Southland (1910) Selected Movements

Harry T. Burleigh, arr. Stig Junge (1866-1949)

Fantasie Brilliante on Themes François Borne, ed. James Galway from Bizet’s “Carmen" (1840-1920) Amanda Nelson, flute 2026 Carthage Philharmonic Concerto Competition Winner

Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, B. 178, “From the New World” I. Adagio - Allegro molto II. Largo III. Scherzo: Molto vivace IV. Finale: Allegro

Anton Dvořák (1841-1904)

personnel Violin I Ben Thoma** Caila Abarro ** Euphrates Willis Sophi Nevarez-Padilla Jerry Farias Violin II Katherine Rieckmann* Jasmin Turner* Kylene McNeese Robert Lach Diego Solano Emily Van Laningham Ciara Woodring Sugar Wradislavsky Viola Hailey Hoelzer* Ava Putnam Elizabeth Whittier* Eli Miklusak Quentin Zeller Rachel Lenzi Giada Castelli Sammantha Gant Cello Danika Stewart* Rebecca DeBoer* Aubri Smith Bass Riley Gaylord* Emma Gough John Lucas

Flute Mandy Nelson* Kaylynn Brewton* Addison Kelnhofer* Oboe Toby Staaden* Laurel Brown Bella Howard* Joseph Redmond Clarinet Hope Johnson* Jana Paulsen* Madison Bazylewicz* Basoon Neil DuJardin* Jalen Imroth* Horn Lanie Klawonn* Piper Nelson Michael Aylward* Trumpet Michael Wellems* Trombone Jake Muller* Anita Gross Tuba Riley Bretthauer* Timpani Cora Brown Cece Cooper *Principal ** Concertmaster

program notes From The Southland (1910) Harry T. Burleigh, arr. Stig Junge (1866-1949)

Selected Movements There is a story behind tonight's program that begins not with Dvořák, but with a young man from Erie, Pennsylvania, standing in a composer's office and singing.

Harry Thacker Burleigh arrived at the National Conservatory of Music in New York in 1892 on a scholarship. His grandfather had been enslaved, and from him Burleigh had inherited a deep knowledge of the spirituals and plantation songs of the African American South.

The Conservatory's new director was Antonín Dvořák, freshly arrived from Bohemia with a mission: to help America find its own musical voice. Dvořák had a theory that the future of American music lay in its folk traditions — but he needed to hear them. Dvořák asked Burleigh to sing for him, and teach him the spirituals Burleigh had learned from his grandfather. Burleigh obliged, spending countless hours in Dvořák's office, singing the melodies that had been passed down through his family. In 1893 Burleigh even assisted Dvořák in copying out the instrumental parts for the symphony you will hear in the second half of this concert.

The New World Symphony, in other words, passed through Burleigh's hands — literally. The haunting English horn melody of the Largo, the themes that would later become "Goin' Home," exist in part because this man sang his grandfather's songs to a homesick Czech composer.

Tonight's program opens with Burleigh's own music as a way of restoring that credit — of saying, before a single note of Dvořák is played, here is where it came from.

Burleigh went on to become the first African American composer acclaimed for his concert songs, and he is credited with bringing the spiritual into the concert hall as a legitimate genre of American art music. He arranged over one hundred spirituals for voice and piano, earned the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1917 for outstanding

program notes achievement, and served for fifty years as the baritone soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan — all while remaining one of the most quietly influential figures in American music history.

From the Southland, composed in 1910, is a suite of six piano sketches portraying the landscapes and moods of the American South that shaped Burleigh's musical imagination. The titles tell the story: Through Moanin' Pines evokes the dense, sighing forests of the Southern interior; The Frolic captures a moment of communal joy and rhythmic exuberance; In de Col' Moonlight is a nocturne of stillness and longing; A Jubilee rings out with the celebratory energy of the spiritual tradition; On Bended Knees is a meditation, quiet and devotional; and A New Hidin' Place — perhaps the most charged title in the set — carries with it the weight of the Underground Railroad, of home as the thing you risk everything to reach.

You will hear a selection of movements tonight in Stig Junge's orchestral arrangement. Together they form a portrait of the American South not as it was romanticized by outside observers, but as it was lived and remembered by someone who inherited its music in his bones. That is precisely what Dvořák heard when Burleigh sang for him. And it is precisely what we mean, tonight, by home.

program notes Fantasie Brillante on Themes from Bizet's "Carmen" François Borne (1840–1920)

edited by Sir James Galway The story of this piece begins in Paris in 1875 with one of the most famous disasters in operatic history. When Georges Bizet's Carmen premiered at the Opéra-Comique, critics panned it and audiences were scandalized by its story of a fiercely independent woman who refuses to be owned by anyone. Bizet died of a heart attack just three months after opening night, never knowing that Carmen would go on to become one of the most performed operas ever written.

