UIC Orchestra Concert October 14, 2021

Thursday October 14, 2021 5pm Timothy Fawkes conductor UIC Music Department Fall Showcase Student Center East Illinois Room

ORCHESTRA

UIC

Land Acknowledgement Statement

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The UIC School of Theatre and Music sits on the traditional homeland of the original peoples of the area: the Three Fires Confederacy (the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations) as well as the Menominee and Ho-Chunk who—along with many Indigenous people—were among its first inhabitants.

With respect and gratitude, The School of Theatre and Music honors the many Native Americans who have, do, and will call this land their home.

STM acknowledges that we have benefitted from the repeated attacks on Native Americans that forced tribal representatives to sign the 1816 Treaty of St Louis, relinquishing to the U.S. all claims of the land from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. This land seizure led to the era of economic development and rapid growth that made Chicago the metropolis that it is today.

We have an obligation to our students and the nearly 65,000 Native Americans now living in Chicago to do no further harm, to amplify Native voices, and to fight for equity and inclusion by engaging in anti-racism policies and practices. For us, this work begins with this statement, and must be followed by actions that immediately affect our work and life on campus. STM therefore commits to the following initiatives: / The creation of an Antiracism Action Plan and Committee / Antiracism training for all STM faculty and staff / Annual Recruitment workshops and on-site special events for Native high-schoolers. / An annual master class or talk with Native musicians and/or theatre artists. / Free tickets to STM performances and concerts, provided through UIC’s Native American Support Program. / Increased representation of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) voices and perspectives in STM pedagogy, classrooms, and performances.

This is only the beginning of our work. We look forward to expanded and sustained STM programming that addresses ignorance, systemic racism, and white dominance.

Developed by STM Theatre Faculty 08.25.2020

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Repertoire String Symphony No. 4 in C minor

Felix Mendelssohn

(1821)

(1809–1847)

I. Grave - Allegro II. Andante III. Allegro Vivace

String Quartet in G major (1929)

Florence Price (1887–1953)

II. Andante moderato

edited by Er-Gene Kahng

Second Suite from Les Indes

Jean-Philippe Rameau

Galantes (1735)

(1683–1764)

I. Air for the Warriors

carrying the flags

III. First air for the

Bostangis

VI. Tender air for the

Rose - Rondeau

VIII. Air for Boreé and

the Rose

Psalm and Fugue, op. 40a (1941)

Alan Hovhaness (1911–2000)

I. Psalm II. Fugue

Novelletten for String Orchestra, op. 52 (1902)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)

UIC Orchestra Personnel

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Violin

# denotes concertmaster

Caroline Barrett

% denotes section leader

Kai Huang Ashlin Michell Adrian Monarrez Stephanie Mudreac Preethi Navalpakkam Walter Rosales # Cissy Xiao % Viola Arij Ahmed Sarah Estilo % Reed McKay Kevin Ramirez Jaelyn Robinson Cello Ibrahim Adebayo Maria Garcia-Kinzig Ishaan Patel % Barunka Szamaransky Mason Taylor Double Bass Jason Soto %

Biographies

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Timothy Fawkes - conductor Timothy Fawkes is Instructor and Music Director of the UIC Orchestra. In his two decades as teacher, musician, and leader, Tim has worked with musicians of nearly every age and skill level. In addition to his work at UIC, Timcurrently teaches music at Glenbard East High School in Lombard, IL, where his responsibilities include three levels of orchestra, two levels of guitar, and several co-curricular ensembles and clubs. Under Tim's direction, the Glenbard East orchestras have collaborated with numerous colleges and professional artists and have presented two performances at the Illinois Music Education Conference.

Tim’s teaching career has spanned several states, grade levels, and content areas. He was assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra and instrumental/general music teacher in the Philadelphia public schools. He has taught courses at The University of Texas and presented at colleges including The Ohio State University and the University of South Carolina. He began his career at Lake Zurich (Illinois) High School.

A passionate advocate for expanding access to the arts, Tim has managed education and community engagement programs for The Philadelphia Orchestra and Peter Nero and the Philly Pops. He has been music director of the University of Texas Opera Society and has conducted the Dallas Wind Symphony. In addition to his work on cello and guitar, Tim plays trumpet in the band Midnight Hour, which pays tribute to Memphis soul music of the 1960s. Tim is also currently president of the Illinois unit of the American String Teachers Association (IL ASTA). He is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a M.M. in conducting, and Northwestern University, with a B.M. in Music Education.

