PROGRAM NOTES

expanding the breadth of her composition to encompass orchestras as well as smaller ensembles. Since then, she has fielded commissions from many leading orchestras, chamber groups, and soloists and has served as composerin-residence for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (for 10 years) and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No.1 Joan Tower

Single Performance: 3/27/1993

Conductor: Joel Levine

Born: September 6, 1938, in New Rochelle, New York

Residing: New York City

Work composed: 1986, on commission from the Houston Symphony

Work dedicated: To conductor Marin Alsop

Work premiered: January 10, 1987, with Hans Vonk conducting the Houston Symphony

Instrumentation: Four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drums, snare drum, cymbals, gongs (or tam-tams), temple blocks, tomtoms, and triangle

Joan Tower was born into a family of ancient New England lineage, but when she was nine the family moved to La Paz, Bolivia, high in the Andes, where her father worked as a manager of tin mines. “My whole world turned inside out,” Tower recalled. “We had servants of Incan descent who lived with us, and they would celebrate the Saint’s Days—and there were a lot of Saint’s Days!—with fantastic festivals, lots of music and dancing. My nurse would take me ... and whatever percussion instruments we’d find there, I’d play them. That’s where my love for percussion, dance, and rhythm developed.”

She returned to the United States at the age of 18 to study at Bennington College and, later, Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition. She co-founded the Da Capo Chamber Players in 1969 and served as its pianist for 15 years. In 1972 she began teaching music at Bard College, where she remains on the faculty a half-century later. In 1984 she embarked on a term as composer-inresidence at the St. Louis Symphony. It proved to be a critical stepping-stone. Although she remained almost exclusively a composer of instrumental music, she began

She has been singled out for some of music’s most prestigious honors, including the Grawemeyer Award in 1990, for her orchestral piece Silver Ladders, which was also honored with a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. She was the first composer invited to write a Ford Made in America consortium commission, with the resulting piece—aptly named Made in America—being played by orchestras in each of the 50 states over the course of two seasons. The Nashville Symphony’s premiere recording of it received three Grammy awards in 2008, including for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. In 2019, Tower was named Composer of the Year by Musical America and was presented the Gold Baton of the League of American Orchestras. The following year she received the national service award of Chamber Music America.

Her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman has become a much-played modern classic since it was introduced in 1986, by now having achieved some 900 performances. In fact, it spawned a whole series of similarly named pieces—six so far, each for a different assemblage of instruments, each dedicated to a woman of note—with the ensuing fanfares appearing in 1989, 1991 (commissioned by Carnegie for its centennial), 1992, 1993, and 2014. The first Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman was written as a response to the famous Fanfare for the Common Man composed in 1942 by Aaron Copland. “[It] employs, in fact, the same instrumentation,” she said. (Well, she actually calls for a larger array of percussion instruments.) “In addition, the original theme resembles the first theme in the Copland. It is dedicated to women who take risks and who are adventurous.”

In an interview with Abby White for BMI’s MusicWorld, Tower elaborated about the genesis of the piece: “This was after the ’60s and ’70s when the consciousnessraising was happening and all these feminists were lashing out about women not having enough power or income, and I was reading a lot of the feminist books. I was really on board with that. And then the Houston Symphony came along and said, ‘We’d like you to write a fanfare.’ And I said, ‘OK, a fanfare, what the hell is a fanfare? Oh yeah, it has a lot of brass, I think. So then I started thinking about Copland and the only fanfare I knew, Fanfare for the Common Man, and the title really bothered me. For the ‘common man’? What the hell is that? It’s kind of elitist. So, I had to turn that one around.”

OKLAHOMA STORIES-CLARA LUPER CENTENNIAL

and a Catholic boy on New York’s Lower East Side, was altered to reflect the more up-to-date social issue of gang conflict. Much of the composition was carried out more-or-less concurrently with Bernstein’s work on his opera Candide. It was while working on these projects, in November 1956, that Bernstein was named Joint Principal Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, an appointment that placed him in a position to succeed Dimitri Mitropoulos as that orchestra’s music director in 1958.

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Leonard Bernstein

First Performance: 1/12/1965

Conductor: Guy Fraser Harrison

Last Performance: 5/14/2016

Conductor: Joel Levine

Born: August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts

Died: October 14, 1990, in New York City

Work composed: The musical West Side Story was composed principally from Autumn 1955 through Summer 1957, and Bernstein assembled portions of the score into the Symphonic Dances in early 1961, overseeing the orchestration for this version as it was carried out by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal

Work dedicated: “To Sid Ramin, in friendship.”

