Upcoming Events of the SeventyFifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Ben Williams Trio

"Washingtonians on Wednesdays"

April 5,12:10

East Building Auditorium

Alliage Quintett

Dancing Paris

April 9, 3:30

West Building, East Garden Court

John Kilkenny, percussion 

Tobias Werner, cello 

"Washingtonians on Wednesdays"

Music by Nick Didkovsky, Stephen Gorbos,

Osvaldo Golijov, and Mark Mellits

April 12,12:10

East Building Auditorium

Eya

Florence: The Cultural Crucible

Presented in honor of Della Robbia:

Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence

April 15,12:00 and 2:00

West Building, West Garden Court

The Sarajevo Haggadah: Music of the Book

Merima Kljuco's multimedia work for

accordion, piano, and video

April 15, 3:00

East Building Auditorium

Musical Dialogues: An Exploration of Hope

April 16, 3:00

West Building, East Garden Court

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

cirde@nga.gov for more information.

www.nga.gov

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2077 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Cover Isaac H. Bonsall, Chattanooga, Tennessee,

from Lookout Mountain (detail), 1863-1865,

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection

of Paul Sack

APRIL 2, 2017 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
PROGRAM

4:00 • West Building, East Garden Court

Apollo's Fire

Amanda Powell and Ross Hauck, vocals

Jeannette Sorrell, director, harpsichord, arranger

Tina Bergmann, hammered dulcimer

Susanna Perry Gilmore, violin

Kathie Stewart, wooden flutes

Brian Kay, lute, guitar, banjo, long-neck dulcimer

Rene Schiffer, cello

Sugarloaf Mountain: An Appalachian Gathering

prologue: farewell to the isles

"The Mountains of Rhum”

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

CROSSING TO THE NEW WORLD

"We'll Rant and We'll Roar"

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

"Farewell to Ireland — Highlander's Farewell"

DARK MOUNTAIN HOME

"Nottamun Town”

Arr. Brian Kay

Brian Kay, vocals and long-neck dulcimer

"The Cruel Sister”

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

Amanda Powell, vocals

"Se Fath Mo Buartha" (The Cause of All

My Sorrows), "The Butterfly," and

"Barney Brallaghan"

Arr. Kathie Stewart

Kathie Stewart, flute

2 • National Gallery of Art

'Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair' 

Arr. Rene Schiffer and Jeannette Sorrell

Ross Hauck, vocals

'Just before the Battle, Mother"

George Frederick Root, 1820-1895

Ross Hauck, vocals

"I Wonder as I Wander," "Kitchen Girl

and "Over the Isles to America"

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

Jeannette Sorrell, harpsichord

CAMPFIRE TALES

"Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night"

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

Amanda Powell, vocals

"A Frog He Went A-Courtin”'

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

Intermission

FRONT PORCH FIDDLIN'

"Oh Susanna!"

Stephen Foster (1826-1864)

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

"Pretty Peg/Far from Home”

Susanna Perry Gilmore, fiddle,

with Rene Schiffer, cello

LOVE AND LOSS

"Once I Had a Sweetheart"

"Wayfaring Stranger" 

from the Kentucky Harmony (1816)

"Pretty Betty Martin/Katy Did/

Red Rockin' Chair"

Arr. Tina Bergmann

Tina Bergmann, hammered dulcimer

and vocals

"Go March Along"

Amanda Powell, vocals

GLORY ON THE MOUNTAIN

"Glory in the Meeting House"

Arr. Jeannette Sorrell, Rene Schiffer,

and Tina Bergmann

"Oh Mary, Don't You Weep"

Amanda Powell, vocals

APPALACHIAN HOME

"A Southern Jack Tale"

"Sugarloaf Mountain"

Lyrics and Arr. Jeannette Sorrell

75th Season • 3
The Musicians

Named for the classical god of music and the sun, Apollo's Fire was founded in 1992 by the

award-winning young harpsichordist and conductor Jeannette Sorrell. Sorrell envisioned

an ensemble dedicated to the baroque ideal that music should evoke the various affekts, or 

passions, in the listeners. Apollo's Fire is a collection of creative artists who share Sorrell's 

passion for drama and rhetoric.

Hailed as "one of the preeminent period-instrument ensembles" (Independent, London),

Apollo's Fire made its London debut in 2010 in a sold-out concert at Wigmore Hall, with a

BBC broadcast. Subsequent European tours with sold-out performances took place in 2011,

2014, and 2015.

