Born in Mangoloaneng—a village in the Matatiele–Mount Fletcher district of the Eastern Cape, South Africa—Michael Mosoeu Moerane was a choral music composer. The family home contained a harmonium, which was likely the first instrument Moerane learned to play. After graduating from the South African Native College (later called the University of Fort Hare) while simultaneously completing a high school teaching diploma at Lovedale Missionary School, Moerane registered for a Bachelor of Music degree at Rhodes University. For his final exam, he wrote a 10-minute orchestral symphonic poem called Fatše La Heso (My Country).
Fatše La Heso is a tone poem based on traditional Lesotho songs that are developed throughout the piece. (The country to which the title refers is Lesotho, formerly called Basutoland—not South Africa.) Moerane told musicologist Percival Kirby that it was built “mainly around three traditional African themes: a war song, a work song, and a lullaby.” The nobility and inventiveness of the piece make a profound impression despite its brief length. Moerane’s harmonic language is tonal, and the singing lines have a soulful sensibility, though spikey bitonal moments remind us that this is a modern work.
The piece opens somberly in the basses with a long, winding melody, echoed by the brass, establishing a stately tone that never abates. Woodwinds and harp introduce more lyrical, flowing material complicated by gently dissonant chords that momentarily meander off key. A sudden climax is followed by a delicate section for winds interrupted occasionally by brass. The work rises toward a majestic conclusion with soaring brass and explosive percussion repeating a powerful motif; these ecstatic sounds die down, then rise a final time for a regal upward sweep.
James Stephen Mzilikazi Khumalo was born in 1932 in Vryheid, South Africa, where his parents were trained as Salvation Army ministers. After the family moved to Durban, Khumalo began his lifelong involvement with choral music, pursuing a wide range of studies, including music theory, composition, and singing. His first composition was “Ma Ngificwa Ukufa,” which was premiered in 1959. Khumalo went on to become a professor of African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 1986, he composed the song “Intonga YoSindiso” for the enthronement of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He was both conductor and director of the Soweto Songsters and the Central Division Songsters of the Salvation Army.
uShaka KaSenzangakhona is a choral/symphonic work about the life of the most famous king of the Zulu nation, uShaka. Nandi, uShaka’s mother, expresses her passionate love for uShaka’s father, King Senzangakhona, in the song on this evening’s program.
Princess Magogo is an opera based on the story of Princess Magogo, mother of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi. She was one of the great princesses of the Zulu Kingdom who was also a singer, composer, and philanthropist.
Bongani Ndodana-Breen was born in Queenstown (now Komani), South Africa, and has written a number of works that relate to or are inspired by his country’s struggle against apartheid and for liberation. One of his most acclaimed is Winnie, The Opera, based on the life of Winnie Mandela. His other recent major operatic and orchestral works include the oratorio Credo, based on South Africa’s historic Freedom Charter with a libretto by Brent Meersman; Mzilikazi: Emhlabeni, a sinfonia concertante for piano and orchestra; and the short opera Hani.
During his inaugural address at the opening of South Africa’s first democratically elected parliament on May 24, 1994, Nelson Mandela read a poignant poem, “Die kind,” by Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker. Two decades later, Jonker (who died in 1965) was posthumously awarded the Order of Ikhamanga by the South African government for “her excellent contribution to literature and a commitment to the struggle for human rights and democracy in South Africa.” Today, Jonker is an iconic literary figure, often called the “South African Sylvia Plath.”
Ndodana-Breen’s song cycle based on Jonker’s poetry comprises three arias for soprano soloist and symphony orchestra. The work is set in Afrikaans in a soaring fusion of African lyricism and rhythms with the symphonic tradition—a celebration of Afrikaans as a language of human rights and compassion.
Shortly after arriving in America in 1892 to head a National Conservatory of Music, Antonín Dvořák declared that the most distinctive folk music in the United States came from Black America; only through a recognition of this fundamental fact, said Dvořák, could America realize itself musically. Spirituals, he said, were “the folk songs of America.” With their unlimited emotional range and bracing syncopation, they had “all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” This assertion by a European was hugely provocative for its time, yet perfectly in tune with Europe’s embrace of radicals like Poe, Whitman, and Melville before Americans accepted them.
Dvořák composed his “New World” Symphony in New York City, with a copy of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha on his music stand and the soulful sounds of spirituals—sung by his most talented student Harry Burleigh—ringing in his ears. A summer sojourn in Spillville, Iowa, convinced him that Native American chants were an important part of American music; he built motifs inspired by these chants into the symphony, though he regarded spirituals as the work’s “foundation.” As prominent New York critic Henry Edward Krehbiel noted, this assertion caused “much consternation” among the musical intelligentsia, with some claiming that Dvořák simply lifted the melodies verbatim and others vehemently denying any Black influence whatsoever. Finicky arguments about authenticity (that continue to this day) barely concealed a larger anxiety and outrage over Dvořák’s embrace of African American music. Tastemakers like James Creelman and James Huneker (who claimed the symphony enabled the “evil” development of ragtime) denounced Dvořák’s advocacy of spirituals in explicitly racist terms.
To this day, some critics deny that the Black influence is authentic or assert that the “New World” is just another Czech/Bohemian symphony. What is odd about all these torturous dissections is that Dvořák clarified the matter from the beginning, stating that he was out to write a symphony that was “distinctly American” and declaring his method was to study indigenous melodies until he became so “thoroughly imbued with their characteristics” that he could create his own themes based on their “essence and vitality.” He never meant to be “authentic” in any literal sense, but he certainly meant to be American.
All these complicated controversies have tended to bury the work’s simple spontaneity and exuberance. Whatever the symphony’s ultimate sources, it has a powerful immediacy and an instant unity of emotion. The sense of open spaces and New World freshness is palpable; that the symphony indeed opened up a New World was not doubted by the cheering audience at its 1893 world premiere at Carnegie Hall.
Dvořák’s Americanness is apparent in his saturation in spirituals; his creation of a spontaneous, open sound; and his immersion in American poetry. H. L. Mencken, one of the symphony’s strongest defenders, spoke of its “atmosphere of frank savagery,” its syncopated “rush of sounds” and “unbroken clarity.” This sprawling exuberance, with themes spilling over from one movement to another and parading by one more time at the end, is set against a powerful homesickness, an excitement about the New World tempered by a longing for the Old. Dvořák fell in love with America, but he deeply missed Bohemia; the big tune in the second movement for English horn became a spiritual called “Goin’ Home,” a metaphor for Dvořák’s nostalgia for his homeland. The middle section of this movement is a somber march that evokes Longfellow’s vision of Minnehaha’s funeral followed by a “Dawn on the Prairie” full of birdsong and brilliant light—a spectacular climax that helped establish the idea of “open sound” in American music.
Couple all this with Dvořák’s link to jazz and the American idioms of Gershwin and Copland—he taught Rubin Goldmark, who mentored the latter two and Ellington as well—and it turns out Dvořák’s detractors had a great deal to be anxious about. American music was never quite the same after the “New World” Symphony. Dvořák may have been a European, but his American legacy was profound.
—Jack Sullivan
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