high note, A high note, not a footnote.

Today we honor the contributions of AfricanAmerican classical composers, musicians and educators. AAA supports the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in furthering their legacy through the DSO Classical Roots Celebration.

Henry Ford Health is pleased to sponsor the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Classical Roots Celebration honoring African-American composers, musicians, and educators. Diversity is the foundation on which Henry Ford Health stands. We value and embrace the wealth of the diversity reflected in our patients, our workforce and partners, and the many diverse communities we serve.

Lift Every Voice and Sing

JOHN ROSAMOND JOHNSON/ARR. CARTER

Scored for 2 flutes, oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

(Approx. 5 minutes)

Lift Every Voice and Sing was first performed, in poetry form, in commemoration of President Lincoln’s birthday on February 12, 1900, by a choir of 500 schoolchildren from the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida—hometown of sibling creators John Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson. The poem was set to music five years later.

Voicing the cry for liberation and affirmation for African American people, the song was declared “The Negro National Anthem” by the NAACP in 1919. It gained new popularity as a protest song during the Civil Rights Movement and was entered into the Congressional Record in the 1990s as the official African American National Hymn.

In his second autobiography Along This Way, James Weldon Johnson describes the emotion in writing Lift Every Voice and Sing: “I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so.” He later reported that creating the song’s lyrics was the greatest satisfaction of his life.

Lift Every Voice and Sing has been sung at the beginning of every Classical Roots concert since the event’s inauguration in 1978.

You Have the Right to Remain Silent

Composed 2007 | Premiered 2007 | Revised 2011

ANTHONY DAVIS

B. February 20, 1951, Paterson, NJ Scored for solo clarinet (doubling on contra-alto clarinet), Kurzweil synthesizer, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion, harp, and strings.

(Approx. 25 minutes)

Anthony Davis is an internationally renowned composer of operatic, symphonic, choral, and chamber works, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his opera The Central Park Five. He is best known for his operas X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, Under the Double Moon, The Central Park Five, and Tania

You Have the Right to Remain Silent was written in 2007 for clarinetist J.D. Parran and Kurzweil synthesizer player Earl Howard. Parran and the Perspectives Ensemble premiered the work in 2007 at New York’s Miller Theatre.

Of this piece, Davis writes the following: “You Have the Right to Remain Silent, for solo clarinet, Kurzweil, and chamber ensemble, takes its inspiration from the Miranda warning. The piece was conceived as a concerto for clarinetist J.D. Parran with realtime processing by Earl Howard on the Kurzweil. I tried to approach ‘Silence’ as, rather than John Cage’s apolitical world of ‘white privilege,’ a much more dangerous space. In the first movement, ‘Interrogation,’ I imagined the clarinet being interrogated by the orchestra as the orchestra utters ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ In the second movement, ‘Loss,’ a phasing texture slowly emerges as the orchestration gains momentum through metric modulation, setting up an improvised duet with the contra-alto clarinet and the Kurzweil. This section concludes with an homage to Charles Mingus with a melodic variation for the contra-alto clarinet in F minor that starts as a dirge and ends in swing. The third movement, ‘Incarceration,’ involves the percussion, with more text from the Miranda in contrast to the clarinet and Kurzweil. I have always been fascinated by the relationship of speech to rhythm, from Sprechstimme to hiphop. The Kurzweil processes both the clarinet and the percussion. The final movement, ‘Dance of the Other,’ begins with a rather simple melody that suggests the fantasy of otherness.”

This performance marks the DSO premiere of Davis’s You Have the Right to Remain Silent.

Price’s Concert Overture No. 2 was composed between her second and third symphonies. The first half of this work is based on three spirituals portrayed in miniature scenes: Go Down, Moses; Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen; and Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit Composed in 1943, the musical character of these spirituals moves rapidly in succession from somber, to poignant, to exuberant. The second half of this overture takes excerpts in the form of melodic fragments from the first three sections into a unified portrait closing with a return of Go Down, Moses as a symbolic cry for liberation.

Concert Overture No. 2

Composed 1943 | Premiered 1943

FLORENCE PRICE

Scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, english horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. (Approx. 14 minutes)

Florence Beatrice (Smith) Price was the most widely known African American woman composer from the 1930s until her death in 1953. After graduating as valedictorian of her class at the age of 14, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music where she studied organ and piano performance, and later composition with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse.

Price was the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra—her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on June 15, 1933. The premiere brought instant recognition and accolades to Price, yet much of her music eventually fell into neglect due to “a dangerous mélange of segregation, Jim Crow laws, entrenched racism, and sexism” (Women’s Voices for Change, 2013). Price’s compositions reflect a romantic nationalist style, while incorporating African American musical forms.

Price was known for her settings of spirituals, which have been performed by some of the 20th century’s greatest vocalists including Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price. Although much of Price’s music remained unpublished until after her death, the rights to her work were acquired in 1918 by G. Schirmer, and recent scholarship and research has led to an increase in frequency of orchestras around the world performing her works. Her Concert Overture No. 2 might have been lost if it wasn’t for the good fortune and hard work of Tom Dillard and Tim Nutt, librarians at the University of Arkansas who found this work among Price’s assets in her late Chicago residence.