Since its premiere, Carmen's color and passion have inspired spectacular arrangements for guitar, piano, full orchestra, and — in the case of François Borne — flute. Borne was a flutist with the principal opera company in Bordeaux and a professor at the Toulouse Conservatory. His Fantasie Brillante, like celebrated arrangements of Carmen by Sarasate for violin and by Busoni and Horowitz for piano, combines the virtuoso's understanding of the solo instrument with a flair for the dance rhythms and passionate colors of the opera.

The Fantasie is a showpiece, not a direct transcription. Borne selects the opera's most irresistible tunes: the smoldering Habanera, in which Carmen compares love to a rebellious bird; the swaggering Toreador's Song; and a dazzling array of improvisatory passagework that lets the flute take virtuosic flight.

A note on Carmen and home: the opera is fundamentally a story about people who don't belong — the Roma, soldiers, smugglers — living on the margins of a society that has no place for them. Its most famous melody, the Habanera, is itself borrowed: it was adapted from a song Bizet found in a collection of Cuban folk music. Carmen is full of music that traveled far from wherever it started.

program notes Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, B. 178, "From the New World" Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) I. Adagio — Allegro molto II. Largo

III. Scherzo: Molto vivace

IV. Finale: Allegro con fuoco In September 1892, Antonín Dvořák stepped off a ship in New York Harbor. He was already one of Europe's most celebrated composers, and he had been hired to lead the National Conservatory of Music of America — an institution with the unusual mandate of helping the United States find its own musical voice and in a surprisingly progressive twist, actively "seeking out and encouraging female, minority and physically disabled students." He would spend three years here, homesick for Bohemia almost from the start, and he would write his greatest symphony.

Dvořák had a theory: the future of American classical music lay not in imitating Europe, but in the folk music already on American soil. He listened deeply, and his most important teacher was Harry T. Burleigh, a young African American singer and composer who sang spirituals for Dvořák in his office. Dvořák was said to have changed the famous English horn theme of the second movement from clarinet to cor anglais because it reminded him of the voice of Harry Burleigh. He also drew on his reading of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, in which he found images of a vast American landscape utterly unlike the rolling hills of home. Dvořák was so taken by African American musics that he discovered on our shores that he declared the Conservatory be "thrown open free of charge" to black students, and even went so far as to state that, "In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music."

program notes Many of the symphony's themes appeared to be direct folk quotations, but Dvořák insisted he crafted them from scratch, using his deep study of American indigenous and African American melodies as a guide. His distillations of that heritage were so natural that, even today, this can be difficult to accept. The symphony opens dramatically, then breaks into the kind of driving, forward momentum that earns it the title "From the New World." The third movement scherzo, which Dvořák himself connected to scenes from Hiawatha, crackles with rhythmic energy. The finale gathers everything together in a sweeping, stormy conclusion.

But the heart of the symphony is the second movement, the Largo. Its hauntingly beautiful English horn solo evokes a sense of immense space and deep, unshakeable nostalgia — so perfectly did Dvořák capture the essence of a spiritual that one of his own students, William Arms Fisher, later set words to it. Fisher called his song "Goin' Home," publishing it in 1922, and it has been mistaken for an actual folk spiritual ever since. That confusion is itself a tribute to Dvořák's gift: he wrote something that felt so deeply American, so deeply rooted in longing, that people assumed it must have always existed.

The transformation of Dvořák's music into "Goin' Home" is a fitting legacy for a symphony about the New World — a work whose message transcends any one culture. Tonight it gives our program its title. Home is what Dvořák missed when he was here. It is what his second movement makes us feel in the music. And it is what this country asked him — and asks all

featured soloist Mandy Nelson is a senior flute performance major and criminal justice minor from Loves Park, Illinois. Throughout her time at Carthage she has been involved in many instrumental ensembles including Wind Orchestra, Carthage Philharmonic, and Jazz Ensemble. Outside of music, Mandy is a member of the track and field team at Carthage. In the fall, Mandy will be attending Northern Illinois University College of Law.

upcoming events Dan Klimzcak: Lives and Times, Student Recital Saturday, May 9 • 4 p.m.

H. F. Johnson Recital Hall Yingchen Dou, Graduate Student Recital Sunday, May 10 • 2:30 p.m.

H. F. Johnson Recital Hall Percussion Ensemble Concert Tuesday, May 12 • 7:30 p.m.

A. F. Siebert Chapel Lydea King: Time, Student Recital Wednesday, May 13 • 7:30 p.m.

A. F. Siebert Chapel Spring Choral Concert Friday, May 15 • 7:30 p.m.

A. F. Siebert Chapel Honors Recital Saturday, May 16 • 2 p.m.

A. F. Siebert Chapel

Arts at Carthage acknowledges that the land on which our building stands is part of the traditional Potawatomi, Sioux, Peoria, Kickapoo, and Miami peoples past, present, and future. These homelands reside along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes. We honor with gratitude the land itself, and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations.

Many Indigenous peoples thrive in this place—alive and strong, and this calls us to commit to continuing to learn how to be better stewards of the land we inhabit as well.

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