The Westchester Chamber Music Society Candlelight Concert Society

The Westchester Chamber Music Society

and

Candlelight Concert Society

present

ANTHONY McGILL, clarinet

and

THE PACIFICA QUARTET

Simin Ganatra, violin Austin Hartman, violin Mark Holloway, viola Brandon Vamos, cello

Florence Price (1887-1953) String Quartet in G Major (1929) Allegro Andante moderato—Allegretto

James Lee III (1975 - ) Quintet for Clarinet & String Quartet (2018) Forgotten Emblems Awashoha Alas, my identity . . . Celebrated Emblems

Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847) String Quartet in E-flat major (1835) Adagio ma non troppo Allegretto Romanze Allegro molto vivace PROGRAM NOTES

by Joshua Berrett, Ph. D.

Florence Price (1887-1953) String Quartet in G Major (1929)

Living in a culture that all too often defined a composer as white, male, and dead,

Florence Price found it a daunting challenge to make any real headway. Writing in 1943 to

Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony, she introduced herself as follows: “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin I have two handicaps . . . those of sex and race. I am a woman, and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” In our own time, it does not seem that the situation has changed very much. Alex Ross, writing in The New Yorker,

Feb. 5, 2018, told a riveting story about what was discovered in a dilapidated house, ransacked by vandals, in the village of St. Anne, in northeastern Illinois. It was Price’s summer retreat. During the renovation, the owners found piles of manuscripts, books, personal papers, and miscellaneous documents, virtually all bearing the name of Florence

Price. In a sobering assessment, Ross wrote: “Not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in

St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.” Let’s hope that today’s concert will help ensure that this kind of amnesia does not continue.

Born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, she was one of three children in a mixed-race family. A musical prodigy, she gave her first piano performance at age 4, and published her first composition at 11. Shortly after graduating high school at age

14, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, passing as a Mexican and listing her hometown as “Pueblo, Mexico” in order avoid racial discrimination. Notable among her teachers were the composers George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, with whom she studied counterpoint and composition. Upon graduation in 1906, Price returned to the South, becoming the head of the music department of what is now known as Clark

Atlanta University, an historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia. Her marriage six years later to Thomas J. Price, a lawyer, brought her back to Little Rock, where she developed an active piano-teaching studio. But pervasive Jim Crow conditions in the Deep

South and the lynching of a black man in particular, led to a decisive move north in 1927.

Chicago was to become her home base for the rest of her life.

Price was energized there by her further studies in composition, orchestration, and organ at such institutions as the Chicago Musical College, the American Conservatory of

Music, and the University of Chicago. Among her accomplishments were finding publishers for her many piano-teaching pieces, playing organ music for silent movies, and composing radio commercials under an assumed name. What brought her national recognition, in 1932, was winning first prize for her Symphony in E Minor from the

Wanamaker Foundation—an entity endowed by the department-store magnate Lewis

Rodman Wanamaker. Her reputation was boosted further the following year, when the

Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock premiered the work. The conventional judgment was that Price’s essential style in subsequent years remained too

“retro” and Eurocentric, even though it incorporated elements of spirituals, the blues, and more.

Price’s String Quartet in G Major (1929) is the first of two she wrote. The first movement, a sonata form, is saturated with tortuous chromatic lines, much of it associated with late European romanticism. Some relief comes with the gently lilting, waltz-like second theme introduced by the viola. A vigorous coda rounds out the movement. The second and final movement is a charmer, quite often presented as a standalone piece. It has the mood of a Black spiritual, tinged with elements of Dvorak’s Symphony “From the New

World” and Edward MacDowell’s “To a Wild Rose.” The evocative midsection, provides some touching, vivid contrast, using the pitches of the harmonic minor scale. In a real sense, this quartet’s second movement anticipates what Price would achieve with her body of songs of the 1930s and the 1940s, drawing upon the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and

Langston Hughes, among others.

James Lee III (1975 - ) Clarinet Quintet (2018)

The African-American composer James Lee III hails from St. Joseph, Michigan. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from the University of Michigan. Among his major composition teachers have been Michael Daugherty, William Bolcom, Bright Sheng, and

Betsy Jolas. Since 2006 he has been highly prolific, writing a broad array of works for orchestra, with performances by the National Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, and the

Philadelphia Orchestra, among others. There is also a sizeable body of work for solo piano, mixed chorus, string quartet, and other groups. In 2014, he was a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at the State University of Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Lee is a professor of music at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Lee’s Clarinet Quintet was completed in November 2018. Like a number of his other works, it is inspired by a profound religious conviction coupled with a commitment to diversity and inclusiveness. In a personal communication to this writer he has drawn attention to the following passage from the New Testament: “And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud voice, fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." --- Revelation 14:6-7

Prefacing the score is this Composer’s Note:

Quintet for Clarinet & String Quartet is a four-movement work inspired by historical aspects of indigenous Americans. The first movement, Forgotten Emblems, uses what I call an “inverted shofar theme” that can be heard at the beginning of Nathaniel Dett’s “The Ordering of Moses” and William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony.” This movement also refers to various paintings of “An Emblem of America” from the eighteenth century. There are also many moments when I try to imitate an Indian Pow Wow. I named the second movement Awashoha, which is a Choctaw Indian word that means to “play somewhere.” This serves as the scherzo movement. Movement three serves as a kind of lament and references the reclassification of many indigenous people and the removal to other regions of the country. Then finally, movement four is a short dance celebration of the lives represented in the various paintings of “Emblem of America.”

