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The Seventy-Third Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

3,039th Concert

Marian Anderson String Quartet

Marianne Henry and Nicole Cherry, violins

Diedra Lawrence, viola

Prudence McDaniel, cello

with

Celeste Headlee, narrator

Presented in honor ofAfrican American History Month

February 22, 2015

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court
Program

William Grant Still (1895-1978)

Songs ofSeparation

Arr. Robert W. Pound (b. 1970)

Idolatry (Poem by Arna Bontemps)

Poeme (Poem by Phillipe Thoby-Marcelin)

Parted (Poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar)

IfYou Should Go (Poem by Countee Cullen)

Black Pierrot (Poem by Langston Hughes)

Jonathan B. McNair (b. 1959)

Follow the Drinking Gourdfor String Quartet (2014)

Introduction and Sing-Along Chorus

On Being Enslaved

When the First Quail Calls

Rivers and Hills

INTERMISSION

Frederick Delius (1862-1934)

String Quartet in E Minor (1917)

With animation

Quick and lightly

Slow and wistfully, “Late Swallows”

Very quick and vigorously

•'Dedicated to the Marian Anderson String Quartet

The Musicians

In 1992 Marian Anderson gave the Chaminade Quartet permission to use

her name as their own, after they had won the International Cleveland

Quartet Competition, making them the first African American ensemble

in history to win a classical competition. In a memorable show of gratitude, 

the Marian Anderson String Quartet performed a private recital for their

namesake in her home in Portland, Oregon.

The winners ofthe 2008 Guarneri String Quartet Award and the 2006

Congress of Racial Equality Martin Luther King Award for Excellence in

Arts and Culture, the Marian Anderson String Quartet is equally at home

in the concert hall and the classroom. With performance venues that range

from the 1993 Presidential Inauguration, Alice Tully Hall, and the Library

ofCongress, to soup kitchens and juvenile correctional facilities, the quartet

continues to uphold its mission to create new and diverse audiences for

American chamber music.

The quartet is currently quartet-in-residence at Blinn College in Brenham,

Texas, and recently founded the Marian Anderson String Quartet Community 

Music School, a nonprofit organization in Bryan, Texas. In May 2015 the 

quartet will be the inaugural Heimark artists-in-residence at the Center for

the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

CELESTE HEADLEE

Celeste Headlee is an award-winning journalist and an active soprano.

She hosts the public radio show On Second Thought in Atlanta and also

has hosted Tell Me More, Talk ofthe Nation, and The Takeaway for national 

audiences. In her musical life, she appears on the CD Classically Blue from 

gospel artist Lea Gilmore. She has given performances for the National

Gallery of Art, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Colorado College,

the Detroit Institute ofArts, Yavapai College, Wagner College, Wayne State

University, and other venues. She performed with the Michigan Opera 

Theatre for six years while in Detroit and served as guest artistic director 

ofthe National Gallery’s 2013 American Music Festival.

3
Program Notes

SONGS OF SEPARATION

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, William Grant Still was the son oftwo

teachers. His father, who performed as a local bandleader, died when

Still was three months old. His mother then moved the family to Little

Rock, Arkansas, where she taught high school English for thirty-three

years. She married Charles B. Shepperson, who nurtured Still's musical

interests by taking him to operettas and buying him Red Seal recordings

of classical music.

Still started violin lessons at age fifteen and taught himselfto play the

clarinet, saxophone, oboe, double bass, cello, and viola. After high school,

his mother wanted him to go to medical school, so he attended Wilberforce University, Ohio, for a science degree. While there, he conducted

the university band and started to compose. He was awarded a scholarship

to study at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

In 1918 Still joined the United States Navy to serve in World War 1, after

which he worked as an arranger for W. C. Handy’s band, and later played in

the pit orchestra for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s musical, Shuffle Along.

In the 1930s, Still worked as an arranger of popular music, writing for the

popular nbc Radio broadcasts Deep River Hour and Old Gold Show. He then

moved to Los Angeles and arranged music for films that included Pennies

from Heaven and Lost Horizon. In 1936 he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and became the first African American to conduct a

major American orchestra.

He also was the first African American to have an opera performed on

national television, when A Bayou Legend (1941) premiered on pbs in 1981.

In 1949 his opera Troubled Island, about the Haitian revolutionary JeanJacques Dessalines (1758-1806) was performed by the New York City

Opera and represented the first opera by an African American to be staged

by a major company.

4

During his life William Grant Still received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was awarded honorary doctorates from Oberlin College, Wilberforce University, Howard University, Bates College, the University ofArkansas, Pepperdine University, the New England Conservatory of Music, the

Peabody Conservatory, and the University of Southern California. He was 

posthumously awarded the 1982 Mississippi Institute ofArts and Letters 

award for music composition for his opera, A Bayou Legend. He is often

respectfully referred to as “the Dean” ofAfrican American composers.

Songs ofSeparation may be Still’s most ambitious work originally written

for voice and piano; it is a cycle offive thematically related songs set to the

writing of Harlem Renaissance poets. Robert W. Pound’s string arrangement

of Songs ofSeparation premiered in 2013 by the Marian Anderson String

Quartet on their program Songs ofFreedom and the Emancipation Proclamation

at Brown University.

