Program Notes: Artistry of the “Woman Composer”
The Wreckers Overture
Ethel Mary Smyth was born in London on April 22, 1858, and died in Woking, England, on May 8, 1944. She was the first composer to be made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922. Smyth wrote her opera The Wreckers in 1902-04 on a libretto, originally in French (as Les Naufrageurs), by her frequent collaborator Henry Brewster. It was first produced in Leipzig two years later, premiering in a German-language version as Das Standrecht on November 11, 1906; it was produced at Covent Garden in English in 1909.
Smyth lived her life on exuberant terms. English by birth, she enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle that took her to Germany, France, Italy, and Egypt. Dressed in her signature tweed suit, and often accompanied by one of her beloved Old English sheepdogs, she became a fixture of European social and artistic circles, known for her eccentric habits (cigar smoking, mountain climbing, bicycle riding) and loquacious conversational style. Yet in other ways, Smyth embraced convention. Born to an affluent British family, she attended conservatory in Leipzig, where she crossed paths with composers including Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, and Brahms. She was, in effect, an insider-outsider: a rebelliously free spirit who also performed her music in Queen Victoria’s drawing room, and who, in 1922, was named a Dame of the British Empire.
The Wreckers is a bleak tale of love, violence, and betrayal amid the desperate and disempowered. Smyth relished the shock value and ethical topsy-turviness of Brewster’s plot, praising it as “devoid of conventional morality.” A community of Cornwall villagers, united by both religious zealotry and impoverished circumstances, turn to “wrecking” passing ships, justifying the practice on religious grounds.
The overture to The Wreckers evokes the twinned forces—the physically powerful sea and the socially powerful church—that govern the villagers’ lives. Its opening gesture, of three ascending notes followed by a torrent of dotted rhythms, arrives with the force of a wave crashing against a rocky shore. A calmer mood soon pervades. The English horn ushers in a mournful rendition of a Cornish folk song; it is passed on to the strings, where it blooms into a serene, lush major key. But the respite is brief, and the wreckers’ theme returns. An atmosphere of increasing agitation culminates in a glorious, hymn-like tune, characterized by rhythmic and melodic unity. The orchestra becomes a choir, its evenly paced phrases punctuated by elegant pauses. The overture swells in grandeur, reaching a celebratory conclusion. If most of the overture is structured similarly to that of an Italian opera, presenting the opera’s melodic “greatest hits” one by one, its rapturous ending evokes Smyth’s Germanic training in its boldness and bombast. — Lucy Caplan
Concerto for You
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. Esmail divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral work. Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music.
(note by the composer) What if there was a concerto where the job of the soloist was to support the orchestra as much as the orchestra supported the soloist?
This is the question that led to the creation of Concerto for You. In a typical concerto, the soloist performs with dazzling virtuosity for the audience, while an entire orchestra sits in the background, staring at their back. I wanted to try something different in this piece.
For this experiment to work, I wanted to find musicians who hadn’t yet experienced a traditional concerto setting, and hadn’t yet made the agreements professional musicians have made — and so I turned to students, and specifically those for whom music was a passion, a means for connection rather than competition.
This work was built with violinist Vijay Gupta. I have watched him inspire so many young musicians, not just with his playing, but with his kindness and collegiality, with his curiosity and openness, and with his willingness to listen deeply. Our joint vision for this concerto was to create a musical means to a human and relational end.
As this work moves into the hands of other professional violinists, building relationships with student ensembles, I wanted each musician in the orchestra to start from the assumption that the music on the stand wasn’t their accompaniment part to a concerto meant for a star soloist — it was truly for them. And so, at the top of each part is written: “Concerto for You”. — Reena Esmail
Price Symphony No. 1 in E minor
In 1935, the African-American writer and composer Shirley Graham could boast of the accomplishments of America’s first African-American symphonists: William Grant Still, Florence B. Price and William Dawson. “Spirituals to Symphonies in less than fifty years! How could they even attempt it?” she asked in an article in which she recounts the development of African-American art music leading to the critical acclaim of Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, premiered by the Philadelphia Symphony under Leopold Stokowski in 1934. William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony was premiered by the Rochester Philharmonic in 1931 and Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1933.
What was the impetus behind the creation of the first symphonies by African-American composers? The spiritual inspiration came from the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an Anglo-African composer and concert violinist who visited this country three times between 1904 and 1910 and who had won fame as a conductor and composer in England. Keenly interested in African-American folk music, Coleridge-Taylor wrote several compositions based loosely or directly on this source material. A more subtle influence on African-American composers came from the “American” works of the Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorák who came to this country in 1892 to head the National Conservatory of Music in New York. During his three-year tenure here, the composer publicly advocated the use of African-American and Native-American folk music in composition to create a national American style. And the affirmation of the values of the black cultural heritage had a decisive impact on Still, Price, and Dawson, who had as their primary goal the incorporation of Negro folk idioms, that is, spirituals, blues, and characteristic dance music in symphonic forms.
Florence Beatrice Smith Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on April 9,1887. After receiving her early music training from her mother, she attended the New England Conservatory of Music, graduating in 1906 after three years of study, with a Soloist’s diploma in organ and a Teacher’s diploma in piano.
After completing her degree, Price returned south to teach music at colleges in Arkansas and Atlanta. In 1927, now married and with two children, Florence Price and her family moved to Chicago to escape the racial tension in the south which, by the late 1920s, had become intolerable. Here Price established herself as a concert pianist, organist, teacher and composer.
Price’s Symphony in E minor was written in 1931. The Symphony won the Rodman Wanamaker Prize in 1932, a national competition which brought her music to the attention of Frederick Stock, who conducted the Chicago Symphony in the world premiere performance of the work in June 15, 1933 at the Auditorium Theater. The Symphony won critical acclaim and marked the first symphony by an African-American woman composer to be played by a major American orchestra.
Price based the first movement of her Symphony on two freely composed melodies reminiscent of the African-American spiritual. The influence of Dvorák in the second theme is most evident. The second movement is based on a hymn-like melody and texture no doubt inspired by Price’s interest in church music. The jovial third movement, entitled “Juba Dance,” is based on characteristic African-American ante-bellum dance rhythms. For Price, the rhythmic element in African-American music was of utmost importance. Referring to her Third Symphony (1940) which uses the Juba as the basis for a movement, she wrote “it seems to me to be no more impossible to conceive “of Negroid music devoid of the spiritualistic theme on the one hand than strongly syncopated rhythms of the juba on the other.” The Symphony closes with a tour de force presto movement based on an ascending and descending scale figure.
Price died in 1953 after receiving many accolades during her career. She wrote over 300 compositions, including 20 orchestral works and over 100 art songs. — Rae Linda Brown