Program Notes

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Mendelssohn - String Symphony No. 4 in C minor notes by Grant Hiroshima Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg in 1809, the eldest male child in a prosperous family. His father was a banker and his grandfather a highly regarded scholar and philosopher. His mother, musically and artistically sophisticated, introduced the children of this multilingual family to the piano. When Felix's musical gifts were recognized, his tuition was taken over by the eminent composer and teacher Carl Zelter.

Even considering these fertile beginnings, it is unnerving to assess the

young Mendelssohn's achievements; he was the ultimate prodigy. The quality of his output before leaving his teens shows a greater sophistication than that of Mozart at a comparable age. Some of the pieces we most immediately associate with Mendelssohn's name came from this period: the Octet for Strings from his 16th year, the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream from his 17th. And both of these more than five years after his first public piano recital.

Mendelssohn's early instruction from Zelter inspired a reverence for his musical predecessors. His recent models were Mozart and Haydn (who died in the year of Felix's birth), but his studies were equally devoted to the "unfashionable" music of a still more remote era. In 1829, the 20-year-old Mendelssohn lead a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in Berlin, the first significant presentation of the work in nearly 40 years and the beginning of a wide revival of interest in the senior Bach's music. The music of Bach's sons had eclipsed the popularity of their father's in the intervening generations.

The work on this program, Mendelssohn's String Symphony No. 4 in C minor, precedes the years of the composer's greatest fame. It was completed in May of 1821 by a boy of 12. Felix was studying with Zelter during its composition and the teacher's conservative musical leanings are reflected in the choice of form and style; the string symphonies of Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), second eldest son of Johann Sebastian, clearly were an inspiration, and the slow introduction is reminiscent of Haydn. The dramatic dash that follows, however, is pure Mendelssohn.

Program Notes

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Price - String Quartet in G major notes by Chris Vaneman Florence Price had, in the 1930s and 1940s, been a composer of some repute—she had even been, very briefly, famous, the first Black woman to have a work performed by a major American orchestra. Price had grown up in the relatively cosmopolitan Little Rock, Arkansas, of the turn of the 20th Century, where Jim Crow laws had not prevented the growth of a welleducated Black elite. She had attended the New England Conservatory, one of the few major music schools open to Black students, and after years spent teaching in her hometown and at Clark University in Atlanta, found herself in Chicago by the end of the 1920s.

In 1932 she submitted two works to the Wannamaker Foundation’s competition; both won awards, with her First Symphony taking the top prize.

The Symphony came to the attention of Friedrich Stock, the Chicago Symphony’s German-born Music Director, and he programmed the piece to general acclaim later that year. A star, it would have appeared, was born.

But the “two handicaps--those of my sex and race,” as she put it in a letter to Serge Koussevitzky, proved enough to prevent her entering the mainstream in a time when racism and sexism were overt in the music world. Later works were performed by the Women’s Symphonies of Chicago and Detroit, and she was a leader in the tightly-knit community of Black classical musicians in Chicago, but when she died in 1954, only Black newspapers saw fit to print an obituary.

Price and her music were nearly lost to the tides of history. But thanks to the efforts of a few intrepid performers and musicologists like the pianist Karen Walwyn, a Florence Price revival has been gaining steam in recent years, with works receiving premieres and acclaim 70 and 80 years after their composition and even a profile in The New Yorker.

The Andante on tonight’s program is an early work, dating to 1929.

Formally and harmonically it shows the influence of Dvorak and other late Romantic composers, but its melodies bear the distinct pentatonic stamp of the African-American spiritual tradition. It is entirely beautiful, and it offers a powerful hint of the musical treasures still wrongfully neglected in the broken-down corridors of history, and therefore still to come to light.