North American tour engagements include the Tanglewood Festival, the Aspen 

Music Festival, the Boston Early Music Festival series, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and major venues in Toronto, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The

ensemble has performed in U.S. tours of the Monteverdi Vespers (2010 and 2014) and a

nine-concert tour of the Brandenburg Concertos in 2013.

This summer Apollo's Fire returns to the Tanglewood Festival and makes its debut at

the Ravinia Festival. It makes its Carnegie Hall debut in March 2018.

At home in Cleveland, Apollo's Fire enjoys sold-out performances at its subscription

series, which has drawn national attention for creative programming. The ensemble has

released twenty-four commercial CDs and currently records for the British label AVIE. Seven

of the group's CD releases have become best sellers on the classical Billboard chart.

4 * National Gallery of Art

Program

Long ago,

The sparkling fiddle tunes and haunting ballads

Of the British Isles

Came across the water —

Taking root in the hills of Virginia,

Mingling with southern hymns and African spirituals.

Creating the soulful music we call Appalachian.

The people of the mountains raise their communal voices

In celebration of daily life —

Love, singing, dancing, and prayer.

Nestled between the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the eastern Appalachians, at the

northern tip of the Shenandoah Valley, lies beautiful Sugarloaf Mountain. Nearby, Amanda

Powell, Kathie Stewart, and I spent some formative years of our lives. From Frederick County,

where I lived as a teenager, and where Amanda later went to college, you can see the

rounded slope of Sugarloaf Mountain in the distance.

This area became my home when I was fourteen. I was still trying to figure out how 

to understand the Southern accents when, unexpectedly, I was offered my first job playing

the piano for the Greenway Southern Baptist Church. I was welcomed with open arms by

this small Revivalist congregation, which represented a completely different culture from

mine. I was entranced by the beautiful, stark harmonies of the Southern hymns and by the

passionate singing of the congregation. There was a sense of communal joy there.

I also keenly remember the lovely Appalachian ballad singer, Madeline MacNeil, who

would travel around to the small towns of the valley, playing her lap dulcimer and singing

these ancient ballads — most of which had come over from the British Isles, yet she sang

them in an Appalachian way.

I left Virginia at the age of seventeen and never looked back, until 2008, when a grant

from the National Endowment for the Arts sent me to the libraries for two years of research

in early American traditional music, and, inevitably, a journey back to my teenage years in

the valley. From this was born Apollo's Fire's 2009 program, Come to the River: An Early

American Gathering. The completely unexpected popularity of Come to the River — sold-out

concerts for years and a CD that spent two weeks in the Top 10 of the Billboard chart — led

me to ponder the way this music speaks to us and to our shared roots.

Sugarloaf Mountain is not a sequel to Come to the River. If anything, it is a prequel —

reaching back in time to explore the earliest roots of the Appalachian heritage.

The immigrants from the British Isles who made the crossing and built the Appalachian community were mostly from the impoverished lower classes. They left their beloved 

isles of Scotland and Ireland only to face endless years of unemployment, hunger, and civil

strife. The ballads they brought with them, which date back to the Renaissance and in some 

cases the Medieval period, include many that are dark and haunting. Topics such as murder

and fratricide are very common in this repertoire, but there are also delightfully playful

children's songs. In short, life was hard back in the home country —and it was still hard in

the Appalachian hills. Yet it was also filled with joy and laughter.

75th Season • 5
In this program, we explore the communal journey of these Celtic immigrants, who

left their island homes with sadness, but also with great hope. Their stories involve many 

young men who had to leave their sweethearts behind in Scotland or Ireland; many young 

women who had to face the choice of a dangerous and unknown life in the wilderness of the

New World, or the seemingly certain poverty and hopelessness of remaining at home in

Ireland; and many children who made joyful games for themselves amidst the hard-working

poverty of their parents. The stories, the sorrows, and the shared laughter of these immigrants are told in these ballads.

The typical instrumental ensemble of early America was the "Old-Time" band,

consisting of a fiddle and a banjo to start with, and maybe adding a guitar and a singer if

available. Of course the Irish were among the most prominent groups of immigrants, and

they brought their airs, jigs, and reels with them. In our opening Prologue, the traditional

Celtic air "The Mountains of Rhum," a young couple prepares to bid a sad farewell to the

beautiful Scottish and Irish islands. This leads into a set I call Crossing to the New World.

