Diversifying the Repertoire pt. 2: Black Composers from the U.S, U.K., and the Caribbean
In my first “Diversifying the Repertoire” post (https://benjaminsteinhardt.com/diversifying-the-repertoire-pt-1-african-composers/) I outlined my reasons for this project and highlighted significant piano composers from the continent of Africa, most of whom were people of color.
In this post my focus is composers who are from the U.S., U.K., and the Caribbean as a result of the African Diaspora (the mass dispersion of African people due to the slave trade of the 16th-19th century). Particularly exciting is how many wonderful black women composers I am able to feature.
Part 3 (upcoming) will feature the African American pioneers of Ragtime and list resources for learning more about black composers.
For links to William Chapman Nyaho’s essential series “Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora” please visit my first post (linked above).
If you would like to see my ever expanding listing of recommended piano repertoire by Black, Indigenous, Latin, and Asian composers click below.
Florence Price
After graduating as valedictorian of her class in Arkansas, Price was accepted to New England Conservatory in 1904 at age 14, double majoring in organ and piano. She apparently applied as a Hispanic student in order to gain acceptance because of prejudices against blacks at the time.
In 1933, Price was the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major American symphony, the Chicago Symphony. In a letter she wrote to Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she stated, “I have two handicaps. I am a woman and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” Unfortunately, this attempt to have her works considered was not successful. She faced numerous similar setbacks.
Price went on to write over 300 works, including symphonies, concertos, songs, and piano works. Take a listen:
Read more:
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/21/686622572/revisiting-the-pioneering-composer-florence-price
https://www.classicalvocalreprints.com/show.php?id=300116
https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Price%2C_Florence
Florence Price’s intermediate level composition, “Sketches in Sepia.”
Composed in September, 1947, Sketches in Sepia typifies Price’s ability to compress intense and wide-ranging emotional and stylistic journeys into compact, tautly organized structures. Outwardly, the work might seem routine: it is just sixty-four bars long and organized in a clear ternary form, with the outer sections firmly rooted in A-flat major and the central section beginning and ending in F minor. But its musical content and emotional and stylistic range are anything but routine. The A sections are relaxed and lyrical, while the central B section is rhythmically animated and stylistically agitated, beginning mf and eventually reaching an abrupt ff climax as a half-diminished seventh chord based on D natural (vii of the dominant of the home key of A-flat) gradually assumes predominance amid powerful left-hand octaves, increasingly syncopated rhythms punctuated with abrupt rests, and an expansion of the initially narrow range to a significantly broader one encompassing the entire gamut from F’ to f””. These two contrasting sections presumably account for the titular plural (sketches). But despite the pronounced contrasts between the two sections, there are also deeper connections: the insistence on F as added sixth in the harmonic language of the A theme, beginning in m. 1, prepares that tone’s importance as the defining pitch of the B section: F is always present from the outset, even before it becomes the central key. Similarly, the blue thirds that emerge in mm. 10 and 13 anticipate the jazz influences and harmonic language of the B section — which, because of these connections, never quite leaves the Sketches even after the A section returns.
— John Michael Cooper
Sketches in Sepia (late intermediate)
“Fantasied Negre” is Florence Price’s virtuosic take on the spiritual, “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.”
Sung here by Jessye Norman
Other recommended Florence Price works:
William Grant Still
http://www.williamgrantstillmusic.com
William Grant Still, Jr. (May 11, 1895 – December 3, 1978) was an American composer of nearly 200 works, including five symphonies and nine operas.
Often referred to as the “Dean of Afro-American Composers”, Still was the first American composer to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera. Still is known primarily for his first symphony, Afro-American Symphony, which was until 1950 the most widely performed symphony composed by an American.
Born in Mississippi, he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and was a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and later Edgard Varèse.
Of note, Still was the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony (his 1st 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.
Due to his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance movement.