Program Notes

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Rameau - Second Suite from Les Indes Galantes notes by Eric Bromberger Jean-Philippe Rameau made his reputation as a harpsichordist and theorist, and then at age 50 he did something that sent his career (and life) in an entirely new direction: he wrote an opera. Hyppolyte et Aracia may have been a commercial failure, but at this point Rameau had been bitten by the bug. Over the rest of his life he wrote 20 more operas, in the process becoming France’s leading opera composer. If Rameau’s first opera was a failure, his second was a striking success. Les Indes Galantes, produced in Paris on August 23, 1735, was an opéra-ballet, a form that combined singing and dancing. That title has been variously translated as “The Amorous Indies” or “The Courtly Indies,” and in its final form Les Indes Galantes consisted of a Prologue and four entrées (essentially, acts), each of which has an individual name, is set in an exotic foreign location and tells a different love story. In the Prologue, youthful warriors from France, Italy, Spain and Poland are called together by Hebe (Youth) and Cupid (Love), but they choose to forsake love and go off to seek military glory in exotic lands (the “Indies” of the opera’s title). Forsaken, Cupid decides to visit those lands herself and thus provides the context for the following four love stories. The Generous Turk, set on an island in the Indian Ocean, tells of the slave girl Emile who escapes her pasha to be reunited with her lover Valère. In The Incas of Peru, set at the foot of a volcano in Peru, the princess Phani chooses the Spaniard Don Carlos over the Peruvian Huascar, whose treachery is rewarded by his being buried beneath lava from the volcano.

The third entrée – titled The Flowers, Persian Festival – revolves around two young men, each of whom loves the other’s slave. The plot (too complicated to explain here or anywhere) eventually ends happily for all concerned. The Savages, set in North America, once again features an Indian princess, this time named Zima. Forced to choose between a Spanish and a French suitor, she rejects both and chooses her Indian lover, the noble Adario. Featuring Rameau’s powerful music, spectacular settings and lavish sets, Les Indes Galantes proved a great success: it was given 64 times in Paris in the two years after its premiere. The opera is rarely staged today, but many have felt that Rameau’s music is too good to lose.

Program Notes

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Hovhaness - Psalm and Fugue notes by Laurence R. Taylor Alan Hovhaness was one of a number of American musical mavericks, whose style owed much to the influence of music from other cultures, as well as being a composer who strove to achieve a directness of expression and accessibility to today’s audiences. Born in Somerville, Massachustts, of Scottish and Armenian ancestry, Hovhaness was trained at the New England Conservatory, where he showed an early interest in Eastern music, particularly Indian music, as well as studying the techniques of Renaissance music. Following a summer spent studying at Tanglewood in 1943, where his work met with severe criticism from Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss, Hovhaness gave serious consideration to the direction in which his work had been moving, which led to the suppression (and destruction) of much of his earlier output. At the relatively late age of 32 he began to give more attention to the music of his Armenian forebears, as well as seeking to establish a clarity of harmonic style, and primary focus on the melodic element in his work, which gave his compositions their distinctive simplicity of expression.

By the 1950s Hovhaness’ compositions began to reach a wider public, especially through the great success enjoyed by his Second Symphony (“Mysterious Mountain”), which was marked by a meditative and mystical character which would be associated with the composer to the end of his career. He was perhaps unique among American composers for the “open-hearted spirituality” of his work, as Allan Kozinn pointed out in his obituary of Hovhaness in the New York Times. Hovhaness was an incredibly prolific composer, composing more than seventy symphonies, and a huge range of music for the stage,orchestra, chamber music, chorus and piano.

One of his most popular works was an orchestral tone-poem, “And God Created Great Whales” (1970), which included a part for taped whale song.

The Psalm and Fugue, (composed in 1941, although only published in 1958), is one of those early compositions which survived Hovhaness’ ruthless winnowing out of his catalogue of works. In its melodic and harmonic simplicity it shows the influence of his preoccupation with Renaissance music. The Psalm is a plaintive, chant-like introductory movement, mostly diatonic (as if meant to be played on the "white keys” of the piano), with soli passages in the violas and celli offering surprising

Program Notes

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diversions outside the tonal center. The fugue sets forth with a “subject” (principal thematic element) heard in the second violins – a sort of “fivefinger” melody akin to that which opened the composition. In quick succession the subject is heard in entries by the first violins, cellos and violas. The music becomes chromatic in texture, moving into tonalities quite removed from the modal G Major which has dominated the composition from the beginning, with striking touches of dissonance.

