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Main Menu Home About Us Contact Us MHS eNewsletter Composers Conductors Instrumentalists Vocalists Featured Artists & Groups Reviews Performance Reviews Record Reviews Book Reviews Donors Search Site for... Links Newsflash Fun Stuff Hot Topic! Bibliography Events Myrtle on the Web Guestbook Finding the truth is not enough. What we also have to find is justice.                                ~Rigoberta Menchu The music of Ulysses Kay Thursday, 29 November 2007 The music of Ulysses Kay Metropolitan Philharmonic Orchestra; Kevin Scott, conductor. Suite from The quiet one, W34 (1948). 1)      Joys and fears (10:20) 2)      Street wanderings (6:28) 3)      Interlude (10:20) 4)      Crisis (3:24) Three pieces after Blake, for soprano & orchestra, W48 (1952, rev. 1974).             Janet Hopkins, soprano 1)      To the evening (5:36) 2)      Mad song (2:12) 3)      Contemplation (7:49) Scherzi musicali, W108 (1968).             6 movements, including two interludes and movements designated by tempo (15:18) Aulos, for flute & chamber orchestra, W103 (1967). (12:52)             Melanie Valencia, flute Ulysses Simpson Kay (1912-1995), following William Grant Still, was the first generally recognized major African American composer active in a large variety of works, to secure fame.  Virtually everything he wrote was published and performed.  In fact, in the days of the LP, he was much better represented in the catalog than was Still, a situation that was reversed with CDs.  There is no reason why he should be relatively ignored, and Kevin Scott, a student of Kay and author of the lucid liner notes, is determined to change this.  This recording might be the inception of this new wave. Kay’s gift was encouraged in his youth by his maternal uncle, King Oliver, then by Still, and was recognized by Paul Hindemith, who encouraged him to follow the German from Tanglewood to Yale.  It happened with some of Hindemith’s students that they never quite got over it.  He brought with him the non-discrimination of neo-classicism, ushering a phase in Black music composition that was not rooted in the spiritual, with Hindemith’s classification of dissonance based on intervals, and an approach that was not based on art for art’s sake.  There was little room for the folkloric, and Hindemith was sometimes closer to jazz than his student.  Kay was not unmindful of these ideas (the instrumentation in these works is minimal), but he was liberated enough to find his own voice, and it was one generally audience friendly, given the limits of tolerability exercised by the vanguard, who seemed to write music that begged more for theoretical analysis than audience pleasure. The first item in this recording does reflect the concept of Gebrauchsmusik.  Those who wrote incidental music for the films or television (and Kay did both) did not often create something that could stand alone, autonomously, free from the visuals it was to serve.  One need not know the story line of The quiet one to find these extracts quite satisfactory on their own, and the harmonic language is a bit milder than in these other works. Kay, who added new instruments to his performance abilities during his service days in the Second World War, was an instrumental composer, but he did not hesitate to write for the solo voice, the chorus, or the opera.  The texts set from William Blake and the Scherzi musicali (not a suite of jokes, however) illustrate this versatility. I was responsible for the première of Aulos, which took place at Indiana University, with Wolfgang Vacano conducting and John Solum as guest soloist.  It was part of an offering by the federally funded Black Music Center, in the days when that innovative campus activity was thriving with off-campus funding. The soloists here are more than satisfactory, although the soprano’s diction requires reference to the printed text for secure comprehension.  The orchestra is certainly first-rate, and the conductor, who is also an exceptionally gifted composer, is a sculptor of sonorities.  All of these composer and performer, fully and seriously merit our future notice. The recording may be acquired from Prof. Scott at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . The numbers assigned to the works come from the chronological listing within Ulysses Kay; a bio-bibliography by Constance Tibbs Hobson and Deborra R. Richardson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994).  Since that publication, I have found a single-movement Sonata, for bassoon and piano from 1941.  It received what very well might have been its première at a recent conference by Monte Perkins, a colleague at Lawrence University, with Wallace Cheatham, pianist.   Dominique-René de Lerma Lawrence University   < Prev   Next > [ Back ]       © 2012 myrtlehart.org Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.

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