Concert of American Music Commemorates Black History Month

January 2009

Betsy Goolian

On Wednesday, February 11 at 8:00 p.m. at Hill Auditorium, Rodney Dorsey will conduct the University’s Concert Band in a program in celebration of Black History Month, which is observed throughout the month of February. Faculty members David Jackson, trombone, and George Shirley, tenor, will perform as guests. The program includes Alton A. Adams’ The Governor’s Own, a march written in 1921 and one of this composer’s most famous works. Mr. Dorsey will be using the edition created by musicology faculty member Mark Clague in his The Memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams Sr: First Black Bandmaster of the United States Navy (University of California Press, 2008). Next on the bill is Charles Ives Variations on America. Son of a military bandleader, Ives produced an impressive body of work in his lifetime—not recognized until after his death. Known for the use of dissonance in his music, Ives was intensely interested in the American music of hymns and marches and incorporated familiar American themes in his music—often in surprising and disconcerting ways. Adolphus Hailstork’s American Guernica, composed for wind ensemble in 1983, was written in remembrance of the 1963 bombing of a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in which 4 young girls died. Donald Grantham’s Honey in the Rock is the fourth movement from An Alabama Songbook. Rosa Parks Boulevard, a piece by the School’s own Michael Daugherty and originally commissioned by the U-M Symphony Band, pays tribute to the woman who helped set in motion the modern civil rights movement through her refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. The evening will finish with Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, one of the composer’s most famous works that includes narration of some of Lincoln’s most famous orations.

A pre-concert lecture by members of the SMTD student group Enharmonia, a project of the national non-profit organization Arts Eneterprise Central created to help foster enthusiasm and open discourse among young performers and listeners, is scheduled for 7:15 p.m. in the lower lobby of Hill.