Catalyst Quartet: Uncovered

The Catalyst Quartet combines a serious commitment to diversity, education, and contemporary works with virtuosic playing “reminiscent of great quartets of the past such as the Guarneri and Budapest” (Richmond Times). The quartet was founded by the Sphinx Organization, a social justice organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts. In this concert, celebrate the music of important Black composers Coleridge-Taylor, Price, and Perkinson with selections from the quartet’s February CD release Uncovered, which strives to highlight works by classical composers previously overlooked because of their race or gender.

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Program

Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR 5 Fantasiestücke for String Quartet, Op. 5

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR 5 Fantasiestücke for String Quartet, Op. 5 (20’)
(1875-1912)
Prelude
Serenade
Humoresque
Minuet & Trio
Dance

The relegation of Black History Month to the shortest month of the year was not the conniving of white calendar gods. A Black history professor, Carter Woodson, conceived the idea in 1926 as a week to honor the adjacent birthdays of two black icons: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. And like Topsy, it just grew. Churches and Black academic circles nourished the idea until the Civil Rights movement and the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations gave it the momentum to earn official national recognition.

The seminal contributions of Black people to American jazz and blues give music uncontested source of pride during Black History Month; hip hop and pop stars lend an added international bling. But, there exists a shy and lesser-known genre thread with serious classical music reaching all the way back to the Chevalier de Saint- Georges, a friend of Haydn.  It has flowered modestly but handsomely in the twentieth century, though the composer’s names remain largely unfamiliar. The Catalyst Quartet, true to its founding ambitions brings three overlooked black creative talents to our attention.
 
Dubbed the “African Mahler” by musicians alert to his genius but foggy about his tangled ancestry (he never even visited Africa), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 – 1912) was born in London,  the illegitimate son of an illegitimate English woman and a Sierra- Leone doctor he never met. Raised in a rambunctious family of music hall musicians, he studied fiddle with his grandfather and of course sang in the church choir—which netted him a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.  There, Sir Edward Elgar praised him as “far and away the cleverest fellow going,” and Sir Arthur Sullivan pronounced him a “true composer, not just a music-maker. His music is fresh and original, he has melody and harmony in abundance, and his scoring is brilliant and full of colour—at times luscious, rich and sensual.” That sums him up better than any program note ever could write.

His main fame rests on his Hiawatha trilogy, a set of cantatas based on a haphazardly-informed epic poem by Longfellow about ‘noble savages.’ Produced in Albert Hall annually for over thirty years until the war put a stop to it, the work was as popular as Handel’s Messiah, raking in millions for others though he had sold it without rights for a few guineas. His shocking death at 37 from pneumonia, exacerbated by financial difficulties, resulted in the creation of the British version of ASCAP. His brief life is documented in a fine film on YouTube is well-worth watching to hear his astonishingly easy gift for setting words naturally.

The warm welcoming sonic world of the Fantasiestücke, an homage to late Brahms and Dvorak, exudes an autumnal self-assurance, though the composer was only 19!  The anecdotal episodes need no formal guide; they are merely fantasies after all. The listener should simply bask in the confidently shifting variety of keys and rhythms, the alternately brooding and dancing melodies, and the radiating sense of ease Coleridge-Taylor displays in melding western music devices and unknown vaguely familiar folk tunes.
         
It is not melatonin and racial DNA that Black History Month celebrates, but the power of nurture over nature, the Black community. Frederick Douglass encouraged his followers to forgo bemoaning fate and “make the past useful to the present and to the future.” All three composers here did that, studying carefully the white-owned European past to create their own unique, Black-inflected voices. This month and this program are not meant to observe or boast about differences, but to educate us together and to remind us, as Frederick Douglass (Black History Month’s original inspiration) observed: “A smile or a tear has no nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations.”

– Frederick Noonan

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR PERKINSON String Quartet No. 1 “Calvary” (1956)

PERKINSON String Quartet No. 1 “Calvary” (1956) (17’)
(1932-2004)
Allegro
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro vivace

By baptizing Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932 – 2004) with such a clumsy homage (to composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor), Perkinson’s mother – a music teacher, church organist, and theater director in the Bronx – blessed him with a future in music. He started with dance, danced over to serious classical music at Manhattan School, then migrated into jazz, and took a job as pianist with Max Roach because it was better money than writing fugues. He was a man of Catholic musical tastes, a jack-of-all-trades eventually rose to the highest levels as music director and composer for both Alvin Ailey and Dance Theater of Harlem. He arranged for Harry Belafonte and Marvin Gaye, scored films for Sidney Poitier movies, co-founded the integrated Symphony of the New World, conducted internationally, taught at Indiana University, coordinated performances at Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research – an exhausting variety.

“It is very difficult to say what black music really is,” he would say evasively to pestering interviewers. With Perkinson, it sure is difficult to nail down ‘Black music.’ His creative output is a riff on all the possibilities from fugues to films, and more eclectic than ethnic. He came of composing age just as Copland’s sweeping Americanism met Babbitt’s emotionless academicism, so he went his own way.  His Quartet No. 1 is very far from Marvin Gaye, Max Roach, or serialism. Using the spiritual ‘Calvary,’ the opening exploits the angular fugal possibilities of the Crucifixion, hinting at the call and response of a church service. A slow and expressive movement intervenes, then the final section resurrects again the jagged agony with an underpinning of syncopation, and drifting off into a harmonious afterlife.

When pressed, Perkinson would consent to assigning the essence of his music to what he called “inspiration,” by which he meant “the genesis of the black psyche or the black social life” – community, church, and education, in other words, with perhaps an added lucky dash of music-loving matriarchy.

– Frederick Noonan

Program Notes

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