A Deserted Plantation (late intermediate)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200038837/
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in Croydon, England, on August 15, 1875. His father, a doctor from Sierra Leone, was forced to return to his home country around the time of Samuel’s birth because he was not permitted to practice medicine in England. Samuel remained in England with his mother.
Coleridge-Taylor’s talent was quickly recognized by the British musical elite. One of his principal music composition teachers was Charles Villiers Stanford. At the suggestion of Edward Elgar, Coleridge-Taylor was commissioned to write a piece for a festival in 1898. The resulting “Ballade in A Minor” was a tremendous success. A subsequent trilogy written from 1898 to 1900 and based on the story of Hiawatha secured his fame for the remainder of his life.
In 1899 Coleridge-Taylor first heard American spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee singers on one of their tours. He became interested in African-American folk song and began incorporating it into his compositions. Black Americans returned the compliment. In 1902 a group of African-American music lovers formed the Coleridge-Taylor Society to perform and promote his music in America, and eventually brought Coleridge-Taylor over for three successful tours–in 1904, 1906, and 1910. During the first tour, Coleridge-Taylor conducted the Marine Band along with the Coleridge-Taylor Society Chorus. He also met with President Teddy Roosevelt. Subsequent tours took Coleridge-Taylor to more and more cities in the Midwest and the East.
In England, Coleridge-Taylor continued an active life in music. He composed, taught at Trinity College of Music, conducted numerous choral societies, and even conducted in the famed Handel Society from 1904 until his death. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died on September 1, 1912, of pneumonia contracted due to overwork.
‘Deep River,’ the tenth piece in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s 24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59, is based on a beloved African-American spiritual. Coleridge-Taylor was likely introduced to the melody when he attended a concert of the Fisk Jubilee Singers during their British tour. He considered it the most beautiful of all of the melodies in his collection. Not merely an arrangement, this work is a ballade-like concert paraphrase. Coleridge-Taylor himself explained his intentions with the Melodies: “what Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies.”
Ulysses Kay
“Ulysses Kay, born on January 7, 1917, in Tucson, Arizona, began his education in the public school system of Tucson. He attended the University of Arizona where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1938 and subsequently entered the Eastman School of Music as a student of Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. He was also a student of Paul Hindemith at the Berkshire Music Center and at Yale University. Following a three year tour with the United States Navy, Kay received an Alice M. Ditson Fellowship for work at Columbia University. Also he has been a recipient of a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, Rome Prizes for residence at the American Academy inRome for the seasons of 1949-50 and 1951-52, a Fulbright Scholarship to Italy for 1950-51, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
In addition to these accolades, Kay has won several awards for his music, including first prize from Broadcast Music, Inc. for his Suite for Orchestra, a Gershwin Memorial Prize for A Short Overture, and an American Broadcasting Company Prize for the overture, Of New Horizons. He also won the third annual George Gershwin Memorial Contest for “A Short Overture,” and an award from the American Composers Alliance for his “Suite for Orchestra.” In 1958 Kay was a member of the first delegation of American composers to visit the Soviet Union in the Cultural Exchange Program sponsored by the United States State Department.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/cea920e2-9216-4f22-a920-4…/
Invention # 2 (intermediate)
Nathaniel Dett
A true polymath, Dett was a great composer, choir leader, pianist, teacher, poet, and writer. During his lifetime, he was lauded as the first American composer to fuse Negro folk music with the European art music tradition in a sophisticated way. As a seminal figure in the preservation and study of spirituals, both as a writer and choral leader, and as a great teacher and inspirer of African-American musicians in later generations, he is acknowledged to be one of the most important musicians in American history. Dett’s writings include The Emancipation of Negro Music, which won an important literary prize at Harvard University in 1920, and Album of the Heart, a volume of poems. He was also deeply attracted to philosophical inquiry and involved with Rosicrucianism as well as Christianity. He was also interested in other cultures; ancient Hebrew legends, African chants, and Hindu poets all have a place in his music. Particularly toward the end of his life, Dett’s music expresses messages of human oneness, which speak to people now with the same meaning and urgency that it did in his time. Through the efforts of Nathaniel Dett, what he called “Negro folk music” is a gift to the world. Dett was an extremely hard working personality, always driven to improve his craft by further study. He was the first African-American to graduate from Oberlin College, one of the few unsegregated colleges at the time, with a double degree in piano and composition in 1908. Even after being awarded honorary doctorates in music from Howard University in 1924 and Oberlin in 1926, he chose to enroll at the Eastman School of Music in 1931 to obtain a masters degree. His life experiences ranged from bitter disappointments to great triumphs, all lived out within the segregated social environment of his time.