FOLLOW THE DRINKING GOURD FOR STRING QUARTET

The suite Follow the Drinking Gourd takes inspiration from the story ofthe

Underground Railroad, a network ofsecret routes and safe houses that

helped enslaved people escape to free states. The song refers to the Big

Dipper constellation, whose code name was the Drinking Gourd. The stars

in this constellation helped guide the escapees in their nocturnal flight.

Also alluded to in the song are the best times ofyear to escape, the markings

that confirmed pathways, and the natural landmarks that indicated the

proximity ofsafer territory.

The audience is invited to sing along with the song’s chorus at the

beginning and the end ofthe suite.

Follow the drinking gourd, Follow the drinking gourd,

For the old man is a waitin’, For to carry you tofreedom

ifyou follow the drinking gourd.

5
Portions ofthe folk melody appear in each ofthe other movements,

as the music reflects on the story of an escaping African American family.

Additionally, three African American spirituals are quoted in the work:

movement two, “On Being Enslaved,” quotes “Go Down, Moses” and

“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”; movement three includes “I

Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” The movement also reflects the sounds and

signals an escaped slave might hear traveling the Underground Railroad.

Whistles, quail calls, feet running, leaves rustling, and water flowing are

all represented by string techniques such as pizzicato, trills, col legno,

harmonics, and ponticello. “Rivers and Hills,” the placid and serene fourth

movement, represents the passage through the Ohio River to freedom. 

Jeanette Winter’s children’s book, Follow the Drinking Gourd (Knopf, 1988)

is the inspiration for this musical suite.

Jonathan B. McNair’s music has been described by critics as “skillfully

crafted... expressive and rhythmic.” His works have been performed across

the United States in national and regional conferences and festivals, faculty

recitals, and professional concerts, as well as professional performances in

Canada, Austria, England, and Brazil. Selected works appear on the Capstone, aca Digital, and aur labels, and are published by Potenza Music and 

Keepe Publishing House. McNair was recently appointed to be the Ruth S.

Holmberg Professor ofAmerican Music at the University ofTennessee 

at Chattanooga, where he has produced or collaborated on eight regional 

music festivals focused on new music. He is currently president ofthe 

Southeastern Composers League.

6

STRING QUARTET IN E MINOR

Frederick Delius was born to a prosperous mercantile family in northern

England. Uninterested in pursuing a commercial career, he was sent to

Florida in 1884 to manage an orange plantation named Solano Grove.

He later said that one ofthe earliest experiences influencing his artistic 

development was the sound of plantation songs carrying down the river to

him. That singing gave him the urge to express himselfin music. “Thus,”

wrote Delius’s musical assistant Eric Fenby, “many of Delius’s early works

are redolent of Negro hymnology and folk song, a sound not heard before

in the orchestra.”

After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects ofsyphilis, contracted 

during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralyzed and blind, but

completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid

of Fenby.

Ifthere is a quartet that exemplifies what it means to be unjustly

neglected, this is the one. Delius’s music is often described as “romantic

impressionism.” You can hear the lasting influence of his friend Edvard

Grieg, tinged with the sensuality ofWagner and Strauss. Delius’s lyrical

writing is most pronounced in the central two movements, and “Late

Swallows” is the centerpiece ofthe quartet. Some ofthe melody heard

in this passage can be traced back thirty years to his fascination with

Negro Spirituals.

Program Notes contributed by the Marian Anderson String Quartet
Idolatry - Arna Bontemps

You have been good to me, I give you this:

The arms oflovers empty as our own,

Marble lips sustaining one long kiss

And the hard sound of hammers breaking stone.

For I will build a chapel in the place 

Where our love died and I will journey there 

To make a sign and kneel before your face

And set an old bell tolling on the air.

Poeme - Philippe Thoby Marcelin

Ce n'etait pas l'aurore,

Maisje m'etais leve

En me frottant les yeux.

Tout dormait alentour.

Les bananiers sous ma fenetre,

Frissonnaient dans le clair de lune,

Calme.

Alors, j'ai pris ma tete dans mes mains

Et j'ai pense a vous.

{Translationfrom original French)

It was not yet dawn,

ButI arose

Rubbing my eyes.

Around, allslept.

Under my window, the banana trees

Shivered in the moonlight,

Calm.

Then, I held my head in my hands

And Ithought ofyou

Parted - Paul Laurence Dunbar

She wrapped her soul in a lace oflies,

With a prime deceit to pin it;

And I thought I was gaining a fearsome prize,

Sol staked my soul to win it.

We wed and parted on her complaint,

And both were a bit of barter,

Tho' I'll confess that I'm no saint,

I'll swear that she's no martyr.
If I Should Go - Countee Cullen

Love, leave me like the light,

The gently passing day;

We would not know, but for the night,

When it has slipped away.

Go quietly; a dream,

When done, should leave no trace 

That it has lived, except a gleam 

Across the dreamer's face

Black Pierrot - Langston Hughes

I am a black Pierrot:

She did not love me,

So I crept away into the night

And the night was black, too.

I am a black Pierrot:

She did not love me,

So I wept until the dawn 

Dripped blood over the eastern hills

And my heart was bleeding, too.

I am a black Pierrot:

She did not love me,

So with my once gay-colored soul

Shrunken like a balloon without air,

I went forth in the morning 

To seek a new brown love.