Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Amy Beach, Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 150

Late Romantic composer Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944) was the first successful American female composer of large-scale works. Though largely self-taught, she became one of America’s foremost composers of the early 20^th century. Beach began piano lessons at age six and briefly studied harmony and counterpoint when she was 14. This would be her only formal training in composition. At age 18 she married a Boston surgeon, after which she published as “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” Dr. Beach placed restrictions on his young wife, demanding that she live “according to his status.”  She would be a patron of the arts but would not teach, and she was limited to two performances per year with proceeds going to charity. Beach was the only female member of the prestigious “Second New England School,” a group of six composers who favored an American sound. While the first movement of her piano trio, written in 1938, is in a more traditional European style, the second and third movements are folk-like, with Native American influences and even rag-time in the final movement.  

William Grant Still, Mother and Child for Violin and Piano  

William Grant Still (1895-1978) was known as the “Dean of African-American Composers.  He wrote nearly 200 works, including symphonies, operas, ballets, choral works and chamber music, and was the first American composer to have a world premier at the New York City Opera. He received three Guggenheim fellowships and nine honorary doctorates from major universities. He was the first African American to conduct a major American orchestra and to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra. Still was a supporter of other Black artists and took a stand in defense of the dignity of all African Americans. He arranged music for major motion pictures but broke ties with Twentieth-Century Fox over a film he felt “degraded colored people.” He attended Oberlin Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music and studied composition with George Whitefield Chadwick. “When I was asked to compose a suite for violin and piano,” Still wrote, “I thought of three contemporary Negro artists whom I admired and resolved to try to catch in music my feeling for an outstanding work by each of them,” asserting the “dignity, sincerity and pride” of Black artists. His “Mother and Child,” written in 1943, was the second movement of that suite and was named for a sculpture of the same name by Sargent Johnson (1887-1967). 

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Louisiana Blues Strut – A Cakewalk for Solo Violin

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) blended American Romanticism with jazz, pop, blues, spirituals and African-American folk music. He also wrote scores for film and television. Named for African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, he attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City, New York University and the Manhattan School of Music, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He was one of America’s foremost composers and conductors and served as the Artistic Director at the Center for Black Music Research of Columbia College in Chicago from 1998 until his death in 2004. Perkinson’s “Louisiana Blues Strut – A Cakewalk for Solo Violin” was written for Sanford Allen, the first African-American violinist to become a regular member of the New York Philharmonic.  The virtuosic piece fuses elements of jazz, ragtime, and Black folk music with blues and a touch of classical in this brief but spectacular double-stop romp. A cakewalk is a dance that originated on plantations in the mid-19^th century involving a competition where a cake was awarded as a prize. Debussy used a cakewalk dance in his popular “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.” 

Antonín Dvořák, Piano Trio No. 3 in F minor, Op. 65   

Romantic composer Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) was born in Bohemia and was heavily influenced by the folk music of that region. In 1892, he became the director of the National Conservatory in New York, where he took a particular interest in American folk music, notably African-American spirituals and Native-American songs. Their influences can be heard in his compositions dating from that time. He wrote, “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies.” The Piano Trio No. 3, written before his time in America, is a dramatic work composed in early 1883 during a dark period in the composer’s life. After a stormy first movement, elements of Bohemian folk music can be heard in the later movements. In 1884, contemporary critic Eduard Hanslick called the trio a “most valuable gem” that “demonstrates that the composer finds himself at the pinnacle of his career.”  

Program notes by Sara Grossman