by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ENTRIES:
. OLO’s Hello, Dolly! reviewed and matinee scheduled for 2pm, UA Symphonic Band goes al fresco tonight
. In the News: ASCAP Young Composer Awards
. Interesting Reads: vocal warmups and vinyl supply chain problems
. Almanac: remembering Cleveland composer Hale Smith
ON TODAY:
Ohio Light Opera continues its run of Hello, Dolly! with a 2pm matinee in Freedlander Theatre, 329 E. University St., Wooster. Read our review of the production and purchase tickets here.
At 7:30 pm, Galen Karriker conducts the University of Akron Symphonic Band — students, alumni, and community members — in a lighthearted program, including a tribute to George Gershwin and patriotic tunes. Guzzetta lawn, University of Akron, 157 University Ave., Akron (rain location: Guzzetta Hall). Free.
To check out live concerts happening this week in Northeast Ohio, see our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Alex Berko and Chris Neiner, two former composition students of Keith Fitch at CIM have been honored in this year’s ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. Read the story here.
INTERESTING READS:
Athletes and singers — both professional and avocational — know the importance of warming up before workouts and performances. In a Smithsonian article, Zofia Majewski explores the routines that Anthony Roth Costanzo, Pui Yan Li, and Ganavya Doraiswamy follow to warm up their voices before singing Western and Cantonese opera and South Indian Carnatic (classical) music. Read Warming to Tradition: The Culture of Vocal Exercise here.
Defying the seemingly ubiquitous trend toward digital, the recording industry is now having difficulty filling orders to meet the North American demand for vinyl pressings. Companies that trashed their analog pressing machines are now hustling to replace them, and “dozens of record-pressing factories have been built to try to meet demand in North America — and it’s still not enough.” Read Vinyl Is Having Supply Chain Issues in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Composer Hale Smith (pictured above) was born in Cleveland on this date in 1925. A precocious musician whose talents were recognized early on by Duke Ellington, after service in the U.S. Army, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1950 and 1952. Smith went on to enjoy a widely varied career in New York, where he moved easily between classical styles (including serial music), and jazz. He died in New York in 2009 at the age of 84.
As Dennis Dooley wrote when Smith won the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music in 1973,
His prolific output includes everything from TV advertising jingles to incidental music for stage productions of Lysistrata and Lorca’s Blood Wedding. His “Castle House Rag” was used in the documentary The Making of Citizen Kane. Smith has, nevertheless, always found time to lend his prodigious energies to such important undertakings as the Detroit Symphony’s annual Symposium on Black American Composers. He gladly served as an advisor to the Chicago-based Center for Black Music Research, but “bristled at the designation [Black composer],” The New York Times noted in its lengthy obituary, “He wanted his work, and that of his black peers, to appear on programs with that of Beethoven, Mozart and Copland” and to be judged simply as music. .
A list of Hale Smith’s works (click the link to “Hale’s Music”) suggests that Cleveland should rediscover one of its hometown composers. Sample some of his music here.