Juba: Dance from “In the Bottoms” (early advanced)
In the Bottoms (advanced)
Margaret Bonds
Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) received great acclaim during her lifetime as a composer, pianist, and teacher. She was the first black soloist to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 1933.
The musical life of Margaret Bonds, a native of Chicago, began in her family’s living room, where her mother (an accomplished organist) facilitated gatherings of important black artists, writers, and musicians. It was here that Bonds met Florence Price, with whom she studied piano and composition. In 1933, Bonds performed Price’s Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during the World’s Fair; with this performance, she holds the distinction of being the first African-American woman to perform as a soloist with a major American orchestra. In 1939, Bonds moved to New York and became an important figure in the artistic scene in Harlem. Her close friendship with Langston Hughes led to many of her celebrated vocal compositions, such as the choral work The Ballad of the Brown King, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1941), and the songs collected under the title Three Dream Portraits (1959).
Howard Swanson
born in Atlanta, Georgia, is known as the American Fauré. He began piano study at age twelve in Cleveland where his family had moved in 1916, entered the Cleveland Institute of Music full time, and received his baccaulaureate degree in music theory in 1927, studying under Hubert Elwell. Following that, Swanson studied with Nadia Boulonger in Paris on a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1939. World War II interrupted his studies and Swanson was forced back to the United States, but in 1952, he returned to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. This happened after Swanson devoted his time entirely to composition after 1945, in wake of working for the Internal Revenue Services and Cleveland Post Office to support himself and his family. Through his compositions, Swanson crystalized a musical style using the conventional forms of classical music infused with a personal style grounded in African American traditions. He is best known for his art songs, most notably “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and for the Short Symphony. Swanson composed a number of other distinguished works, including “The Cuckoo” Scherzo for Piano (1948); Suite for Cello and Piano (1949); “Night Music” (1950); “Music for Strings” (1952); Concerto for Orchestra (1957); and Symphony no. 3 (1969).
Hale Smith
“Hale smith was one America’s finest composers. He enjoyed a long and fruitful career in music as an arranger, editor, pianist and educator. In 1952, Hale Smith was a winner of the first Student Composer’s Award sponsored by Broadcast Music Inc., and in 1973, he became the first African American to receive the Cleveland Art Prize in Music. Hale Smith was a native of Cleveland, Ohio and began playing piano at the age of seven. He eventually went on to study composition and earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in music. Smith was heavily influenced by Jazz music and he spent quite a bit of time arranging Jazz compositions and performing as a Jazz pianist. His Jazz endeavors occupied much of his time, so creating Classical music, his first love, became especially important. Smith wrote solo pieces, duos, chamber ensembles, string orchestra works, large orchestra pieces, compositions for soloist and orchestra, band, jazz ensembles, choir and incidental music. Notable compositions include his In Memoriam, Beryl Rubinstein (1953) for choir and orchestra and the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1955).”
Nkeiru Okoye
Hailed as “sublime” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nkeiru Okoye’s genre-bending compositions reflect a dizzying range of influences — Gilbert & Sullivan, the Gershwins, Sondheim, Copland, gospel, jazz, and Schoenberg. Okoye writes in both the opera/theatre and symphonic mediums; and her works have been performed on five continents. Her cycle Songs of Harriet Tubman has become established repertoire for African American sopranos; her Voices Shouting Out has been on statewide music education curricula with Virginia Symphony and Grand Rapids Symphony; her suite African Sketches has been performed by pianists around the globe.
