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Music segments:
- Ainadamar by Osvaldo Golijov
Carmen Helena Téllez, conductor;
soloists & chorus
- vocal aria "O Sorrow" from And They Lynched Him
on a Tree by William Grant Still
Mark Doerries, conductor;
Xan Jennings, guest performer;
& chorus
Venezuelan-American conductor Carmen Helena Téllez has been called “a quiet force behind contemporary music in the United States today” by the online journal Sequenza 21. Since the beginning of her professional career, she has concentrated in the relationship of music with other arts through her performances of contemporary works for chorus, orchestra and new opera in the United States, Europe, Israel and Latin America. After her tenure as Music Director of the National Chorus of Spain she joined the distinguished music faculty at Indiana University in 1992, as Director of the Latin American Music Center and the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. For these organizations she has commissioned and recorded several new works, and has founded the Inter-American Composition Workshops. During the 2001-2002 she was the Resident Conductor of the path-breaking Contemporary Chamber Players of Chicago and became the Music Director of the Pocket Opera Players in New York City.
Mark Brennan Doerries founded and directs the Luminescence Project, a choral
music organization dedicated to performing interdisciplinary and
multi-sensory compositions. The ensemble presented Luminescence:
Experiments in Visual Acoustics, a fusion of choral music and dynamic lighting, in the 2006 Philadelphia Fringe Festival and will debut in April
Ensnaring Hate, a semi-staged synesthetic performance of William Grant
Still¹s oratorio And They Lynched Him On A Tree.
Mark is completing his doctorate in Choral Conducting at Indiana University
and holds masters degrees from Temple University and the City University of
New York in conducting and music theory. Mark frequently presents papers on
multi-sensory performance practices, most recently at the Canadian
Festival500: Sharing the Voices, and will speak in September at the
Australian National Choral Association Conference. Mark will discuss
lynching dramas and And They Lynched Him On A Tree at the upcoming
conference on William Grant Still.
Xan Jennings, contralto, is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina and a recent graduate of Southern Methodist University. She is a first-year Master of Music student, studying with Marietta Simpson. With the IU Opera Theater, she performed the role of Mrs. Ott in Susannah. She has also performed the roles of La Zia Princepessa in Suor Angelica, in Amalfi, Italy, Katisha in The Milkado, and Maria in Porgy and Bess, with which she toured throughout South Africa. This past summer she performed with Utah Festival Opera.
William Grant Still (1895-1978), remembered as the "Dean of American Negro
Composers," pioneered a career as a composer and conductor that was marked
by success and discrimination. After college, Still entered the world of
commercial music, playing violin, cello and oboe in orchestras as well as
orchestrating for W. C. Handy, Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw.
Despite this immersion amongst major popular-music artists, Still's most
influential musical mentor was the ultra-modern composer Edgard Varèse.
Encouraging his gift for lyricism, Varèse championed Still¹s works and
programmed them on concerts of the International Composer's Guild.
Prior to Still, African-American composers were largely absent from
mainstream classical music performances. Still broke through this color barrier via his unique musical voice that fused improvisational elements of
the blues, which he considered the only authentic African music in America,
with the structure and forms of western classical music. Still became the
first African-American in the United States to have a symphony performed by
a major orchestra, the Rochester Symphony, the first to conduct a major
symphony orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936, and the
first to have an opera produced by a major company, Troubled Island was
performed in 1949 at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York City.
Still rejected spirituals as a source of musical material believing that
this idiom had been corrupted by Œthe influence of Caucasian music. Blues,
an untouched idiom, provided Still with an endless source of inspiration
from modal inflections and irregular phrase lengths to descending chromatic
melodies. In the Afro-American Symphony (1930), his best-known work, a
blues melody appears as the symphony's principal theme, exhibiting idiomatic
modal harmonies and rhythms.
With over 200 composition, including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber
works and arrangements of folk themes, William Grant Still was a well
recognized composer during the 1940s and 50s. After a recent period of
latency, Still¹s life and works are being rediscovered and performed with
renewed attention focused upon the racial and political climate that
influenced African-American artists of the early-twentieth century.
And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940), William Grant Still's controversial
choral ballad scored for black and white choruses, courageously speaks of
the countless black men brutally murdered in the name of Southern Justice
during the early twentieth century. Still and librettist Katherine Garrison
Chapin borrowed the politically charged anti-lynching drama, as pioneered by
Langston Hughes, as a model for their ballad. Lynching dramas gave voice to
the collective outrage of an underclass of black Americans that sought to
decry institutionalized racism and violence. In 1940 anti-lynching
legislation passed the United States House of Representative, yet the bill
was defeated in the Senate; And They Lynched Him On A Tree is Still and
Chapin's response to this legislative failure.
Despite Still's recognition as a composer, conductors and orchestras refused
to perform the work protesting its dark and disquieting conclusion, talk of
justice and take your stand, but a long dark shadow will fall across you
land. The oratorio was altered to forecast a hopeful future for race
relations in America at the request of the New York Philharmonic, which
feared stirring up unnecessary excitements could insight violence or
riots. Although And They Lynched Him On A Tree received major performances
in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, the University of Mississippi
prohibited its faculty and students from performing the work.
The work contains three scenes and begins just moments after a young black
man has been battered and strangled. A mob of white men and women recount
their vicious act with alarming dissociation. As the mob disperses, the
family of the murdered man cautiously emerges and fills in the details of
the events that led to his death. Caught flirting with a white woman, the
young man was tried on false charges and sentenced to spend his life in
jail. An angry mob rejects this judgment and drags the man from his cell
and lynches him. The emotional climax of the scene occurs when the murdered
man¹s mother laments the loss of her son in the aria "O Sorrow".
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