Coleridge Taylor Perkinson (b. 1932)
Sinfonietta No. 1 (1976)
Scored for: strings
Performance time: 15 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance.

Predestined for greatness, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was named for British Black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was himself named for poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in New York (now LaGuardia High School), Perkinson went on to the Manhattan School of Music for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, where he studied with Vittorio Giannini and Hugh Ross. He also studied with Earl Kim at Princeton University and spent three summers in Europe, studying conducting with Dean Dixon and Franco Ferrara and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Back in the United States, a lack of professional opportunities due to racial discrimination meant he had to continually reinvent himself. In addition to composing and conducting, Perkinson toured with drummer Max Roach as a jazz pianist and wrote arrangements for him and pop singers such as Harry Belafonte and Marvin Gaye. He was music director for several dance companies, including Jerome Robbins’s American Theater Lab and Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, and composed scores for television and film, including A Warm December (1973), directed by and starring Sidney Poitier. In 1965, he co-founded New York’s Symphony of the New World, the first racially integrated professional orchestra in the United States. He called Chicago home for the last 16 years of his life, serving as coordinator of performance activities at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College from 1998 until his death in 2004.

Perkinson composed Sinfonietta No. 1 in 1954, but it was not publicly performed until 1966. The work, written when he was only 22, demonstrates musical influences and techniques he would continue to explore and develop throughout his career. The first movement reveals an affinity for Baroque counterpoint while adhering to the strict thematic development of classical sonata form. The lush slow movement, “Song Form: Largo,” is reminiscent of mid-century American Romantic composers such as Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber. By contrast, the furious “Rondo” bears the hallmarks of jazz in its syncopations and rhythmic displacement of the movement’s themes.

—Katherine Buzard

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
Violin Concerto in G minor, op. 80 (1911)
Scored for: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, solo violin, and strings
Performance time: 33 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912) was born in London to Daniel Taylor, a doctor from Sierra Leone, and Alice Martin, a white Englishwoman. Unable to practice medicine in England, Daniel was forced to return to Africa before Samuel was born. Despite facing discrimination as both a person of color and a child born out of wedlock, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor went on to become one of the most performed composers in England at the turn of the 20th century. At age 15, his musical talent had earned him a place at the Royal College of Music, where he studied violin and later composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. Shortly after graduating, his career took off with his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898). Performed by virtually every choral society in England and selling 140,000 copies before World War I, the cantata rivalled Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah in popularity.

During his three visits to the United States in the early 1900s, he fostered an ardent American fan base, particularly among African Americans, who saw him as an inspirational figure. One American would be especially influential in promoting his work and preserving his legacy: violinist Maud Powell. Coleridge-Taylor first met the pioneering violinist in 1898 when she performed his Gipsy Suite in her London debut. The two struck up a creative partnership, finding kinship in their shared struggle against prejudice, he as a Black composer and she as a professional female violinist before women even had the right to vote.

Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto was conceived in 1910 while the pair were at the Norfolk Music Festival in Connecticut. Coleridge-Taylor originally based the concerto’s themes on African American spirituals. Unhappy with the result, he decided to rewrite the piece entirely, omitting the spirituals and devising his own folk-inspired melodies. Powell joked that the concerto was “Taylor-made” for her in its balance of soaring lyricism and memorable melodies with heroic power and rhapsodic virtuosity.

The opening movement, “Allegro maestoso,” begins with a weighty orchestral statement of the main theme. When the soloist enters, she takes up the majestic subject, decorating it with arpeggios of increasing complexity. A charming dotted theme serves as the contrasting second subject. After a dramatic cadenza over ominous timpani, the movement concludes with a powerful rendition of the opening theme. In the slow movement, muted strings create a sleepy, perfumed atmosphere, over which the soloist offers a sweetly lyrical melody. The rhapsodic finale brings the concerto full circle with references to the previous movements, concluding with a return to the work’s opening maestoso theme.

Scheduling conflicts meant Coleridge-Taylor was not able to attend the premiere at the Norfolk Music Festival in June 1912. In fact, he never got to hear a full performance of the work. On the day of the US premiere, he played the piano reduction with a violinist in Croydon to establish British copyright, with the official British premiere slated for October 8 at the Proms. Tragically, the composer succumbed to pneumonia and died on September 1. His last moments were spent conducting his Violin Concerto with an imaginary orchestra.

Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto received critical acclaim after its premieres, with one British publication predicting it would become “a work of permanent importance to violinists.” Besides a handful of performances after Coleridge-Taylor’s death, the concerto quietly fell from the repertory. Fortunately, with increased interest in historically underrepresented composers, Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto has rightfully seen a resurgence in recent years. Perhaps it will become of permanent importance to violinists after all.

—Katherine Buzard

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
The Three Black Kings (1974)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, four trumpets, four trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, electric guitar, and strings
Performance time: 15 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: Jul 18, 1987; David Amram, conductor

Throughout his storied career, Duke Ellington often drew on Black history and identity in his works, beginning with his “jazz symphony” Black, Brown, and Beige in 1943. During the civil rights movement, Ellington honored the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on several occasions. First, in 1963, he recast Dr. King in the spiritual “Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho” for the song “King Fit the Battle of Alabam,” which honors Dr. King’s courage in the face of police violence in Birmingham, Alabama. Then, when Dr. King was assassinated the night of Ellington’s annual Carnegie Hall concert on April 4, 1968, he dedicated the performance to the slain civil rights leader.

In 1974, Ellington honored Dr. King again in what would be his last work, Three Black Kings. “My father first intended it as a eulogy for Martin Luther King, but then decided to go back into myth and history to include other black kings,” Ellington’s son, Mercer, wrote. “The opening movement represents Balthazar, the black king of the Magi. King Solomon is next, with the song of jazz and perfume and dancing girls and all that, then the dirge for Dr. King.” Placing Dr. King within the context of these biblical figures is not only proof of Ellington’s high regard for him but also proclaims Dr. King’s historical importance within a timeline stretching back millennia. Ellington died from lung cancer before he could complete the work, leaving Mercer to finish it and longtime collaborator Luther Henderson to orchestrate it. The piece premiered at an Ellington tribute concert in 1976.

Wild percussion drives the first movement, “King of the Magi,” before erupting into a sensuous string melody tinged with exoticism. In “King Solomon,” dreamy sections accompanied by harp alternate with episodes of upbeat jazz hall music, nodding to Solomon’s erotic side as the author of Song of Songs. The work concludes with “Martin Luther King,” an uplifting, gospel-influenced tribute to the civil rights icon.

—Katherine Buzard

George Gershwin (1898-1937)/arr. Frank Campbell-Watson
An American in Paris (1928)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, two bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, and strings
Performance time: 16 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: Aug 30, 1936; Joseph Raffaelli, conductor

In the spring of 1928, George Gershwin was about to embark on a three-month European trip in the hopes of improving his compositional technique. Even though he had already achieved global fame with his musicals and concert works, he was self-conscious about having hired an orchestrator to bring Rhapsody in Blue to life in 1924. Shortly before his trip, he approached Maurice Ravel at a party in New York, asking if he could study with him in Paris. After careful consideration, the French composer demurred, saying, “it would probably cause him to write bad ‘Ravel’ and lose his great gift of melody and spontaneity.” Ravel referred Gershwin to Nadia Boulanger, but she too declined, feeling she had nothing to offer to such a natural and singular talent. Even if Paris didn’t give Gershwin the tutelage he sought, the city did inspire his next big hit, An American in Paris.

“This new piece, really a rhapsodic ballet, is written very freely and is the most modern music I’ve yet attempted,” Gershwin explained in an interview for Musical America in August 1928. “My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere.” After this jolly opening, the American stops in a café for a few drinks, where he is stricken by homesickness. Here, Gershwin introduces a characteristically memorable blues melody. Before long, however, “the spirit of the music returns to the vivacity and bubbling exuberance of the opening part with its impressions of Paris,” Gershwin says. “Apparently the homesick American, having left the café and reached the open air, has downed his spell of the blues and once again is an alert spectator of Parisian life. At the conclusion, the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant.”

Gershwin spent much of his trip working on An American in Paris, completing the orchestration less than four weeks before the premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 3, 1928. To the ranks of the large symphony orchestra Gershwin adds three saxophones and four Parisian taxi horns, which he sourced himself. (In the 1940s, Frank Campbell-Watson revised the orchestration, fixing some instrumentation errors.) Audiences, if not critics, were smitten with the piece’s charming scenario and memorable tunes. The tone poem went on to inspire the 1951 film of the same name, forming the film’s climactic dance sequence.

—Katherine Buzard