Okoye has received commissions, awards and honors from the NEA, Opera America, ASCAP, American Opera Projects, Meet The Composer, John Duffy Composer Institute, Composer’s Collaborative, Inc., the Walt Whitman Project, and the Yvar Mikhashov Trust for New Music for her compositions. Notably she is the recipient of three grants for female composers from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Her work has been recorded by Moscow Symphony, and the Dvorak Symphony Orchestra. She is profiled in the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation Music of Black Composers Coloring Book, Routledge’s African American Music: An Introduction textbook, and the Oxford University Press Anthology of Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora.
Versant in many compositional techniques, Okoye specializes in works that celebrate the African American experience. In 2018, the Charlotte Symphony commissioned her to write an orchestral piece in celebration of the city’s 250th anniversary. In the 2019-20 season, Okoye will have premieres of Black Bottom for Detroit Symphony’s Classical Roots Festival, for which she will be the composer in residence; and Tales from the Briar Patch, a rebooted version of Bre’r Rabbit stories, and a revival production of her landmark HARRIET TUBMAN: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom, by Knoxville Opera.
Dr. Okoye is a board member of Composers Now. She holds a BM in Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and a Ph.D. in Music Theory and Composition from Rutgers University.
Valerie Capers
Dr. Valerie Capers is a preeminent pianist, vocalist, educator, composer, and arranger. After graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical composition and performance from The Juilliard School of Music, the first blind person to do so, Valerie undertook the next step in her musical career – learning to play jazz.
A naturally gifted musician, she has noted that dedication to the craft is necessary for success. In a Jazz Times interview with Sunsh Stein, she stated: “Developing your talent and skills is a very private and relentless thing. It doesn’t happen in a hurry. It’s very important to be organized, have discipline, and have an approach. Our ears are the most wonderful access to creativity and imagination because as musicians we hear everything, and those things get stored in some inner vault and come out in all sorts of ways we don’t expect.”
John W. Work
John W. Work, III, was a noted African American educator, composer, choral director, scholar, and folklorist whose 39-year career at Fisk University in Nashville (1927-1966) was filled with accolades. Work held degrees from Fisk, Columbia and Yale and was well versed in the music favored by academia, but what set him apart from his contemporaries was the value he placed on African American folk, blues, and gospel music. Although the full extent of his work in the blues was not appreciated until long after his death, he left a valuable legacy of field recordings that includes the first Library of Congress sides by Muddy Waters, conducted in conjunction with a team that included Alan Lomax, in addition to many other recordings from Mississippi, Nashville, and Fort Valley, Georgia. Work’s historic descriptions of the 1941-42 Library of Congress project in Mississippi, complete with musical transcriptions, were published in the acclaimed book Lost Delta Found in 2005. Work was born in Tullahoma, Tennessee, on June 15, 1901, and carried on his family’s church choir tradition when he became director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. He died on May 17, 1967, not long after his retirement from Fisk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley_Work_III
Amadeo Roldan
Amadeo Roldán y Gardes (Paris, 12 June 1900 – Havana, 7 March 1939) was a Cuban composer and violinist.
During this period, Roldán, one of the leaders of the Afrocubanismo movement, wrote the first symphonic pieces to incorporate Afro-Cuban percussion instruments.[1] Roldán’s best-known composition[2] is the 1928 ballet La Rebambaramba, described by a critic of the era as “a multicolored musicorama … depicting an Afro-Cuban fiesta in a gorgeous display of Caribbean melorhythms, with the participation of a multifarious fauna of native percussion effects, including a polydental glissando on the jawbone of an ass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Roldán
Wallace McClain Cheatham
Wallace McClain Cheatham (b. 1945) has continued to grow as a musician, researcher, and teacher. From the podium, he has introduced major works of African-American composers to audiences in Wisconsin and Illinois. His compositions, which span a variety of genres, have been performed in national and international settings. Some of his scores have been published by Shawnee, Alfred, Master-Player Library, Oxford University Press, Southern Illinois University Press, and Jomar Press.