An increasing rhythmic momentum creates a mood of excitement, with chains of rapid notes in the lower strings. Marked “noble and majestic,” the opening music of the Psalm movement returns (with the basses rejoining the orchestra), to stride on to a powerful conclusion.

Coleridge-Taylor - Novelletten for String Orchestra notes by K. Dawn Grapes Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912) was the son of a white, English mother and a Sierra Leonean medical student who met in London. Young Samuel, raised in his grandfather’s household by his single mother, picked up the violin quickly, showing musical talent at a young age. A scholarship at age fifteen led him to the Royal College of Music, where he eventually changed his major to composition. He studied with the great Charles Stanford Villiers, at times receiving more attention from his teacher than fellow students Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan-Williams. The young composer finished college with a publisher in place and a number of compositions in print. In the late 1890s, Coleridge-Taylor became increasingly interested in his own heritage and the concept of PanAfricanism, which led him to study the history of Africans in America. He later noted that one of his lifetime highlights was meeting W. E. B. DuBois at the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. In 1898, he composed a cantata titled Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast that found instant international success. A group of African-American singers in Washington, DC founded the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, finding inspiration in the black composer’s music. They invited him to the United States, where he made three tours in 1904, 1906, and 1910. On the first trip, he conducted his own works with the Marine Band, and was invited to meet Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. Being forewarned of the discrimination he might face in U.S., Samuel wrote to his sponsor: “I can assure you that no

Program Notes

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one will be able to stop me from paying you my long deferred visit. As for prejudice, I am well prepared for it. Surely that which you and many others have lived in for so many years will not quite kill me… I am a great believer in my race, and I never lose an opportunity of letting my white friends here know it.”

Written in 1902, this work’s title may have been inspired by Robert Schumann’s Novelletten, op. 21, a set of piano miniatures composed in 1838. Coleridge-Taylor, a gifted violinist, wrote his four Novelletten for strings, infusing romantic sentimentality with a coloristic exploration of the modern string orchestra. The work was first dedicated to Miss Ethel Barns, a composer and virtuoso violinist who performed and premiered many of Coleridge-Taylor’s works, including the subsequent violin-piano arrangement of Novelletten. The orchestral version must have been a favorite of the composer, for even though his publisher Novello lost money printing the piece, Coleridge-Taylor programmed the set repeatedly on concerts he conducted throughout his career.

UIC Music Concert Series Fall 2021 Friday, October 15

Monday, November 22

UIC Music Department Showcase

Symphonic Band Concert

with Jazz Ensemble

UIC Theatre L280

UIC Student Center East

1044 W. Harrison St.

Illinois Room, 750 S. Halsted St.

7:30pm

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12pm–2pm Tuesday, November 23 Friday, October 15

Pop Rock Concert

UIC Music Department Showcase

Recital Hall L285

with UIC Percussion Ensemble

1040 W. Harrison St.

and UIC Bands

7:30pm

UIC Student Center East Illinois Room, 750 S. Halsted St.

Nov 29–Dec 3

7:30pm

Campus Caroling with UIC Choirs UIC campus

Monday, October 18

11am–2pm (during rehearsal times)

Jazz Combo Performance Recital Hall L285

December 1–2

1040 W. Harrison St.

UIC Jazz

7pm

Recital Room L285

Sunday, November 7

Friday, December 3

Honors Band Festival

UIC Percussion Ensemble

UIC Student Center East

UIC Theatre L280

Illinois Room, 750 S. Halsted St.

1040 W. Harrison St.

5pm

7:30pm

Friday, November 19

Saturday, December 4

Chamber Music

UIC Orchestra

Recital Hall L285

UIC Theatre L280

1040 W. Harrison St.

1040 W. Harrison St.

7:30pm

3pm

UIC Music Concert Series Fall 2021

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Saturday, December 4 UIC Wind Ensemble UIC Theatre L280 1040 W. Harrison St. 7:30pm

Our student concerts are free and open to the public. Dates are subject to change. Visit us at theatreandmusic.uic.edu for a full listing of events.

Please RSVP your attendance registration link coming soon.

For accessibility and accommodations contact our box office at (312) 996-2939 or email nealmac@uic.edu

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