Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
Selected Songs
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Paul Freeman. Performed by William Brown (tenor)
Columbia Masterworks Recording
Selected Songs
1) ‘Onaway! Awake, Beloved’ from “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast”
2) Danse Nègre
L-R: William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Brown
A week away——Owing to an impromptu ski (read: falling) trip, I missed the opportunity for a proper sendoff to the five-week stretch of female composers on here. But that’s probably for the best: if anything, the takeaway is how thoroughly female composers should be worked into any catalogue of compositions, and how much that sentiment is belied by a ‘send off’. So upwards and onwards to more of the same newness. The timing’s good for this week’s vinyl recording: a pair of pieces by Coleridge-Taylor, one of which is an operatic solo for tenor and small orchestra. Good timing as I’ve had a lot more opera on my mind than usual, I’m currently working on a piece on opera in Canada for CBC Music—the fruit of a series of great conversations with companies across Canada—that I can’t wait to share.
Black operatic——I listened to the first half of this recording (the William Grant Still half) over a year ago and it spurred a provocatively-titled essay that I wrote for a recent music course: Black While Composing: William Grant Still and an Argument Against The ‘Black Composer’. An excerpt:
If we cringe at the thought of ‘black biology’ and ‘black physics’, I believe it is not only because of the un-scientific sentiment insinuated by such a proposition, but also because of the separation that it suggests between black people and the rest of life’s tremendous variety; setting the group apart “from the nucleus of life and to make it appear that there is some sort of “blackness” that White people can’t understand, and some sort of “whiteness” that black people can’t fathom.”* It is with that same logic, and on account of the nearly scientific standardization of music which classical music has been celebrated for, that I submit we should reject the premise of the ‘black composer’. This is not merely a rejection of the use of the nomenclature, but the rejection of the underlying notion that classical music is fundamentally and indefinitely a European aesthetic. I argue that we should reject that notion inasmuch as we are serious about the question of whether classical music’s tent is big enough to integrate composers and performers who express cultural colours and sentiments different from the typical European flavours that have hitherto populated the classical canon. Otherwise we resort to the conclusion that the genre, perhaps like every other genre, is beholden to its cultural circumstances and therefore as removed from a ‘universal musical language’ as say bluegrass, Javanese gamelan, or Mande jeli music.
(*Verna Arvey Still and William Grant Still, “Negro Music in the Americas,” in The William Grant Still Reader: Essays on American Music, ed. Jon Michael Spencer (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992), 91.)
It’s a sentiment I still believe in. And that’s the same sentiment behind my preference for not capitalizing the ‘b’ in black. That essay cascaded a series of events and essays that eventually lead to my guest-lecture for another music course at UofT wherein I got a chance to articulate the necessary question that should fall from a title like that: will classical music always rely on a specifically European (read: white) aesthetic in order to survive? What’s true in purely instrumental music is perhaps even more true in opera, as the black opera singer does not have the same cushion of anonymity which a black composer has…
In praise of the tenor——Inspired on an epic poem by HW Longfellow, Coleridge-Taylor spins a cantata trilogy titled Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, from which this lone solo for tenor and orchestra ‘Onaway, Awake Beloved’ erupts like an anthem. Tenor William Brown’s performance on this record must be a high-water mark of feeling, the way his voice quakes out of the vinyl like earth. The way air is piped through impossible laryngeal pressure and makes it seem the song isn’t coming from the chest but from the last pleading cell of a swollen and pulsing spleen. All throughout the week Brown’s voice gave me flashbacks of Ben Hepner’s performances in the COC’s Peter Grime, before his short stint at retirement. I’ve not been able to really hear anyone else’s Grimes since. There was another voice gnawing at the back of my mind all week, spurred each time by the fourth verse in Onaway:
"Does not all the blood within me
Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee,
As the springs to meet the sunshine,
In the Moon when nights are brightest?”
The way the music revs the words ‘Does not all the blood within me’ kept sending me to a similarly tuned song that I couldn’t place. Then all of a sudden realized it wasn’t a song that I was trying to remember but, going full circle, a poem. Or, more accurately the voice of a poet, perhaps the most sonorous tenor in English poetry: Dylan Thomas. His poem ‘Lament’ is perhaps his most exaggerated use of his lilting cadence. By the time he gets to the lines “Chastity prays for me, piety sings / Innocence…” he practically breaks out into song. But he’s been winding you up all throughout and leaves no choice but to go along with the bravado. It seems the way he attacks that line in particular must have been stored deep in the same place in my brain where “Does not all the blood within me…” now adds. I’m not entirely sure Thomas’s voice can fits the tenor tag—though in my defense, when Stravinsky wrote an In Memoriam piece to mourn Thomas’s untimely passing (and perhaps the anticipated collaboration for which the poet was apparently on his way to California), he chose the fitting combination of: tenor and small orchestra.
Song of the week: ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ — Cass McCombs / Steve Gunn
Oh the springtime is a coming
And the birds are singing sweetly
All around this mountain thyme
All around this purple heather
Will ye go, lassie, go?
In retrospect——Cass McCombs is a special special man. A voice far from the vigour and muchacho strut of a tenor, it’s got a simpler yet more jaded glow to it. He’s just one of those sneaky artists that you wouldn’t think of as a favorite, but then you look back and realize you’ve been following everything he does with rapt religious attention for the past eight years. So when I saw that he and Steve Gunn recently recorded a rendition of the Scottish/Irish folk song ‘Wild Mountain Time’, I knew it was going to do something special.
Throwback to: YR3, WEEK30 — YR2, WEEK30
Click here for the full 2020/2021 roster of selected recordings