Program Notes for Distant Shores
This is a program of intersections, of cultural cross currents from the end of the Age of Discovery/Conquest to the age of Empire. Like an oceanic gyre, this program celebrates music and musicians traveling across the globe, scattering musical ideas like seeds across shores near and distant. And while any exploration of art from these centuries should rightfully force us to confront the often-unpleasant legacies of colonialism, we cannot also help but marvel in the breadth and depth of beauty and creativity that blossomed from ground stained with centuries of oppression and bloodshed; the best of humanity springing from the worst. May this music bring us at least some comfort in the midst of this reality.
AGAVE's last two touring and recording projects, In Her Hands and the GRAMMY-nominated American Originals, featured a tapestry of music which spanned centuries and continents, all woven together with music by the remarkable Black American composer Florence B. Price. For this new project, which is receiving its premiere with you today at the Whidbey Island Music Festival, the composer whose unique story and musical works bookend our journey is Queen Lili'uokalani of Hawai'i.
The music of Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha, (Lili'uokalani was the name given to her upon becoming heir to the Hawai'ian throne) occupies a unique place in the history and cultural landscape of her native land, existing as it does at the intersections of art and folk music, secular and sacred context, and indigenous and acculturated traditions. Born in Honolulu to a noble family of ali'i (descendants of chiefs) and educated by Congregationalist missionaries, Lili'u, along with her sister Miriam Likelike (1851-1887) and her brothers David Kalākaua (1836-1891, King from 1874 until his death) and William Pitt Leleiohoku II (1855-1877) were collectively known as na Lani 'Ehā (the heavenly four) and revered for their contributions to Hawai'ian musical and cultural life both during their lifetimes and into the present day.
When the first American missionaries arrived in Hawai'i in 1820, they brought with them the Congregationalist part-singing hymn traditions prevalent in their native New England. A few decades later, Gospel songs - inspired by the secular sentimental ballads popular in the United States at the time - inspired a new genre of Hawai'ian song called hīmeni (lit. 'hymns'), which, despite their sacred influences, were primarily secular in nature. Lili'u composed over 250 songs in a variety of styles. Her most famous song - indeed, for many people outside of Hawai'i, her only known work, is the heartbreaking Aloha 'oe, written in 1878 and published in San Francisco in 1890. Equally lovely and showing the influence of the Victorian parlor ballads beloved by Lili'u and her sister, is Ku'u Pua i Paoakalani, written during the Queen's imprisonment in 1895 after Hawai'i's monarchy was overthrown under threat of military force by American robber barons. Both of these songs make use of the beloved Hawai'ian poetic technique of kaona - imbuing the lyrics with multiple contextually dependent layers of hidden meanings. Also on the program is Lili'u's graceful waltz song Puna Pala 'A'aia, here arranged with for solo piano by Henry Lebedinsky.
Although the works of the first known native-born Cuban composer is just now beginning to be recognized abroad, the music of Esteban Salas y Castro has enjoyed almost uninterrupted performance in his homeland over the past two centuries. From 1764 until close to his death, Salas served as maestro de capillaat the cathedral in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second largest city. An avid scholar of the music of the Spanish Renaissance, he collected, studied, transcribed, and arranged the works of Vittoria, Guerrero, and others. The result is music full of contradictions – alternatively conservative and forward-looking, blending stile antico polyphony with au courant Italian galant string writing and incorporating native Cuban poetical and musical elements – all with a keen sensitivity to the performing forces he had at his disposal.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London, the son of an Englishwoman and a Creole man from Sierra Leone. At fifteen, he entered the Royal College of Music, studying first violin and then composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. He quickly gained a reputation as a composer and conductor, touring the USA in 1904 and meeting President Theodore Roosevelt. The American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar encouraged him to explore the music of his African and African-American roots, which inspired a number of his works, including his 1905 piano collection Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, which included works based on music from both Africa and the African diaspora, including Spirituals and the remarkable Bamboula, one of the most popular Haitian dance rhythms, itself derived from West African models. While less known in Classical and Baroque musical circles than other globetrotting rhythmic/chordal progressions such as the Chaconne and Folia, which danced their way from Africa and South America via Spain into the most prestigious circles of European society, the Bamboula made its way to Cuba and South America where it evolved into the Habanera (think Bizet's Carmen) and Argentine tango. Coleridge-Taylor died from pneumonia at age 37, his respected reputation never translating into financial solvency. His daughter Avril (1903-1998) was also a successful conductor and composer.
Camille Nickerson was a Black American pianist, singer, composer, and ethnomusicologist. She earned degrees from Oberlin Conservatory, Columbia University, and the Juilliard School, and served on the faculty of Howard University from 1926-1962. Throughout her life, she collected, arranged, and published songs from her Louisiana Creole heritage and toured across the United States and France performing the repertoire under the moniker 'The Louisiana Lady.' Lisette, to quitte la plaine is the oldest known poetic text in Haitian Creole, dating back to around 1757. The version of the text (and the tune upon which Nickerson based her 1942 setting) comes from the Creole community living in Philadelphia at the end of the 18th century. It is a heartbreaking slave narrative telling of a man whose enslaved beloved is being taken away to live in the city. On a very different note, the nursery song Dansé Conni Conné, from Nickerson's same collection of Five Creole Songs, is a lighthearted Bamboula with a nonsense refrain.
