BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 1

WELCOME BACK

WE HOPE TO SEE YOU ALL SUMMER LONG

Next Up

Wednesday, July 7 Bizet Suite from L'Arlésienne Grieg Piano Concerto featuring Joyce Yang Rossini Overture to William Tell

Friday, July 9 and Saturday, July 10 Vivaldi Gloria with the Grant Park Chorus Barber Adagio for Strings Brahms Symphony No. 3 GPMF.ORG

JOHN WILLIAMS (B. 1932)

SUMMON THE HEROES (1996)

Scored for: pairs of woodwinds, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Performance time: 6 minutes. First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 3, 2003, with Christopher Bell conducting

Try muting your television and watching the opening of any Star Wars film—absent the peal of brass instruments—you instantly grasp the primacy of John Williams’s music. He doesn’t just compose to complement storytelling, he makes you feel it. He put terror into an empty seascape (Jaws). He made you believe that children could fly (ET and Harry Potter) and transformed a nerdy archeology professor into a swashbuckler (Indiana Jones). Winner of 25 Grammy Awards, 5 Academy Awards and an astonishing 52 Academy Award nominations, Williams is among the most recognizable composers ever. He wrote Summon the Heroes for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta Georgia.

John Williams was born in Flushing, Queens, New York City and attended North Hollywood High School in Los Angeles. He went on to study at UCLA and at the Juilliard School. He has worked as a conductor, jazz pianist and trombone player. As a classical composer, he continues to write new works for a variety of ensembles.

SCOTT JOPLIN (C. 1868-1917)

OVERTURE TO TREEMONISHA (1946)

Scored for: is scored for single woodwinds and brass, one percussionist, piano, and strings Performance time: 8 minutes First Grant Park Orchestra performance: This is the first Festival performance of the Overture to Treemonisha

Scott Joplin is known as the King of Ragtime, an early 20th-century musical genre that combined the harmonies of European art music with the syncopated and accented rhythms and aesthetics of African-American music. Performed primarily on piano and through song, ragtime is a distinctly American music, born in the generation after slavery and evolved and popularized by Black musicians with Scott Joplin at the forefront. Scott Joplin was born in 1867 or 1868 in what is now known as Texarkana. As one of six children, Joplin was among the first generation of Black people born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Both of his parents were musical; while enslaved, his father, Giles Joplin, played violin during parties in the “Big House”. His mother, Florence, sang and played banjo while encouraging her son’s musical study. Working as a domestic, she would labor for free in exchange for Joplin’s use of the piano in the homes of her employers. By the time he was a teenager, Joplin decided to take his music on the road and support himself playing ragtime tunes in cities such as St. Louis, Chicago, and eventually New York. In 1899, Scott Joplin received his big break after his “Maple Leaf Rag” was published, which remains to this day one of his most popular compositions along with “The Entertainer”. (If you’re unsure if you’ve ever heard the music of Scott Joplin, it’s possible that you’ve heard it as one of the infamous ice cream truck songs.) The publishing industry was eager to capitalize on the popularity of ragtime, which spread throughout the US and eventually Europe. As popular as ragtime was, there was a widespread opinion that it was a low class, vulgar music—entertainment for saloons and cabarets. It was important to Joplin to be understood as a more serious composer, and so he set out to write Treemonisha, one of America’s early operas. Completed in 1911, it received one showing in 1915, and would not be performed again for another sixty years. The Overture to Treemonisha sits firmly in the tradition of the opera overture, a musical introduction to the opera that is filled with lyrical sections and drama that ends with a grand finale in preparation for the curtain to rise. While Joplin desired to expand his identity as a composer, the Overture to Treemonisha, as well as the opera, is firmly rooted in the ragtime style.

©2021 Danielle Taylor