Dr. Cheatham’s research dealing with opera as it relates to the African-American experience has been published in internationally circulated journals of scholarship. His book, Dialogues On Opera and The African American Experience, is housed in libraries worldwide.
Dr. Cheatham was a public school music teacher for more than three decades. Recently, he was a guest professor at Wisconsin’s Cardinal Stritch University. He has been called upon to be a piano accompanist for instrumentalists and singers, and a lecturer in national and international performance and professional venues. He is a subject of biographical record in Who’s Who In The World, Who’s Who In America, and Who’s Who In American Education.
H. Leslie Adam
is an American composer. His works have been performed by the Prague Radio Symphony, Iceland Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, and Indianapolis Symphony, and commissioned by The Cleveland Orchestra, Ohio Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Symphony, among others. Metropolitan Opera artists have performed his vocal works internationally. Adams is best known for writing music for voice (including choral music, art songs, vocal solos, and music drama) but has also written numerous purely instrumental compositions as well. Adams’s music is composed largely within the tradition of Western classical music and also incorporates elements unique to African-American music.
He is listed in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed.; International Who’s Who in Music and Musicians; Wikipedia Encyclopedia; and Who’s Who in America.
Chevalier de Saint-Georges
was an extraordinary composer, musician and polymath whose name has long been neglected in Western classical music tradition.
Born in 1745 in the French colony of Guadeloupe, he was the illegitimate son of a slave (his mother) and married white plantation owner (his father). As a young boy, he was taken to France by his father, where he became a master swordsman.
He was one of the first black colonels in the French army, leading 800 infantrymen and 200 cavalries in Europe’s first all-black regiment. It was there he acquired his title, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
Then, there was his music. De Saint Georges was a contemporary of Mozart and Haydn, and he wrote countless symphonies, sonatas, concertos, opera and string quartets. He was a violin virtuoso and conducted one of Europe’s greatest orchestras, Le Concert des Amateurs.
Former US president John Adams called him “the most accomplished man in Europe”.
Regina Harris Baiocchi
Azuretta, by Regina Harris Baiocchi
From the YouTube description:
“Regina Harris Baiocchi describes Azuretta as her “musical reaction to a debilitating stroke Dr. Hale Smith suffered in 2000. It was unbearable to witness my mentor, friend and master composer rendered mute and paralyzed. Hale was such a vibrant man who loved to talk, hold court; and he had the goods to do so. Unfortunately, Hale subsisted in a mute, paralyzed state until he passed 24 November 2009. Fortunately, Hale’s incredible legacy speaks for him and itself.”
From Baiocchi’s biography:
“Baiocchi primarily composes instrumental and vocal music for opera, libretti and concertos.
For Baiocchi, it is through music that the greatest strides in civil rights and cultural tolerance have been and will continue to be made.”
George Walker
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, pianist and educator George Walker has died at the age of 96. Walker’s death was first announced to NPR by one of his family members, Karen Schaefer. Gregory Walker, the composer’s son, said his father died after complications of a kidney ailment Thursday at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, N.J.
Walker’s music was firmly rooted in the modern classical tradition, but also drew from African-American spirituals and jazz. His nearly 100 compositions range broadly, from intricately orchestrated symphonic works and concertos to intimate songs and solo piano pieces.
“His music is always characterized by a great sense of dignity, which is how he always comported himself,” says composer Jeffrey Mumford, who, as a music professor at Lorain County Community College in Ohio, uses examples of Walker’s music in his classes. “His style evolved over the years; his earlier works, some written while still a student, embodied an impressive clarity and elegance.”