Work premiered: The musical itself on August 19, 1957, at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C; the Symphonic Dances on February 13, 1961, with Lukas Foss conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall

Instrumentation: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets plus E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bongos, suspended cymbal, cymbals, tenor drum, snare drum, bass drum, four pitched drums, xylophone, trap set, three cowbells, timbales, conga drum, police whistle, vibraphone, chime, woodblock, triangle, glockenspiel, tom-tom, guiro, maracas, finger cymbals, tambourine, harp, piano, celesta, and strings

As early as 1949, Leonard Bernstein and his friends

Jerome Robbins (the choreographer) and Arthur Laurents (the librettist) batted around the idea of creating a musical retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set amid the tensions of rival social groups in modern New York City. The project took a long time to find its eventual form. An early version tentatively titled East Side Story, involving the doomed love affair between a Jewish girl

As the production of West Side Story moved into the home stretch it was beset with several crises. Cheryl Crawford, the producer, got cold feet about what she termed “a show full of hatefulness and ugliness,” but her partner Roger Stevens jumped in to ensure that the project would continue; and the young Stephen Sondheim, who had been brought on as lyricist, snagged the interest of his friend Harold Prince to be involved as a producer. To everyone’s amazement, Robbins announced at the eleventh hour that he would rather spend his time directing than choreographing the show, thereby jeopardizing Prince’s participation; in the end, Robbins was persuaded to stay on as choreographer and was granted an unusually long rehearsal period as an inducement.

On August 19, 1957, West Side Story opened in a try-out run in Washington, D.C., with a host of government luminaries in attendance. (During the intermission, Bernstein ran into Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in tears.) It proved a very firm hit when it reached Broadway, running for 772 performances, just short of two years. After that it embarked on a national tour and eventually made its way back to New York in 1960 for another 253 performances, after which it was released as a feature film in 1961. (It was revisited again in the 2021 cinematic remake by Steven Spielberg.) “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” wrote Walter Kerr, critic of the Herald Tribune, in the wake of the opening in New York, and one might argue that his assumption remains true all these years later. West Side Story stands as an essential, influential chapter in the history of American theatre, and its engrossing tale of young love against a background of spectacularly choreographed gang warfare has found a place at the core of Americans’ common culture.

In the opening weeks of 1961, Bernstein revisited his score for West Side Story and assembled nine sections into what he called the Symphonic Dances. The impetus was a gala fundraising concert for the New York

Philharmonic, to be held the evening before Valentine’s Day. The event was styled as an overt love-fest, celebrating not only his involvement with the orchestra up to that time but also the fact that he had agreed that month to a new contract that would ensure his presence for another seven years. In the interest of efficiency, Bernstein’s colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had just completed the orchestration of West Side Story for its film version, suggested appropriate sections of the score to Bernstein, who placed them not in the order in which they occur in the musical but instead in a new, uninterrupted sequence derived from a strictly musical rationale. Two of the most popular favorites of the musical’s songs are found in the pages of the Symphonic Dances: “Somewhere” and “Maria” (in the Cha-Cha section), though not the also-beloved “America,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “I Feel Pretty,” or “Tonight.”

Hannibal Lokumbe’s long career has reached into the areas of performance, composition, poetry, and social activism. He was born (and given the name Marvin Peterson) in the town of Smithville, Texas. “When I was a kid there,” he says, “it was totally segregated, with a line of demarcation, and living insulated in a segregated community was pure heaven. It was that village that people are always talking about when they say ‘It takes a village’; I was raised by that village, and we flourished in all the love and brilliance.” In the 1990s he moved back to Smithville as a place for his family to blossom, and he lives there still today.

During the years between he had achieved acclaim as a jazz trumpeter in New York, where he moved in 1970. There he performed with such notable colleagues as Gil Evans, Roy Haynes, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, and Elvin Jones, building an impressive discography and earning the distinction of becoming a lifetime inductee into the Harlem Jazz Hall of Fame. He also began applying music to social goals. He founded the Music Liberation Orchestra, a program that teaches music, genealogy, and writing to incarcerated men around the country, in institutions that include the Bastrop County Jail (near his home in Smithville), Orleans Parish Prison (New Orleans), and Holmesburg Prison (Philadelphia).

