Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin (1919)

Maurice Ravel’s (1875–1937) Le Tombeau de Couperin (“The Tomb of Couperin”) was originally written between 1914 and 1917 as a six-movement suite for solo piano, each dedicated to the memory of a friend lost in combat during the First World War. The work is better known today by its four-movement orchestrated version written by the composer himself in 1919 at the request of his publisher. The Couperin in the title is the French composer François Couperin (1668–1733), and the word “Tombeau” has less to do with Couperin or his actual grave than it does with the 17^th century meaning of the word as a memorial. Ravel’s intent, as seen in the work’s structure, was to compose an homage to the sensibilities of the French Baroque keyboard suite. The orchestrated version opens with an energetic, perpetually-moving Prelude featuring the oboe and winds. Next comes a joyful Venetian folk dance, the Forlane. The Menuet, an elegant classical dance, brings in a hint of sadness, with the concluding Rigaudon returning to the spiritedness of French folkdance.

Brittany Green: Black Dandelions: An American Triptych (WFSO World Premiere)

Dr. Brittany Green is a composer, performer, and professor who currently teaches at East Carolina University. Her music has been featured worldwide, including at the World Saxophone Congress, the American Piano Awards, and at Carnegie Hall and Tanglewood. According to the composer, her “music works to facilitate collaborative, intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses. The intersections between sound, video, movement, and text serves as the focal point of these musical spaces, often questioning and redefining the relationships between these three elements.” Here she is discussing the work on tonight’s program, which was commissioned by the Lexington Philharmonic and the WFSO:

“Black Dandelions: An American Triptych is a 20-minute full orchestra work that interrogates nuanced and contentious relationships between Blackness, land, American history, and the lived experiences of Black Womxn in the American South. Featuring a prelude and triptych, movements are designed to be modular and can be performed as a full set, individually, or as a subset. The piece opens with Against/Sharp, an orchestral expansion of a chamber work by the same name. This expansion serves as the prelude of the work, grounding it in the ethos of taking up space.”

“The prelude is followed by a triptych of Black womxn—the daughter (mOther/Land), the messenger (blue breath/red hands), the God (to swell/to SWALLOW)—presented through the setting of poetry by Crystal Wilkinson (Lexington, KY), Jaki Shelton Green (Mebane, NC), and Ebony Stewart (Texas) in conversation with familiar Southern American and Appalachian themes. Through the stories of these womxn, audiences are invited to see Black womxnhood in its fullness and sit with the dualities of hurt, healing, care, and discardment these womxn must carry. Much like the dandelion’s ability to grow in diverse and harsh environments, the depth and stability of its taproots, and its unrelenting resilience, Black womxn both make home and hold the burden of the truths of this land wherever we go.”

Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “from the New World,” Op. 95

The New World Symphony was composed by Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) while he was living in America from 1892 to 1895 as the director of the National Conservatory of Music. The Czech composer brought with him the Romantic-era fascination of embracing native folk songs and dance rhythms known as “musical nationalism,” as seen, for example, in the music of Béla Bartók (Hungary), Ralph Vaughn Williams (England), and Jean Sibelius (Finland). In the US, for Dvořák that meant finding inspiration from Native American and African American musical traditions. As the composer put it: “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil.” Similarly, twenty-two-year-old Englishman Frederick Delius was deeply influenced by the spirituals he heard while managing an orange plantation in Florida in 1884, as exemplified in his 1887 Florida Suite.

Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered under the baton of Anton Seidl at Carnegie Hall on December 16^th, 1893. In a New York Herald article appearing the previous day, Dvořák said, “I have not actually used any of the [Native American] melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral colour.” Further, he says that the second movement, marked “Largo,” was a “sketch or study for a later work, either a cantata or opera . . . which will be based upon Longfellow’s [The Song of] Hiawatha.” Though this follow-up work never came to fruition, the movement presents Dvořák’s most celebrated melody. Interestingly, the above-mentioned Delius had already composed a tone poem titled Hiawatha himself in 1888.