Walker was a trailblazing man of “firsts,” and not just because of the Pulitzer. In the year 1945 alone, he was the first African-American pianist to play a recital at New York’s Town Hall, the first black instrumentalist to play solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the first black graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Oscar Peterson
“Oscar Peterson, whose dazzling piano playing made him one of the most popular jazz artists in history, died on Sunday night at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto. He was 82.
The cause was kidney failure, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported. Mr. Peterson had performed publicly for a time even after a stroke he suffered in 1993 compromised movement in his left hand.
Mr. Peterson was one of the greatest virtuosos in jazz, with a piano technique that was always meticulous and ornate and sometimes overwhelming. But rather than expand the boundaries of jazz, he used his gifts in the service of moderation and reliability, gratifying his devoted audiences whether he was playing in a trio or solo or accompanying some of the most famous names of jazz. His technical accomplishments were always evident, almost transparently so. Even at his peak, there was very little tension in his playing.
One of the most prolific major stars in jazz history, he amassed an enormous discography. From the 1950s until his death, he released sometimes four or five albums a year, toured Europe and Japan frequently and became a big draw at jazz festivals.”
Mr. Peterson won eight Grammy awards, as well as almost every possible honor in the jazz world. He played alongside giants like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Nat King Cole, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald.
Duke Ellington referred to him as “maharajah of the keyboard.” Basie said, “Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I’ve ever heard.” The pianist and conductor André Previn called Mr. Peterson “the best” among jazz pianists.
Oswald Russell
http://www.musicunitesjamaica.com/oswald-russell.html
He distinguished himself internationally as a world-class pianist and composer.
Born in 1933, he made his first public appearance at the age of eight and, while at St George’s, played solo in the school’s musical plays.
He later won a scholarship to study at The Royal Academy of Music in England, graduating in 1956. He continued his studies in Paris at the famed Juillard School of Music before returning to Jamaica in 1963 as professor of piano at the Jamaica School of Music.
He has won several international piano competitions, including the BBC Mozart competition in London in 1968, and has played in concerts in France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Russia as soloist, and in chamber music ensembles with symphony orchestras.
In 1989, the city of Geneva commissioned him to compose Caraibes for the Harmonie Nautique, the official wind band of Geneva. He has also composed works for piano, flute solo and cello solo, viola with organ.
Since 1970, Russell held the post of professor of Keyboard Harmony and Improvisation at The Conservatorire Populaire in Geneva, at the Jacones-Dalcroze Institute of Geneva, as well as the Conservatorire de Musique of Geneva, before retiring in 1999.
He was inducted into the Hallowed Hall of Fame of St George’s College in 2002.
Ludovic Lamothe
was a Haitian composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of Haiti’s most important classical composers. Lamothe’s music drew on both elite and folkloric styles, including compositions inspired by the music of Haitian Vodou, by the Haitian méringue and other dance forms, and by the music of Frederic Chopin, whose music Lamothe performed. Lamothe composed exclusively for his own instrument, piano.
Eleanor Alberga
With her 2015 Last Night of the Proms opener ARISE ATHENA! Eleanor Alberga cemented a reputation as a composer of international stature. Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Chorus and conducted by Marin Alsop, the work was heard and seen by millions.
Her music is not easy to pigeon-hole. The musical language of her opera LETTERS OF A LOVE BETRAYED (2009), premiered at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury stage, has drawn comparisons with Berg’s Wozzeck and Debussy’s Pelleas, while her lighter works draw more obviously on her Jamaican heritage and time as a singer with the Jamaican Folk Singers and as a member of an African Dance company. But the emotional range of her language, her structural clarity and a fabulously assured technique as an orchestrator have always drawn high praise.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Alberga decided at the age of five to be a concert pianist, though five years later she was already composing works for the piano.
