Coleridge-taylor perkinson
worship: a concert overtureDIVE IN!
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) was an American composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist who operated across multiple genres including classical music. He was raised in a musical household and pursued music as a career path by the time he was a teenager. Perkinson's compositional style has been described as a combination of Baroque style counterpoint and American Romanticism with elements of folk music, blues, spirituals, and filled with rhythmic vitality. He composed and arranged innumerable works for jazz, R&B, and pop artists, ballet, theater, film, television, chorus, and instrumental groups ranging from solo to full orchestra.
RESOURCES:Worship: A Concert Overture is built around the Christian Doxology hymn in multiple inventive ways.A wonderful live audio recording of Worship: A Concert Overture.Like Worship: A Concert Overture, this piece uses an existing familiar tune as source material hidden in plain sight.HIGHLIGHTS:
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was named after African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) who himself was named after Ango-British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. None of them related in any way other than being great artists and having moms cool enough to name them after great artists!
Perkinson attended the "Fame" school in New York, the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. He also studied at NYU and received bachelor and master degrees in composition from Manhattan School of Music. Perkinson independently continued studying composition and conducting at Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts and at Princeton University, and spent three years training as a conductor at Salzburg’s Mozarteum and in the Netherlands.
Perkinson toured as pianist for drummer Max Roach’s jazz quartet and was music director and arranger for Roach, Lou Rawls, Marvin Gaye, and Harry Belafonte among others.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson composed Worship: A Concert Overture in 2001 and revised it in 2002, just two years prior to his death.
Worship: A Concert Overture is a tautly constructed 6 minute piece of music in two sections - a slow introduction and an energetic quick Allegro.
In Worship: A Concert Overture, Perkinson uses the Christian Doxology hymn “Prase God, from whom all blessings flow” as source material from which to build the piece while also invoking an amalgam of styles using compound meters, syncopated rhythms, and the use of congas and other percussion instruments not typically featured in orchestral concert music.A seat at the table: Consider and Discuss!
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's compositional style was more adventurous than his more well known African-American composer forbears like William Grant Still or Florence Price. Johann Buis, a musicologist and colleague of Perkinson's describes his music as being an “in-between category... using a kind of modernistic language with a fairly strong image of dissonance, yet he also uses a jazz through-line that constantly informs a rhythmic vitality in his work that was extremely attractive.”
William Grant Still's compositions have been performed fairly consistently, if periodically, since their premieres. Florence Price's music fell nearly completely from memory but has been enjoying a welcome renaissance since major collections of unpublished works dating back to the early 1900s were discovered in 2009 and again in 2018.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was well respected by colleagues within his academic, research, performance, and composition circles but didn't achieve the level of fame or fortune someone of his level of productivity might suggest. He lamented to Buis once, regarding his work in other countries, “I could not really explain ... that no orchestra, no ensemble, no opportunities would come my way in the United States. The phone rang, and it was Max Roach on the line: ‘Perk, I’m booked for a tour to Japan, and I need a pianist. Would you come?’ His phone call came when I was broke and I needed to eat, and I went on this tour. The fact was that I did not or could not make headway in the United States and when opportunities did come my way, and they discovered that I was Black, these opportunities were withdrawn or modified.”
Composers encountering adversity is a familiar story - Ludwig van Beethoven grappling with deafness, Robert Schumann's mental health struggle - but gatekeeping by people of power and/or influence has been, and continues to be, extremely problematic. Women composers, like Nannerl Mozart (1751-1829) and Amy Beach (1867-1944) being barred from working by their fathers and husbands, or unable to publish under their own names like Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847), seems unthinkable in our contemporary era. How then is it true that barely 5% of concert music programming decisions go to compositions by women despite the documented and known five thousand or so women composers who have produced music for the concert stage throughout the Common Era? Works by the thousands of composers of color and from countries and cultures other than Europe (primarily Western Europe) and Russia are similarly rarely programmed or ignored altogether.
Who do you think is responsible for concert music programming selection? Who should or could be included in that responsibility? What role might the current or future audience play in this process?
Listen Critically!
Listen to the Colorado Symphony performance of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Worship: A Concert Overture and again via multiple different recordings if possible. Take note of what you observe and how it ignites your curiosity to discover more music by Perkinson and other composers you may be encountering for the first time. Listen as well for the many and varied ways Perkinson uses the Doxology tune in this overture. How do these things draw you in as a listener and leave you wanting more?Ludwig van beethoven
piano concerto #5, "emperor"DIVE IN!
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer who was born into the Classical Era, broke those conventions during his middle compositional period, and paved the way for the Romantic Era in his late compositional period. He's like three composers for the price of one! He composed Piano Concerto #5 a few years into his experimental middle period. It is one of the most enduring and often performed works for solo piano and orchestra.RESOURCES:A wonderful historic recording of the concerto performed live by Arthur Rubinstein.A performance of the beautiful slow second movement by young phenom Jan Lisiecki.HIGHLIGHTS:
Ludwig van Beethoven finished composing Piano Concerto #5 in Vienna in April of 1809 during the Napoleonic War while the city was under siege. He wrote to his publisher that there was "nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of all sorts" around him. To save his already quite compromised hearing, he fled to his brother's cellar and covered his ears with pillows.
