by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12:00 noon, Trinity Lutheran Church will host organist Florence Mustric again for Music Near the Market. On the Beckerath organ, she will perform a program of “simply perfect” music by composers ranging from Pachelbel to Mendelssohn and Grigny to Demessieux.
For more details, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cleveland Arts Prize awards ceremony (coming up on October 24) will honor composer Clint Needham with the Mid-Career Artist Prize. Needham (pictured) is a professor of composition and the current composer-in-residence at the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory. His latest work, Mustang Gallop, will be premiered at BW on Friday by the Strongsville Community Band. Read more about the Arts Prize here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
Meet, if you haven’t already, two composers with Cleveland connections who were born on October 9 in 1869 and 1922 respectively.
Hearing a performance of Tannhäuser at the age of 18 inspired Cleveland-born Henry Lawrence Freeman to compose opera, and by his death in 1954, he had written scores for at least 23 titles, 21 of which are preserved in manuscript at Columbia University. He also founded two opera companies — one at the age of 22 in Denver that bore his name, and the Negro Grand Opera in 1920 in New York. The Martyr — the first opera to be produced by an all-black company, was staged in Chicago in 1893 and in Cleveland in 1894.
In June, 2015, Morningside Opera, Harlem Opera Theater and the Harlem Chamber Players gave two performances of Freeman’s VOODOO, a Harlem Renaissance Opera at Columbia’s Miller Theater. Watch a trailer here.
Raymond Wilding-White, born in Surrey in England, followed a circuitous career path that took him to France, Argentina, the Juilliard School, the New England Conservatory, then to Cleveland in 1962 to occupy the Kulas Chair at CWRU and to become one of the city’s foremost exponents of avant-garde music. He won the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music in 1967, when Dennis Dooley wrote:
He stunned and stretched local ears (and minds) with adventurous compositions of his own such as Paraphernalia—a Regalia of Madrigalia from Ezra Pound (recorded by CRI in the fall of 1963 with a chorus drawn mostly from the choir of the First United Church of Shaker Heights, directed by Robert Shaw) and the 13-movement Monte Carlo Suite No. 1 for String Quartet (premiered the same year by the Koch Quartet). Among other avant-garde works composed by Wilding-White that were performed and recorded during those years: settings of four songs by William Blake and three poems by A. E. Housman as well as playful piano pieces for young players intriguingly titled Cartoon and Character Sketches.
By the time of his death in 2001 at the age of 78, Wilding-White’s catalogue of more than 200 compositions comprised chamber music (including seven string quartets), dozens of songs and choral works, concertos, three symphonies (and another for swing band), an opera for television (The Selfish Giant), stage works, arrangements for jazz vocal groups, and oratorios—all of them full of a sense of exploration. One of the most ambitious is De Profundis, a meditation for orchestra and multiple vocal groups on “the Eight Virtues and Seven Vices as Seen by Peter Breughel.” Taking its title from the ancient Latin hymn sung at funerals that begins, “Out of the depths, I cry to thee, O Lord,” it juxtaposes texts from such disparate sources as the medieval play Everyman and a 1960 book written for the Rand Corporation by military strategist Herman Kahn with the chilling title, On Thermonuclear War.
Alas, the only recordings readily available seem to be his choral arrangements of Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs. Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear a performance of De Profundis?
