77TH SEASON OF

CONCERTS

national gallery of art | november 4, 2018
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Flophouse Crew

Nolan Williams, Jr., conductor

Celebrating Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940 – 1950

Music by Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (1912 – 2006)

November 4, 2018 | 4:00 

East Building Auditorium

Musical excerpts from the film Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (1984) * †

Selected movements from Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1953) ‡ †

Announcement

Episode

Nocturne

Prelude and fugue

The Learning Tree † §

Selected movements from the ballet Martin (1989) * †

Allegro Maestoso

Letter to the World

Entr’acte

Letter from Birmingham Jail

From the film Shaft

“Don’t Misunderstand” (1972)§†

 * Transcribed and orchestrated by Kermit Moore 

 † Arranged by Scott Silbert

 ‡ Orchestrated by Henry Brant

 § Transcribed by Scott Silbert

PROGRAM MUSICIANS | COMPOSERS

Flophouse Crew | Ensemble

Flophouse Crew is an assembly of local freelance musicians whose mission is to research, 

cultivate, and preserve the historical, cultural, and ethnic diversity in music. Our goal 

is to foster an audience of concert attendants who hunger for the unusual and the 

unknown, eclectic, and academic. We are pleased to showcase some of the works 

of the modern Renaissance man, Gordon Parks. We want to thank the Gordon Parks 

Foundation, the Library of Congress, Philip Brookman, curator of the National Gallery 

of Art’s exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940 – 1950, and the Wichita 

State University Special Collections in aiding in the accrual and permission to perform 

and project on a screen these timeless and valuable works of art.

Scott Silbert | Arranger

Scott Silbert arranged all of Gordon Parks’s works in today’s concert. As an arranger, 

Silbert adapts musical scores for specific ensembles. Born in Philadelphia, he is also 

a woodwind player and served as the United States Navy Band’s chief arranger until 

his retirement in 2017. He is currently an active musician and arranger with the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and has performed and arranged music for James 

Taylor, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Michael Buble, Gloria Estefan, and Josh Groban, 

among others.

Gordon Parks | Composer

Gordon Parks was an American photographer, musician, composer, writer, poet, and 

film director, who gained prominence in documentary photojournalism from the 1940s 

through the 1970s, particularly in the areas of civil rights, poverty, and African American 

life. He also worked in glamour photography.

As the first famous pioneer among African American filmmakers, Parks produced 

and directed major motion pictures that shared the experience of America’s enslaved 

people and the continuing struggle of African Americans. He pioneered the “blaxploitation” genre and is best remembered for his photos of poor Americans taken during 

a fellowship with the Farm Security Administration in the 1940s, as well as for his Life

magazine photographic essays and his directing of television and film productions that 

include Shaft (1972).

Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of Sarah (née Ross) and Jackson 

Parks, a farmer. When he was fourteen, Gordon’s mother died, and soon after he was 

sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with a sister and her husband. Disagreement ensued 

and at age fifteen Parks was turned out on the street to fend for himself. Struggling to 

survive, he worked in brothels and also as a singer, piano player, busboy, traveling waiter, 
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and semipro basketball player. Later, he jumped a train to Chicago where he landed a job 

in a flophouse, an extremely sparse and inexpensive hostel.

Similar to Brahms and Debussy, Parks’s first job as a teenager was as a piano player 

in a brothel. He quickly learned the popular jazz medium of the day. In 1929, he briefly 

worked in the Minnesota Club, where he met and performed with band leader Larry 

Funk. Although the Depression brought an end to the club, Parks’s song “No Love” was 

performed during a national radio broadcast by Funk and his orchestra in the early 1930s.

Parks learned piano by rote and could not read or write music in conventional 

musical notation. He created his own tablature to capture his musical works on paper. 

He relied on the help of composers and arrangers — who transcribed from his personal 

taped recordings on the piano and his tablature — to orchestrate and arrange his music 

for professional musicians to perform and record. 

Gordon Parks, composition notes from Nocturne (Main Theme). Courtesy 

Gordon Parks Foundation

PROGRAM NOTES

The PBS television film Solomon Northup’s Odyssey aired in 1984 and was both directed 

and musically scored by Parks. Based on the autobiography Twelve Years a Slave by 

Solomon Northup, the film featured the story of a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped and sold into slavery. The impact of Parks’s musical score was skillfully developed 

by Kermit Moore, an outstanding African American cellist, conductor, composer, teacher, 

and mentor. Through his broad talents in music, Moore succeeded in breaking down 

the racial barriers of his generation. His early studies were at the Cleveland Institute of 

Music, and at age nineteen he became a member of the Cleveland Orchestra. He continued 

his studies at the Paris Conservatory with the legendary composer and pedagogue 

Nadia Boulanger. Living and performing in Europe, he soloed with and conducted major 

orchestras. In 1961, Moore returned to the States to teach, compose, conduct, and perform with the New York Philharmonic, Jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, and violin virtuoso 

Ruggiero Ricci. He founded the Symphony of the New World, which actively fosters 

minority artists.

The excerpts featured on today’s program are cues from the film’s soundtrack and 

include original music written to accompany specific scenes. These musical cues aimed 

to enhance the dramatic narrative and actively underscore the intended emotional 

impact. To fuse the music with the video, the music was first recorded by an ensemble 

of musicians, and then “burned” (synchronized) onto a time code with the previously 

filmed material.

Parks composed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra at the encouragement of African 

American conductor Charles Dean Dixon and his wife Vivian Rivkin, a pianist. Dixon was 

of West Indian descent and attended the Juilliard School in 1932 and Columbia University 

in 1939. He was the first person to establish a racially integrated orchestra in New York 

City. His career as an accomplished conductor began with concerts for the New York 

City Orchestra, the NBC Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. Later he directed 

various French and German radio orchestras.