Born in Manila to a wealthy family, Dolores Paterno grew up surrounded by music and art. Her brother Pedro was a novelist and poet who became the second Prime Minister of the Philippines, and several of her sisters were celebrated painters. Dolores showed early musical talent and pursued piano studies in college. She wrote Sampaguita at the age of 25, and is her only known composition, set to lyrics by her brother based on a poem written by her mother. It is a habanera, based on the African Bamboula rhythm, traveling all the way to Asia via Spanish colonization. Sadly, Paterno died only two years later at the age of 27. Like Lili'uokalani's Aloha 'Oe, this piece has enjoyed quite a bit of fame after the death of its composer, being translated into Tagalog and recast as a military march still performed today for the President of the Philippines.
Nobu Koda was born in Tokyo and studied at the Tokyo Music School before going to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory in 1889 at the age of 19, becoming one of the first Japanese women to study abroad. She later traveled to Vienna to study violin with Joseph Joachim, long-time friend and collaborator of Johannes Brahms. Returning to Japan, she taught for years at the Tokyo Music School, where Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the Suzuki Teaching Method, was one of her students. Her violin sonata in D minor dates from 1897. In mood and style, it very much shows the influence of early German Romanticism - especially the works of Mendelssohn. Yet it is far from just an imitation, instead carefully imbued with an understated, spacious, and elegant aesthetic.
Composer, cellist, and professor Kiyoshi Nobutoki was born in Osaka and studied composition, counterpoint, and cello at the Tokyo National University for Arts and Music. From 1920-1922, he traveled abroad to study in Germany, France, and the UK, returning to Japan in 1923 and joining the faculty of his alma mater, where he taught until his retirement in 1954. His output includes works for orchestra, choir, wind band, chamber ensembles, as well as many solo songs and piano pieces. Dokurakugin (lit. 'reciting poetry for my own pleasure') was published in 1936 and is based on a series of short poems by Akemi Tachibana (1812-1868), each extolling the virtues of a simple, solitary pleasure. Nobutoki's setting, originally for voice and piano and arranged for this program by Henry Lebedinsky, blends Western harmony and melodic ideas with Japanese folk modes into a unique, approachable, and text-driven narrative.
Son of a Puerto Rican woman and a French organist and composer who trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, José Ignacio Quintón grew up in Coamo, where he studied with his father and later with the Spanish pianist and organist Ernesto del Castillo. By the age of nine, he was performing professionally, and enjoyed success as a band leader, organist, chamber musician, composer, and teacher before his untimely death at the age of 44. His surviving output includes a Requiem Mass, orchestral music, a number of chamber works, and solo piano pieces. However, he is most notably remembered for his Danzas - a uniquely Puerto Rican folk genre which he elevated to the same poetic level that Chopin did with the humble waltz. His String Quartet in D (1913), the only one he wrote, shows his mastery of both the European romantic style as well as his innate rhythmic flair and vitality.
Just two years younger than Quintón, Haitian pianist and composer Justin Élie was born in Cap-Haïtien and studied at the Paris Conservatory from 1901-1905. After returning to Haiti, he began to compose, perform, and tour in earnest, traveling around the Americas from Venezuela through the Caribbean and eventually settling in New York City, where he published, performed, and recorded his own works, many of which were evocative of the folk music and traditions of his native country. He was a major force in bringing Haitian méringue music to the world's attention, especially after the 1915 US occupation of Haiti, performing in venues from clubs to Carnegie Hall. He died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage in 1931. Légende Créole is an example of the type of character piece Élie was known for, combining Haitian folk elements with violinistic virtuosity - and savvy marketing: its length was tailored to fit on one side of a phonograph record.
The final few decades of the 18th century saw a heightened interest in folk music from what the educated elite classes in major European capitals considered the dark and mysterious corners of the world, with their air of exoticism and romanticism. The top three exotic destinations, in the minds of these folks, were Turkey, Russia, and... Scotland. Variations on Russian folk songs, Turkish marches (think Mozart's Rondo alla Turca and the Turkish variation in the last movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony), and especially Scottish songs were all the rage, and flew off publishers' shelves onto the music stands of enthusiastic amateurs across Europe.
Among the many continental composers who published sets of Scots songs were Beethoven, Geminiani, Barsanti, and Franz Josef Haydn, whose heartbreaking and (literally) haunting Mary's Dream we feature today. Haydn published 150 (!) Scots songs in two volumes (1792 and 1795) with figured bass accompaniment and a part for a violin or flute, much in the style of earlier publications by native Scotsman James Oswald and Italians Domenico Corri and Francesco Geminiani, with whose works he was likely familiar. Both Scots poetry by writers like Robert Burns and Walter Scott, often very sentimental and evoking an idealized and romanticized version of carefree life in the Highlands, remained extremely popular through the 19th century and occupied a prominent place in the personal song collections of Queen Lili'uokalani and her sister, Princess Miriam Likelike. The Scots parlor song style found its way into the original works of both sisters, seeking solace in music at a time when both their kingdom and their way of life was changing quickly and irreparably.
- Henry Lebedinsky