Like many composers, Adolphus Hailstork began developing his musical abilities in a church choir—in his case, the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, New York. He also took violin lessons, but by the time he was in high school began exploring the world of the composer. In a recent issue of Coastal Virginia Magazine, he said: “When I got to high school, I had a truly great orchestra teacher who found out that I was interested in writing music, and she said, ‘Hailstork, if you compose it, we’ll play it.’ So that’s how I had my first orchestra pieces done, back in 1958 and ’59. And I decided that this was the way for me, since I wasn’t that crazy about practicing scales and arpeggios on piano, and I wasn’t really good at violin.”
He earned his bachelor of music degree in composition from Howard University, where he studied with Mark Fax. Then he spent a summer at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau (France) with Nadia Boulanger, the legendary pedagogue who helped form several generations of America’s leading composers. His studies continued at Manhattan School of Music (with Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond) and Michigan State University (with H. Owen Reed), where he received his PhD.
Hailstork began his career as a teacher at Michigan State University (1969–1971) and Youngstown State University in Ohio (1971–1976) before joining the faculty of Norfolk State University in Virginia, a historically Black institution, where he was professor of music and composer-in-residence from 1977 to 2000. In 2013, he established an endowed scholarship fund at the university to assist undergraduate music students. In 2000, he moved to Old Dominion University, also in Norfolk, as professor of music and Eminent Scholar. He remained there until his retirement at the beginning of 2021 and now holds the position of professor emeritus.
Hailstork has written pieces for symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra, and chorus and orchestra, as well as operas and chamber music. His numerous awards include the Ernest Bloch Award, the Belwin-Mills Max Winkler Award (from the College Band Directors National Association), and a Fulbright Fellowship to work and study in Guyana. Hailstork’s music has been performed by the Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as by the New York Philharmonic, which programmed Celebration! (on two occasions, in 1977 and 1991) and Songs of Isaiah, in which Kurt Masur conducted the orchestra and the Boys Choir of Harlem. In January 2021, his Fanfare on “Amazing Grace” was played by “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band during the inaugural ceremony for President Joe Biden. His musical style is characterized by buoyantly unpredictable rhythms, colorful orchestration, and rich harmonies in which “added-note” chords and piquant dissonances heighten the dramatic flavor.
Hailstork’s music is informed not only by the European tradition, but also that of Black Americans, although he came to know and love spirituals only as a college student: “They’re not as naturally in my ear as the music I grew up with, which is Beethoven and Mozart and the English masters, like Vaughan Williams,” he told Coastal Virginia Magazine. “I’d say I’m about 70% Euro-oriented and 30% Afro.” That 30%, however, has produced Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed (1979), a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., and four operas on Black subjects: Paul Laurence Dunbar: Common Ground (1994), on the famous Black poet; Joshua’s Boots (1999), about Black cowboys in the Wild West; Rise for Freedom: The John P. Parker Story (2007), about abolitionism and the Underground Railroad; and Paul Robeson (2013). A Knee on the Neck, a requiem-cantata inspired by the murder of George Floyd, will receive its world premiere next spring at Strathmore, performed by the National Philharmonic.
One of Virginia’s leading musical citizens, Hailstork honors his state through tonight’s work, which is inspired by “the great port of Norfolk, Virginia … The concert overture, in sonata-allegro form, captures the strident (and occasionally tender and even mysterious) energy of a busy American port city.”
John Adams first gained attention as a minimalist composer in 1970s California, but by 1981 he was describing himself as “a minimalist who is bored with minimalism.” His compositions gradually assimilated techniques from other kinds of music, finally exhibiting a style in which musical richness and stylistic variety are deeply connected to various impetuses of classical music and jazz.
As he approaches his 75th birthday, Adams can look back on a still-vibrant career that has earned him distinction in many genres, including opera (eight so far, including such modern classics as Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic), symphonic works, chamber music, and pieces for piano. He is among the most honored of American composers, with accolades that include the Pulitzer Prize for Music (On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the tragedies of September 11, 2001), the Grawemeyer Award (Violin Concerto), the California Governors Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, five Grammy Awards, and the 2019 Erasmus Prize (in recognition of exceptional contributions to culture, society, or social science). From 2003 to 2007, he occupied the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall.
Adams grew up in Massachusetts, where he studied clarinet, becoming so accomplished that he performed occasionally with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He was also fond of the saxophone, a cousin to the clarinet since they are the two principal single-reed instruments of the woodwind family. Unlike the clarinet, the saxophone never gained full-fledged membership in the symphony orchestra, usually being reserved as a “special effect” timbre, as in Ravel’s Boléro, Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, or Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. “Its integration into the world of classical music has been a slow and begrudged one,” says Adams, but he has been its advocate:
Having grown up hearing the sound of the saxophone virtually every day—my father had played alto in swing bands during the 1930s, and our family record collection was well stocked with albums by the great jazz masters—I never considered the saxophone an alien instrument. My 1987 opera Nixon in China is almost immediately recognizable by its sax quartet, which gives the orchestration its special timbre. I followed Nixon with another work, Fearful Symmetries, that also features a sax quartet in an even more salient role. In 2010, I composed City Noir, a jazz-inflected symphony that featured a fiendishly difficult solo part for alto sax, a trope indebted to the wild and skittish styles of the great bebop and post-bop artists such as Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, and Eric Dolphy.