Parks composed his piano concerto with the help of the composer and orchestrator 

Henry Brant, who was America’s foremost composer of acoustic spatial music. Born to 

American parents living in Montreal, Brant is widely recognized as a master orchestrator. 

He moved to New York in 1929, where he worked commercially in radio, film, ballet, and 

jazz. He completed orchestration projects for George Antheil, Aaron Copland, Virgil 

Thomson, Douglas Moore, and Gordon Parks. In 2002, Brant was awarded the Pulitzer 

Prize in Music.

The Learning Tree is a film adaptation of Parks’s semi-autobiographical novel of 

the same name. It is set in the 1920s in the fictional town of Cherokee Flats, Kansas. 

Gifted in many artistic mediums, Parks helps his audience understand the feelings of 
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others. The work shares the hardships of poverty and discrimination that aren’t limited 

to a single group. The honesty and nuance of Parks’s work not only instills compassion 

for victims of racism, but also shows how people in general allow irrational fears and 

personal vulnerabilities to affect their racial attitudes. The theme song to The Learning 

Tree is presented in binary song form in a pop jazz medium and was premiered and 

popularized by song stylist O. C. Smith.

The Learning Tree

Where grows the learning tree 

By rivers that flow 

When the night . . . winds that blow . . . after sundown 

That’s what a boy should know

Fireflies and restless stars 

In tall fields of corn 

Where all June bugs are born 

In the dew time 

That’s what a boy should know

Broad skies . . . round as pie 

Clouds puffed . . . white as snow 

With two dogs . . . by his side 

And a nice girl to know 

Out where the sparrow flies 

Where blue birds can sing 

Overhead . . . . . . in the spring after moon down . . . 

There grows the learning tree

In 1989, Parks composed and directed Martin, a ballet dedicated to Martin Luther 

King, Jr. It was broadcast in 1990 on public television. Parks served as executive producer, 

director, documentary photographer, and composer for Martin, in itself a remarkably 

multifaceted feat. Though the film’s main body is the ballet, it is preceded by a documentary introduction that is the most highly charged, impassioned, and impressive 

part of the program. Similar to his photographic themes, it bears witness to the pain, 

suffering, and squalor of the mean streets for persons of color. The ensuing ballet, a 

cinema-dance fusion more than a conventional film record of a dance work, has an 

arrestingly individual, somewhat surreal look. It proceeds in five acts, corresponding to 

episodes in King’s life and introduces the trio of principal characters: Rosa Parks, King, 

and the Assassin. Choreography was by Rael Lamb, with Parks’s music transcribed and 

orchestrated by Kermit Moore.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for 

love. Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or will we be 

extremists for the cause of justice. I am here because injustice is here, and 

injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an 

inescapable network of ‘neutral-allity,’ tied in a single garment of destiny, that 

whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. — Excerpt from Martin 

Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail 

Gordan Parks composed “Don’t Misunderstand” for the blaxploitation crime film 

Shaft, which Parks also directed. The film is about a private detective, John Shaft, who 

is hired by a Harlem mobster to rescue his daughter from Italian kidnappers. The film’s 

major themes are race, masculinity, sexuality, and the Black Power movement. The Shaft

soundtrack album, recorded by Isaac Hayes, won a Grammy for Best Score. Parks composed “Don’t Misunderstand” in binary form and it was popularized by song stylist O. C. 

Smith. Later the song was covered by such great crooners as Etta James and Nancy Wilson.

Don’t Misunderstand

Don’t misunderstand 

We are only strangers 

On our way to somewhere else 

To some place we forgot

Don’t mistake my smile 

It just means I am lonely 

So love me till this day has passed 

And then forget we met

We’re just spending time 

In some secret place 

Yielding to a softened day 

To love, blow the pain away

Don’t misunderstand 

You are no concern of mine 

But in case you’re free sometime 

And you need some time with me 

 sometime 

To hold my hand, then I 

 will understand

We’re just spending time 

In some secret place 

Yielding to a softened day 

To love, blow the pain away

Don’t misunderstand 

You are no concern of mine 

But in case you’re free sometime 

And you need some time with me 

 sometime 

To hold my hand, then I will wonder, 

 I will understand

Program notes by Bruno Nasta
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Upcoming Events of the SeventySeventh Season of The William Nelson 

Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin Concerts

Unless otherwise noted, concerts 

are held in the West Building, West 

Garden Court.

Tapestry

Lessons of Darkness: Armistice Day 1918

November 11, 3:30

Nobuntu

Featuring traditional Zimbabwean 

songs, Afro jazz, and gospel

November 18, 3:30

Carolina Eyck + American Contemporary 

Music Ensemble 

Fantasias

December 2, 3:30

Caroling in the Rotunda

U. S. Army Chorus

MSG Jason Gottshall, conductor 

West Building Rotunda 

December 8, 1:30 and 2:30

Caroling in the Rotunda

Encore Chorale

Jeanne Kelly, director

West Building Rotunda 

December 9, 1:30 and 2:30

Mettis String Quartet

With Gabrielius Alekna, piano

Presented in collaboration with the 

Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania

December 9, 3:30

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art 

and all of its programs is free of charge, 

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording 

equipment during the performance 

is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic 

devices are turned off.

—

Concerts are made possible in part 

through the generosity of donors to the 

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition 

of their support. Please contact the 

development office at (202) 842-6450 or 

circle@nga.gov for more information.

—

The department of music produced 

these program notes. Copyright © 2018 

Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 

Washington

Cover Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941, 

Private Collection, Courtesy of and 

copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

NGA.GOV/MUSIC