Piano Concerto #5 was premiered in 1811 in Leipzig by Friedrich Schneider and the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Beethoven suffering too much from his hearing loss to perform it himself.
Beethoven did not nickname it the Emperor, and most musicologists agree there is no connection to a specific person. The work's style reflects the war-ridden era in its military rhythms and heroic tone, which likely later influenced people toward that nickname.
Composed several years into his more innovative middle period, Beethoven experimented with new techniques. One of those happens right away as the piano begins at the outset of the piece and with a florid improvisatory sounding cadenza. Prior to this the standard was to begin with thematic material in the orchestra and then introduce the piano to repeat or develop that material in conversation with the orchestra.
Pianist Alfred Brendel said it has "a grand and radiant vision, a noble vision of freedom.” It’s no wonder that this concerto is among the most frequently performed. At Carnegie Hall alone it’s been played over 200 times!
Leonard Bernstein seemed particularly taken with it, considering he likely quoted directly from the melody of the second movement for the iconic song "Somewhere" from West Side Story.
Piano Concerto #5 is one of the most often performed works for solo piano and orchestra. At New York's famous Carnegie Hall alone it has been performed more than 200 times!NERD ASSIGNMENTS!
Start with a Conversation:
A concerto is a type of musical form that creates dialogue and drama between a single instrument or small group of instruments, and a much larger group of instruments. What exactly is dialogue? How is dialogue made? Think about constructing a brief dialogue between two people. What can you do to alter this dialogue so that one participant becomes a whole group of people? What are some examples of this type of dialogue you can think of in your every day life? [call and response in pep rallies, a religious service, etc.] Now imagine what it might be like if each person in the large group had an individual response in this dialogue. Would we be able to understand all the responses simultaneously? In music, many different sounds (often called ‘voices’) can be processed simultaneously by the human ear. Because of this it’s possible to have a two part musical dialogue with many individual voices!
Try an Activity!
Go ahead and dive down that internet rabbit hole! Listen to at least three different recordings of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Emperor" Piano Concerto #5 for comparison and contrast. How do you find the interpretation of different soloists and orchestras affect the overall piece of music? What specific things do you notice? Do you have any favorite interpretations or moments? What draws you toward some and/or turns you away from others?
Listening for dialogue and interpretation in Beethoven's Piano Concerto #5
Listen to the performance live and again via recording if possible. Try to listen carefully for musical dialogue and dramatic interpretive elements in this composition. How did the conversation and comparison/contrast activities help you to better engage as a listener?sergei prokofiev
symphony #5DIVE IN!
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was a Ukrainian born Russian citizen and highly influential composer of the early/mid 1900s Modernist era. Symphony #5, composed in 1944 and premiered in 1945, was an instant popular success and remains one of the most influential large scale symphonic works of the 20th century.RESOURCES:A performance recording of the full symphony.
HIGHLIGHTS:
Sergei Prokofiev was born near Donetsk, Ukraine, moved to St. Petersburg, Russia at age 13 to study at the conservatory there, toured internationally as a pianist and composer, lived in the United States, Germany, and France after the Russian Revolution, and then settled in Russia as a citizen in 1927.
Prokofiev was an avid chess player, and befriended several world champions.
Sergei Prokofiev and fellow Russian composer Igor Stravinsky were good friends, even though they took jabs at one another. Prokofiev made no secret that he didn't appreciate Stravinsky's later works, while Stravinsky described Prokofiev as the greatest Russian composer of his day, after himself. ;)
The first recording Prokofiev ever made was at London's famous Abbey Road studios in 1932 where he recorded his Piano Concerto #3 with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Sergei Prokofiev composed Symphony #5 in 1944 as the second world war was ending.
The January 1945 premiere performance of Symphony #5 was an instant success in Russia and abroad, so much so that he was featured on the cover of the November 1945 Time magazine.
The premiere was a highly anticipated event. Prokofiev himself conducted it in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. In attendance that evening was pianist Sviatoslav Richter was in attendance, who recalled:
“When Prokofiev mounted the podium and silence set in, artillery salvos suddenly thundered. His baton was already raised. He waited, and until the cannon fire ceased, he didn’t begin. There was something very significant, very symbolic in this. It was as if all of us—including Prokofiev—had reached some kind of shared turning point.”
At the time of the premiere, Prokofiev wrote that he “conceived of it as glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit, praising the free and happy man—his strength, his generosity, and the purity of his soul,” although he later told the Time magazine reporter that it was “about the spirit of man, his soul or something like that.” This leaves open to question whether his original statement was free from Stalin's watchful eye.
Symphony #5 lasts for 40-45 minutes and is in four movements that could be described as Moderately Quick, Crazed, Contemplative/Intense, and Adventure Gone Wild.Enjoy listening!
READY TO ENGAGE!
Please share your experience with me – [email protected]!
I’d love to hear about it or see any of your activities, journaling, or creations!
I’d love to hear about it or see any of your activities, journaling, or creations!