When Adams came to compose his Saxophone Concerto in 2013, he embraced as a source “my lifelong exposure to the great jazz saxophonists, from the swing era through the likes of Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Wayne Shorter.” He wrote it specifically for saxophonist Timothy McAllister, who had been involved in the performances and recording of City Noir. “Classical saxophonists,” Adams observes, “are normally taught a ‘French’ style of producing a sound with a fast vibrato very much at odds with the looser, grittier style of a jazz player. Needless to say, my preference is for the latter, ‘jazz’-style playing, and in the discussions we had during the creation of the piece, I returned over and over to the idea of an ‘American’ sound for Tim to use as his model.”
“While the concerto is not meant to sound jazzy per se,” says Adams, “its jazz influences lie only slightly below the surface. I make constant use of the instrument’s vaunted agility as well as its capacity for a lyrical utterance that is only a short step away from the human voice. The form of the concerto is a familiar one for those who know my orchestral pieces, as I’ve used it in my Violin Concerto, in City Noir, and in my piano concerto Century Rolls. It begins with one long first part combining a fast movement with a slow, lyrical one. This is followed by a shorter second part, a species of funk-rondo with a fast, driving pulse.”
During his formative years, Jean Sibelius drew on the resources of both his native Finland and other, more “musically central” lands. He studied composition and violin at the Helsingfors (Helsinki) Conservatory of Music, then received a grant from the Finnish government that enabled him to take classes in counterpoint and fugue in Berlin. From there, he continued to Vienna for further study of composition. He then turned his sights back toward Finland and, in the early 1890s, began writing works on Finnish folk legends. These quickly established him as the most important of his nation’s composers, a reputation that was absolutely clinched with the premiere of his stirring patriotic composition Finlandia in 1900.
A year earlier, Sibelius had unveiled the first of his seven symphonies. These would occupy him practically to the conclusion of his productive career, which ended in 1927. At the age of 62 he basically retired, and, despite persistent and hopeful rumors, completed no more compositions in the three decades that remained to him.
The Finnish government commissioned Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony to mark the composer’s 50th birthday in 1915. The resulting symphony was something of a surprise to Sibelius watchers. His Fourth Symphony had been a rather desolate piece, redolent of isolation, even in the context of an oeuvre that was regularly described as reflecting the iciness of its Nordic origins. Then again, Sibelius would declare, “Each of my symphonies has its own style. I have to work a lot to achieve that”—or, on another occasion, that each of his symphonies represented “a credo at varying stages in life.”
Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony occupied the composer for seven years, since he probably began sketching it as early as 1912 and revised it considerably following the provisional premiere, which he conducted in Helsinki on his 50th birthday. A second version was unveiled in 1916, and then, after still more work, the Fifth Symphony reached its final form in 1919.
External difficulties may have accounted for some of the slow going. Finland had been a Grand Duchy of Russia since 1809, when Russia wrested the country from Sweden. But Finnish nationalism had been growing—fueled publicly by Sibelius’s music—and in 1917 the nation achieved its independence, at which point internal political strife led to an immediate civil war. In a sense, this was only a subplot to the larger political drama of World War I, during which Sibelius, cut off from his German publishers, received no royalties and had a hard time getting by.
Then, too, he was juggling several major projects at once, at least in his mind. In 1918, he wrote in a letter:
My new works, partly sketched and planned. The Fifth Symphony in a new form—practically composed anew—I work daily … The whole—if I may say so—a spirited intensification to the end (climax). Triumphal.
Sibelius goes on to tell his correspondent that two of the other pieces currently in his thoughts are his Sixth and Seventh symphonies. These final three Sibelius symphonies exhibit strikingly distinct characters, but listeners would not be amiss to consider them a sort of trilogy, summing up the composer’s grappling with symphonic writing.
The Fifth opens in an atmosphere of mysterious beauty. One might imagine time-lapse photography of wildflowers unfolding in a vast landscape, or at least think of the composer’s notation in a notebook in late 1914:
I begin to see dimly the mountain I shall ascend … God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.
The Andante mosso movement is a placid interlude marked by numerous melodies set to a similar rhythm. All manner of brilliant writing fills the finale, such that by the time this remarkable work reaches its conclusion in six widely separated and powerful chords—please don’t clap till they’re over!—one can only agree with the composer’s description of it as “triumphal.”
—James M. Keller
Former New York Philharmonic Program Annotator,
The Leni and Peter May Chair