This performance marks the DSO premiere of Florence Price’s Concert Overture No. 2.

Concerto No. 1: SERMON

Devised 2021 / Premiered 2021

VARIOUS COMPOSERS

DEVISED BY DAVÓNE TINES

Scored for 4 flutes, 3 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, 2 keyboards, and strings.

(Approx. 20 minutes)

Of Concerto No. 1: SERMON, Davóne Tines writes the following:

“Before I was a singer, I was a violinist for 14 years. I deeply love the broader orchestral repertoire and, as a young person, dreamed of performing concertos with major orchestras. When I became a singer, I didn’t want to leave that dream behind. With Concerto No. 1: SERMON, I wanted to begin to explore what it might mean for a singer to dialogue with an orchestra in the same way.

The complication that singing adds is the likely necessity of words. And with the addition of words, there is the likely addition of explicit meaning. If a concerto is essentially a statement made by a soloist in dialogue with an orchestra, then what could be expressed if this notion of a ‘statement’ is made more literal or even more personal through words? Should the words be poetic? Prose? Abstract? Direct? The notion of an abstract personal statement is intrinsic in the instrumental (e.g. wordless) concerto form. Solo instrumentalist artists have been doing this for centuries via their readings and interpretations of wordless musical texts. We surmise that we get a sense of an individual artist's persona and personality through their interpretation. Some appreciate the anonymity that abstraction affords the artist and audience alike, but for me, as an artist of classical music in a fraught contemporary context, I find there is an incredible opportunity and need for a classical artist to be in direct, unmitigated, intentional, and non-abstract communication with an audience. So, what did I want to say?

In the Fall of 2020, I was invited by Philadelphia Orchestra Musical Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin to perform John Adams’s The Wound Dresser. That beautiful, impressionistic piece, made on a text by Walt Whitman, can be understood as an extolling of the importance of care; but at the particular time, after yet another resurgence in attention paid to the undue deaths of Black people at the hands of police, this time Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I wanted to say something more personal, less abstract, and utterly direct.

I decided to explore the idea of delivering a sermon to speak to the majority white audience I would encounter; to make an appeal to that group which holds the most power and accountability in the matters of systemic and institutionalized racist violence.

There's a lot of different kinds of sermons, and I chose the idea of an exegesis sermon, the tradition I was most familiar with growing up in the Black Baptist church of rural Northern Virginia. In an exegesis, a speaker takes scriptures and expounds on them in order to share a principle or value. I wanted to share with an audience what it might mean to be a marginalized identity, wanting to be able to exist in a way in spite of marginalization. So, in order to tell that story, I chose three different poetic and prose texts by Black writers to serve as ‘scriptures,’ and paired them with three arias or songs that elucidate the texts.

The program starts with a text by James Baldwin excerpted from his A Letter to My Nephew used to introduce his book The Fire Next Time. In the text, Baldwin explores an idea of what it might mean or imply for marginalized people to exist beyond the fixed roles prescribed by their marginalization. That text is followed by John Adams’s Shake the Heavens from his El Niño oratorio which sonically shows a person moving into humanity almost by force, by shaking the heavens and the earth and disrupting reality or the majority expected identity of said person.

The next text is a short poem by Langston Hughes titled Hope. The idea being that a Black person claiming humanity isn’t a violent act, but rather a simple, human act. And what more human act is there than expressing emotion? And in this particular song, I wanted to express the human emotion of hope.

Then there's an interrogation. At the golden mean, there's a moment where the audience is asked to contend with the fact that myself or someone of a marginalized identity even ever feels the need to defend their humanity in the first place. The audience has seen me announce my humanity, then demonstrate, and now I ask: ‘Why do I still feel the need to prove my humanity to you?’

I asked my dear colleague and incredible writer jessica Care moore to create a text in response to that question. This text is in lineage with the text of an aria I premiered from John Adams’s opera Girls of the Golden West based on an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s staggering 1852 speech What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, which states: ‘Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping,... living, moving, acting, thinking,... we are called upon to prove that we are men!’

What does it mean for someone to be existent in a place where they feel they need to defend the basic fact that they're human? This critical sentiment is brilliantly expressed in the main aria from Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X titled ‘You want the truth, but you don’t want to know.’ The aria spells out that the crime and violence Malcolm X is accused of is a reflection of the systemically dehumanizing violence that was enacted upon him and his family for his entire life.

So, hopefully this direct personal statement, delivered as a sermon, in the form of a concerto, provokes the audience to question their complicity in a society that continues, through generations, to provoke marginalized people, Black people, to prove that we are deserving of the so-called inalienable rights afforded to those who are undeniably human.”

This performance marks the DSO premiere of Concerto No. 1: SERMON devised by Davóne Tines.