Here we evoke the last night at home before boarding the ship for the New World, with a

lively ce'ili dance. Our version of the traditional British and Canadian sea shanty, "We'll Rant

and We'll Roar,” evokes the hopes and fears of the men and women who made the crossing —

sometimes by choice and sometimes in desperation. This erupts into a "barn dance" featuring

the Irish reel "Farewell to Ireland" and the Appalachian version of the Scottish reel "Highlander's Farewell.”

The large group of ballads from Renaissance England and Scotland that made their

way across the Atlantic and permeated the fabric of Appalachian culture are known as the

Child Ballads — named for the ethnomusicologist James Frances Child, who spent a lifetime

collecting and cataloguing them. As mentioned, many of these are dark, and we explore 

that aspect of the Appalachian psyche in the second set, which I call Dark Mountain Home. 

This section includes the medieval ballad "Nottamun Town," which can still be heard today

in the English Midlands, particularly in Nottinghamshire and Southern Yorkshire; however, it

is much more popular in Appalachia. Probably "Nottamun" is a corruption of Nottingham.

The nonsensical lyrics describe an absurdly topsy-turvy world, and the song may have been

part of the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival where the hierarchy of the local clergy was

flipped for a day, with the lower clergy elevated to power. The festival was frowned upon by

the church and repeatedly condemned in the fifteenth century. In the twentieth century, Bob

Dylan used the melody of "Nottamun Town" for his song, "Masters of War."

The Renaissance ballad "The Cruel Sister" is also known as "Two Sisters” ("Twa Sisters"

in the earliest sources). About twenty-six different versions of its text and about five different

tunes for it can be found in New England and Appalachian folk music sources. The version 

that I created uses three different tunes, chosen to suit the character at different moments

of the story. I drew the text and the tunes from versions in the Northumbrian Minstrelsy (an

1882 publication of much older ballads as they were sung in North England and Scotland),

and Cecil Sharp's collection of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1932).

The Campfire Tales section of our program was inspired partly by the descriptions

that respected folk singer Jean Ritchie provides about her childhood in Kentucky — neighbors 

would gather around the campfire for songs, stories, tall tales, and dancing. The ballad "Fox

6 • National Gallery of Art

Went Out on a Chilly Night" is centuries old and can be found in many early English sources

as well as in Appalachian versions. There are even two versions in Middle English from the

time of Chaucer.

In the Front Porch Fiddlin' section, our version of the 1848 minstrel song "Oh 

Susanna" was inspired by our wish to sing the praises of our fabulous fiddle player, Susanna

Perry Gilmore. Our resident "minstrel," Brian Kay, begins the song with "a banjo on his knee”—

and indeed he plays a gourd banjo similar to the African instrument in use by nineteenthcentury minstrels. Then "Susanna" takes the spotlight, performing a virtuoso set of variations composed by our cellist Rene Schiffer.

No program about early America could be complete without a look at the music of 

Old-Time Religion. The Glory on the Mountain section of our program evokes the small 

meeting houses of the Revival Movement in the Appalachians, where Southern hymns and

spirituals were born in the early nineteenth century. From 1800 to 1850, several different

shape-note hymnals were published, including the Kentucky Harmony in 1816, the Southern

Harmony in 1835, and the Sacred Harp in 1844.

This was the era when the Celtic immigrants of the Appalachians met the music of 

enslaved Africans — resulting in the vibrant infusion of African American spirituals into the 

musical fabric. The Kentucky fiddle tune "Glory in the Meeting House" opens this set with

fiery ecstasy. The spirituals sung by Amanda Powell —"Go March Along" and "Oh Mary, Don't

You Weep"—represent the fervent and soulful expression of rural Appalachian worshippers,

both black and white. Our version of "Oh Mary" is inspired by the tradition of a cappella 

vocal ensembles such as Take 6 and the Cherryholmes family.

This program probably would not have been possible without the pioneering work

of the great American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Lomax, who died in 2002, spent most

of his life journeying through rural America and making field recordings of Old-Time and

Appalachian singers. His series of anthologies of traditional American songs and dance

tunes is a treasure-trove of the folk art of regional cultures.

To close the concert, the echoes of the Scottish air that opened the program now 

return with a more Appalachian feel. I took the liberty to write new lyrics to this melody, 

celebrating Sugarloaf Mountain and its settlers. The song reflects the communal journey of

our grandparents and their grandparents, as they made the crossing to the New World and

built their new mountain homeland, one cabin at a time. We hope that these concerts ring

with their inextinguishable spirit.

Program notes by Jeannette Sorrell

75th Season • 7