Trials, Tears, Transcendence: The Life of Clara Luper

Hannibal Lokumbe

First Performance on this Series

Born: November 11, 1948, in Smithville, Texas

Residing: Smithville, Texas

Work composed: 2022-23

Instrumentation: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bells, glass wind chimes, balafon, shekere, triangle, crotales, small string bells, agogo bell, wood blocks, maracas, snare drum, bass drum, caxixi chimes, crash cymbal, floor tom, bean pods, helix, tambourine, Brother Martin’s Emmet Stick (a custommade jingle-stick), chocalho, celesta, and strings; also solo trap set drum, mixed chorus, solo soprano singer, and narrator

In the 1990s, his compositions began to attract widespread attention, with major impetus coming from his African Portraits, an oratorio premiered by the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1990. The New York Times described it as tracing “the story of slavery and black culture’s contributions to American music, using orchestra, jazz quartet, blues guitar, chorus, gospel singer, African griot and ethnic instruments.” It was recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under its then-music director Daniel Barenboim, and Lokumbe estimates that it has been programmed 120 times by orchestras nationwide. In 1999 he received a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for Love Poems for God, developed with choreographer Dianne McIntyre. His work would later be recognized through the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Lifetime Achievement Award, the United States Artist Award in Music, the Joyce Award, and (in 2020) the Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities, among other honors. His music has been commissioned by many of the country’s symphony orchestras, including those of Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Houston, Baltimore, New Jersey, Nashville, and now Oklahoma City.

Clara Shepard Luper (1923-2011) is a heroine of Oklahoma City’s history, a schoolteacher, civic leader, and unstoppable force in civil rights. In 1958 she organized and led sit-ins at the city’s segregated lunch counters, non-violent acts that eventually proved successful. She went on to champion other civil rights incentives, including equality in banking, voting rights, and improved employment opportunities and housing policies. She was involved in the Oklahoma City sanitation workers strike of 1969 and, at the national level, became active in the NAACP and participated in the Selma and Montgomery marches of 1965, during which she was injured by brutal police response. Today her name is attached to downtown Oklahoma City’s two-mile Clara Luper Corridor, the Clara Luper Post Office, the Oklahoma City Public School’s Clara Luper Center for Educational Services, and the planned Clara Luper Civil Rights Center.

“I have such an affinity for those who fight for the village,” says Lokumbe. “Not long ago, people might have been reticent to sing her praise. Now there is not much risk involved. It is easier for people to stand up for civil rights without putting skin in the game, but we need people of the Clara Luper mindset today more than ever, and we need for everything possible to be done to celebrate someone of her spiritual consequence.” He cites a favorite quotation of Clara Luper’s that he feels goes to the core of her spiritual outlook: “I believe in the sun when the sun does not shine. I believe in the rain when the rain does not fall and I believe in a God that I have never seen.”

About Trials, Tears, Transcendence: The Life of Clara Luper:

Asked to describe this new work, Hannibal Lokumbe characterizes its music as “pure Americana.” He wrote its text as a series of letters between Clara Luper and her daughter, Marilyn Luper Hildreth‚ who serves as the narrator in this performance. “One soloist, Karen Slack, sings letters Clara writes to her daughter, and then Marilyn Hildreth, as narrator, speaks the letters she sends in return. The choir provides a spiritual background and also serves as the voices of people of color, representing students and others who were with Clara. The letters are imagined as they might have been between mother and daughter—and they are approved by the daughter.” He notes how fortunate it is that many of the people who participated in the 1958 sit-ins are still active members of the community.

JAMES M. KELLER

James M. Keller is the longtime Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony and was formerly Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and a staff writer-editor at The New Yorker. The author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press), he is writing a sequel volume about piano music. An earlier version of the Bernstein note previously appeared in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and is used with permission.

Lokumbe often uses the word “veil” to identify a distinct section of a composition, signifying what another composer might call a “scene” or “act.” (“We can move forward in our understanding in one movement, and in the next movement retreat backward,” he explains. “When a veil of understating is lifted from our consciousness we are never the same. I use that analogy to call people to not remain the same, to expand their understanding as veils are lifted.”) “The piece,” he says, “consists of three veils, which flow together into a single span—separate but connected. The chronology begins with her trials, then tears, then transcendence. There is no transcendence without trials, there are no trials without tears. In all my pieces I strive most of all to speak the truth. I feel I accomplished that in this work.”

—JMK