Saturday, February 26, 2021 at 3:00 p.m.
A free one-day-only concert in person at THEARC
THEARC | 1901 Mississippi Ave SE, Washington, DC
and live streamed on PCE’s YouTube Channel
Elizabeth G. Hill, piano
Steven Mayer, piano
Melissa Constantin, soprano
Produced by Joseph Horowitz, Executive Producer PostClassical Ensemble
By Joseph Horowitz
I came up with the name “Black Virtuoso Tradition” decades ago, inspired by Steve Mayer’s singular advocacy of Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and other Black pianists who didn’t write their improvisations down. Steve – and only Steve -- has been presenting this music (transcribed from recordings) as canonized American piano repertoire for decades. If you add to that Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson, and also such white composers as Gottschalk, Dvorak, Gershwin, Bernstein, and Bolcom, you wind up with one of the signature achievements in American music: piano cameos, many of them highly virtuosic, absorbing Black vernacular strains.
The Black Virtuoso Tradition remains virtually invisible for two reasons. The first is that other pianists don’t very much play Tatum and Waller and Morton. The other is that it combines “popular” and “classical” genres. It’s actually therapeutic – it heals a schism driven like a stake through classical music in America.
The inclusion of Dvorak, who famously predicted that “Negro melodies” would spawn a “great and noble” American classical music, may surprise. It’s my contention that by 1894 he had become an “American composer” as surely as Domenico Scarlatti, born in Italy, became “Spanish.” The proof in is in the pieces Steve plays this afternoon: the G-flat Humoresques; the American Suite.
Steve and I have presented “Black Virtuoso Tradition” programs for years – completely innocent of the music Liz Hill performs today by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. They are part of a new awakening to the Black Classical Music composed beginning in the early twentieth century, in the wake of Dvorak’s advocacy. The other important composers include Harry Burleigh, William Grant Still, and William Levi Dawson – whose amazing Negro Folk Symphony PostClassical Ensemble will perform (its long overdue DC premiere) on March 18 at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. The neglect of pieces like the Dawson symphony is a central topic of my new book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. The book links to six PCE films released on Naxos, including “The Souls of Black Folk.”
STEVEN MAYER ON ART TATUM
There are many accounts of Art Tatum amazing people like Duke Ellington and Vladimir Horowitz. It’s fortunate that recordings exist to substantiate the various claims made about him. Of these recordings Oscar Peterson has said, “There is so much in them yet unheard, even by the trained ear.” One feels almost premature in making an assessment. Almost fifty years after Tatum’s death, his accomplishment is still the subject of enjoyment, conversation, and awe, as much among classical musicians as jazz artists.
It’s worth noting the Tatum studied classical piano with a Toledo musician named Overton Rainey. The influence of this training, and of lifelong exposure to classical music, are subtly yet unquestionably felt throughout Tatum’s work. From right-hand passagework sometimes based on nineteenth-century music to actual transcriptions of classical compositions and quotations from Ravel to Ethelbert Nevin, Tatum honored the classical tradition in many ways.
As an assimilator of Harlem stride, Tatum almost immediately surpassed his mentors. His left hand, now “striding,” now “walking” in parallel motion, was flawlessly secure and steady. Where Fats Waller alternated low notes with mid-register chords. Tatum tried out basses with seamless tenths, often with notes in between. So–called “substitute” chords, made up of harmonies not envisaged by the composers of the original tunes, are already much in evidence in early Tatum.
Most noticeably, florid and spectacularly rapid passagework set Tatum apart from his jazz influences. By 1933 he had developed an arsenal of pianistic embellishments which, when slowed down an analyzed, are clearly derived from the slower paced runs of earlier stride pianists and related to, though different from, passages found in Chopin, Liszt, and their contemporaries.
Tatum’s complex art justifies hearing, rehearing, study, and performance.
TODAY’S PIANISTS
Elizabeth Hill has performed across the US and Europe in service of her life’s work: joining cultures through music. She is a co-founder of the chamber ensemble Meraki, dedicated to awakening cultural compassion through music. She is also pianist for Balance Campaign, a chamber group which commissions and performs under-represented composers. A native of Anchorage, Alaska, she holds degrees from Mary Baldwin College (B.A.), James Madison University (M.M.), and The Catholic University of America (D.M.A.).
Steven Mayer, a frequent guest of PostClassical Ensemble, is credited by the New York Times with “piano playing at its most awesome.” Mayer has recreated the Harlem Stride solos of Art Tatum, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fats Waller. He has also revived the music of Anthony Philip Heinrich, Ethelbert Nevin, and William Mason, and makes a specialty of Vladimir Horowitz’s transcription of The Stars and Stripes Forever. His recordings, on Naxos, feature Ives’ Concord Sonata (with readings) and the solos of Art Tatum. He won the Grand Prix du Disque Liszt for his recordings of the Liszt concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra.
COMING UP NEXT:
Hope in the Night
March 18, 2022
7:00PM Pre concert discussion with George Shirley
7:30PM Concert
Duke Ellington School of the Arts | 3500 R St NW, Washington, DC 20007
In partnership with Duke Ellington School of the Arts and the DESA Alumni Association
PCE celebrates composer William Dawson and features a forgotten masterpiece from this major Black symphonist. At its 1934 premiere, by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony received a thunderous ovation and was hailed by some as the highest achievement in American symphonic music. But Dawson never found a publisher, and the music disappeared from view.
This is the final concert in PCE’s season-long project, The Rediscovery and Renewal of Black Classical Music, which seeks to celebrate consequential composers who have too long been neglected for all their profound contributions to American orchestral music.