In 1970 she won the biennial Royal Schools of Music Scholarship for the West Indies which she took up at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying piano and singing. But a budding career as a solo pianist – she was was among the 3 finalists in the International Piano Concerto Competition in Dudley, UK in 1974 – was augmented by composition with her arrival at The London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1978. Under the inspirational leadership of its Artistic Director Robert Cohan, she became one of the very few pianists with the deepest understanding of modern dance and her company class improvisations became the stuff of legend. These in turn led to works commissioned and conceived for dance from the company, most notably the piano quintet CLOUDS (1984). Alberga later became the company’s Musical Director, conducting, composing and playing on all LCDT’s many tours.
The orchestral works, SUN WARRIOR (1990) written for the inaugural Women in Music Festival and her dramatic adaptation of Roald Dahl’s SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES (1994) for large symphony orchestra and narrators, premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 1994 with Franz Welser Möst and the LPO, helped build her growing reputation. In 2001 she was awarded a NESTA Fellowship for composition.
2001 also saw the completion and premiere of a highly praised first VIOLIN CONCERTO, written for Thomas Bowes and commissioned by The Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Joseph Swensen. A second violin concerto entitled NARCISSUS was premiered in 2020. Also written for Thomas Bowes, it was premiered with the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra in Wroclaw, Poland and conducted by Joseph Swensen.
Chamber music, both in the more traditional form of three String Quartets and a Piano Quintet, and for more unusual line-ups, abounds. An unfolding series of Nocturnes – notably, SHINING GATE OF MORPHEUS and SUCCUBUS MOON – featuring horn and oboe respectively with string quartet, is an expanding project. Works for voice have more recently come to the fore with a luminous setting of George Herbert’s THE GLIMPSE and most recently the song cycle THE SOUL’S EXPRESSION to poetry by George Eliot, Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Barret Browning; both premiered by the baritone Jeremy Huw Williams.
Other recent works include AWED LIGHT ITS CHANT ENTRANCES for Chorus and piano. It was commissioned by and premiered at the 2019 Dartington Festival with Joanna MacGregor and the festival chorus to text by the poet Alice Oswald. 2019 also saw the completion and premiere of the first portion of a large tripartite piano sonata SERAPH. Entitled PRESENCE it was performed by Alberga herself at the 2019 Arcadia Festival.
Alberga now lives in the Herefordshire countryside with her husband the violinist Thomas Bowes and together they have founded and nurtured an original festival – Arcadia. In 2019 a prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award was presented to Eleanor for composition. This year she is to receive the honour of ‘Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music’.
https://shop.abrsm.org/shop/prod/ABRSM-Spectrum-4/904887
Lettie Beckon Alston
Lettie Beckon Alston was born in 1953 and received her bachelor and master degrees in Music Composition from Wayne State University in Detroit, studying composition with James Hartway and piano with Mischa Kottler. She also worked with Frank Murch and Wesley Fishwish. Continuing her education, she was the first African-American composer to obtain a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan in 1983, where she studied composition with Leslie Bassett and William Bolcom. Alston also worked with Eugene Kurzt and George Wilson in the electronic music area. Dr. Alston’s works have been featured widely in eastern and mid-western states, Austria and England. Her music has been recorded on compact disc under the Leonarda, Albany, Videmus and Calvin College labels. Alston’s music scores are published with MMB, Vivace Press and under the assumed name of Lettie Beckon Alston.
Alain Pierre Pradel
is a pianist and composer from the former French West Indies colony of Guadeloupe. He studied both in his homeland and in Paris. His music combines local “island sounds” with Western classical traditions. His “Pomme cannelle” is named after the Caribbean fruit (in English it’s called a sugar apple) and it is a part of his Sept Pièces Créoles.
Coming Soon!
In my next post I will focus on Ragtime/turn of the century African America composers. If you have recommendations of piano music by composers of the African diaspora I have not listed, I’d love to add them in future updates!