by Jarrett Hoffman
NEWS BITS & MORE:
The Canton Symphony has announced that it will require all patrons, except for children under age 12, to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test within 48 hours for entry to all performances. Masks will be required within the building. “Our orchestra has been silent for so long,” president and CEO Michelle Charles said in a statement. “The rise in cases once again threatens the live music industry. We needed to find a way to bring the music back.” See the full announcement here.
After great uncertainty and contentious negotiating, The Metropolitan Opera has reached a labor deal with its orchestra. That paves the way for the players’ return to work, and for the company to resume performances in September. Read Julia Jacob’s article in The New York Times.
Curious about The Cleveland Orchestra’s September 11 concert at Blossom featuring Police Deranged by Stewart Copeland — drummer, composer, and founding member of The Police? Yesterday the Orchestra brought Copeland onto the On A Personal Note podcast to talk about his early influences and his recent compositions. Listen here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Who better to honor Leonard Bernstein on the anniversary of his birth — he would be 103 today, and boy does his centennial feel like ages ago — than one of his own children? In 2018, I interviewed his daughter Jamie Bernstein, who is also an author, narrator, and filmmaker, and who had designed a program titled “Late Night with Leonard Bernstein,” which she was bringing to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
To describe her dad, she used a word that didn’t exist in his time. “He was so broadband,” she told me. “He wasn’t just a conductor, he was a composer. And as a composer he was always pulling down the walls between genres and mixing things up in a new way. His legacy as an educator is astonishing, and hasn’t been duplicated by anyone.”
In addition to those areas, and his talents at the piano, he was also an activist and humanitarian. “He was never afraid to stand up and speak out against injustice and violence, and that has certainly lost none of its relevance.” Jamie pointed to the modern idea of the citizen-artist. “That wasn’t a ‘thing’ back when my dad was doing it — in a way he was the granddaddy of citizen-artists. He’s a role model for artists today who want to make their work part of the world.”
YouTube is full of material to celebrate Bernstein, but here’s a clip that Daniel Hathaway plucked from the internet last year that gives insight into Bernstein’s warm and exciting personality as a teacher. Click here to watch him rehearse Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring during the 1987 International Conductor’s Competition and Master Course at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany.
We’ll close today’s almanac with Undine Smith Moore, who was born on this date in 1904 in Jarratt, Virginia, and who has become known as the “Dean of Black Women Composers.”
Vocal music was her preferred genre, including 50 choral works. Her 1981 oratorio Scenes from the Life of a Martyr, based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Listen here to an excerpt performed by the Detroit Symphony.
Like Bernstein, education and activism are important elements of Moore’s legacy. In the first category, she taught piano, organ, and music theory at Virginia State College (now University) for over four decades, beginning at age 23. A champion of music by Black composers, three years before her retirement she co-founded the Black Music Center at Virginia State, aiming to spread awareness of the “contributions of black people to the music of the United States and the world.”
Moore was outspoken about the Civil Rights Movement, and about racism in general. We’ll end with a quote from her in that arena, as she looked back on her career:
One of the most evil effects of racism in my time was the limits it placed upon the aspirations of blacks, so that though I have been ‘making up’ and creating music all my life, in my childhood or even in college I would not have thought of calling myself a composer or aspiring to be one.