This clarinet quintet offers richly evocative music that is to be savored for its rhythms, textures, and timbres as much as anything else. By way of homage to Nathaniel

Dett and his “The Ordering of Moses,” Lee announces the “inverted shofar theme” in the cello at the outset. The prophet has spoken. Listeners may also hear this motif as a pentatonic four-note module that sounds like the opening of the traditional black spiritual

“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” This motif is very soon expanded upon by the cello, with other instruments developing it further. What also imparts a special atmosphere to the movement is the eighth-note ostinato—presumably an evocation of pow-wow drumming.

Awashoha is truly playful—a con spirito movement replete with frequent metrical shifts, including those with five beats to the bar. Zestful pizzicato, playing col legno (with the wooden part of the bow) and glissandi all communicate a sense of fun. By contrast, the third movement, “Alas, my identity,” at least in its opening measures, harks back to a kind of accompanied recitative—an “operatic” clarinet-as-protagonist lamenting the abuses of reclassification and removal. The writing in this movement is deeply expressive of a bleak world, particularly in passages that are spare. By the same token, these passages serve as a foil for the impassioned climax around the midpoint of the movement. A reprise of much of the opening material rounds out the movement. The celebratory finale captures the spirit of the dance, starting with a series of tightly interlocking eighth-note duplets. Suggestions of stomping abound as well; they are contrasted with trance-like quintuple groupings of eighth notes that underpin the clarinet melodic line. Part of this melodic material turns out to be a variant of what was heard in the preceding movement. The closing measures are packed with the joyous fortissimo energy of eighth-note triplets that promptly deposit us on a final resounding E-major chord.

Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847) String Quartet in E-flat Major (1835)

Fanny Mendelssohn “struggled her entire life with the conflicting impulses of authorship versus the social expectations for her high-class status . . . ; her hesitation was variously a result of her dutiful attitude towards her father, her intense relationship with her brother, and her awareness of contemporary social thought on women in the public sphere.” This assessment by the preeminent Fanny Mendelssohn specialist Angela Mace Christian is inseparable from what was an ongoing crippling ambivalence at play within her immediate family. While her brother Felix—far more famous and four years her junior-- would privately be effusive in his praise for her gifts as both composer and performer, in the larger world he could caution against publishing under her own name. As he once wrote: “From my knowledge of Fanny, I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship.” At the same time, he would commend her for how she ran her household—she was married to the artist Wilhelm Hensel—contending that publishing her music and all that “would only disturb her” in discharging her domestic duties.

In 1846, a year before her death, after being approached by two Berlin publishers,

Fanny Mendelssohn decided to go ahead without consulting with her brother and publish a collection of her songs under her own name. Upon their publication, Felix wrote her a letter bestowing his approval. “I send you my professional blessing on becoming a member of the craft. . . . May you have much happiness in giving pleasure to others; may you taste only the sweets and none of the bitterness of authorship; may the public pelt you with roses, and never with sand.” Lieder make up the bulk of Fanny Mendelssohn’s compositions; they total over 250. There are also some 125 short pieces for piano—akin to

Felix Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words”–as well as some cantatas, a piano trio, and a piano quartet.

The Fanny Mendelssohn string quartet on today’s program, a work from 1835, is the only one she wrote. She had rather negative feelings after completing it, writing to her brother: “I lack the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency.

Therefore lieder suit me best, in which, if need be, merely a pretty idea without much potential for development can suffice.” From today’s perspective, Fanny was clearly being self-denigrating. In fact, the work offers ample evidence of how much she had absorbed of

Beethoven’s late style in terms of form, tonal relationships, and contrapuntal mastery.

The first movement, the Adagio ma non troppo, begins in C minor, with a series of halting, despairing phrases and contrapuntal writing. The mood is lifted somewhat once the home key of E-flat major arrives. The next movement is essentially a scherzo, despite the tempo marking of Allegretto. Although the movement once again begins in C minor, the mood is very different in terms of tempo and texture. In many ways, the trio of this movement is a stand-out. Cast in G major, it is filled with vigorous polyphony and developmental writing. There follows a reprise of opening material with the tonality eventually moving to the brighter sound of C major. The third movement, the Romanza, is in essence an expansive song without words, exploring a broad range of keys and culminating in a soaring ending. The finale, anchored in the home key, should put to rest any doubts about Fanny’s compositional skills. It is virtually a perpetuum mobile, presenting an impressive fusion of sonata form and fugal writing, all leading to a resounding coda.