Introduction

It is an absolute honour to perform Florence Price’s music for you in this concert. Her music is finally getting the attention it deserves and it’s amazing to see.

The Heart of a Woman is written for soprano and orchestra – I had the pleasure of premiering the piece with the Minnesota Orchestra this season and am really excited perform it in this concert. I feel somewhat connected to Florence Price as she lived in Chicago, which is where I now live too and as an African-American myself, knowing what she must have gone through to have her music shared on the concert platform is so inspiring. I think it’s really important to celebrate those who came before you and so it feels special to share her music with you today.

The song cycle takes us on a complete journey. It begins with the theme of dreams and aspirations, moving to themes of personal struggles and connection through our community, before ending on the theme of familial love and a sense of returning home. It’s a full circle journey which I think resonates with audiences as much today as it would have when it was composed.

One of my favourite songs from the cycle is ‘Don’t You Tell Me No’ – it is completely different from the rest of the songs. It fuses jazz and pop, creating a super upbeat and fun song to sing – it kind if reminds me of Chicago the Musical!

The end of the song cycle also really resonates with me – the songs talk about being in your mum’s house, climbing into her bed, the feeling of fresh sheets. The orchestration thins out, creating sensitivity and it feels like a truly special moment, the feeling of returning home that means a lot to many of us.

This is my first time working with Kazuki Yamada and it is uplifting to bring this programme of American music to you on the 250th anniversary of American Independence. As an artist, my greatest gift is to be able to use my voice to bring people together through the love of music. Using Florence Price’s music to do this in today’s concert is incredibly special – with so much uncertainty in the world at the moment, through music we can bring hope, goodness and light. Music is what unites us and I really hope you get a sense of just that in today’s concert.

Janai Brugger
Soprano

Programme notes

In turbulent times, we seek out inspirational figures to make sense of the world. Be duly inspired by stirring words set to magnificent music in this celebration of American composers. Copland composed his Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942, following a powerful speech by the Vice President Henry A. Wallace. He urged Americans to fight for freedom, not only their own but that of the whole world. Lior Rosner has orchestrated nine songs by Florence Price, including her famous ‘Heart of a Woman’. Written in 1941, it reminds us that freedom should never be taken for granted. Tower celebrates the ‘Uncommon Woman’ in her fanfares, each dedicated to a remarkable female musician. Adams’ Harmonium searches for transcendence in the face of uncertainty. Kazuki Yamada leads the CBSO, with soprano Janai Brugger speaking and singing the visionary texts.

Fanfare for the Common Man

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

This Fanfare is probably Copland’s most instantly recognisable work, not only for itself but for its emblematic status within American classical music. The open fourths and fifths, the prominent use of brass, the calls to action from the percussion, and the general air of nobility have been influential on subsequent generations of American composers, including those writing for film and television (think of the opening title track of The West Wing). It was composed in 1942 as a ‘patriotic gesture’, as Copland put it, and was one of several fanfares commissioned for a series of wartime subscription concerts. Copland struggled for a title for some time, considering then rejecting ‘Fanfare to the Spirit of Democracy’ and ‘Fanfare for the Rebirth of Lidice (the Czech town razed to the ground by the Nazis). Ultimately it was dedicated to the common man who ‘after all’, as Copland put it, ‘was doing the dirty work in the war’.

Lincoln Portrait

Aaron Copland

Copland’s Lincoln Portrait is packed with historical resonance, managing to encompass three wars in three different eras of American history: the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. The original commission arose at the height of the war and, like the Fanfare for the Common Man, was patriotic in intention. In 1942 Copland was asked by conductor André Kostelanetz to compose a musical portrait of an eminent American. The result is a multi-dimensional Portrait which not only attempts to convey Lincoln’s character in music, but to drop in on his world, and to make space for his voice.

The inspiring opening music was intended, as Copland put it, ‘to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality’ along with ‘his gentleness and simplicity of spirit’. Songs from Lincoln’s own era, including the famous ‘Camptown Races’ make brief appearances in the more sprightly middle section of the Portrait; and in the final part Copland’s music recedes into the background, serving simply to ‘frame’ Lincoln’s words. The texts are selected from State of the Union speeches, debates and the 1863 Gettysburg Address, all of them concerned with democratic rights and the fight for freedom against tyranny. Just over a decade later, Copland was under scrutiny for his leftwing beliefs during the McCarthy trials. His Lincoln Portrait was pulled from one of President Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration concerts and Copland was summoned to testify to the McCarthy committee a few months later. Historian Heather Cox, who narrated the work in 2025, remarked on its protean role across American history: ‘The point is that democracy itself has always been a work in progress and always will be.’

Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman

Joan Tower (b. 1938)

Tower’s Fanfare was composed in 1986, and is dedicated to conductor Marin Alsop. It was consciously modelled on Copland’s famous 1942 ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’. Tower retains Copland’s instrumentation and echoes some of the musical content of the earlier work, yet her title directs our attention to the ‘Uncommon Woman’. As Tower put it, ‘[Copland’s] title really bothered me. For the “common man?” What the hell is that? It’s kind of elitist. So, I had to turn that one around.’ Her Fanfare later become no. 1 in a sequence of other works, all dedicated to women musicians.

The Heart of a Woman, Ten Songs for Soprano and Orchestra

Florence Price (1887-1953) (orch. Lior Rosner)

Lior Rosner notes her in introduction to the score of this collection that the ‘Florence Price renaissance is well underway’. Yet while Price’s songs are indeed becoming increasingly well-known and performed, Rosner’s orchestrated set gives them a larger platform, in all senses. The selection of poems, all by Black American writers (one is by Price herself), share certain themes, including dreams, fantasies of a more easeful life, a yearning for freedom and for visibility, and a kinship with the peace and repose of night. ‘My Dream’ is a vision of a place where ‘white day is done’ and ‘night comes on gently/Dark like me’; while Louise Charlotte Wallace’s ‘Night’ is a maternal space in contrast with the ‘Wearied day’. The central poem, ‘Heart of a Woman’, is a plea for freedom, the heart attempting to travel where the physical body cannot, similar to the ‘Dream ships’ of the first song. ‘Song to the dark virgin’, especially in Price’s erotically-charged setting, is a hymn to the beauty and strength of those women whom society would not have so valued.

Price’s music overall is powerfully effective in conjunction with the direct and sometimes devastating verses, especially in the heartbreakingly poignant ‘To my little son’, a parlour song that becomes a blues. Across the cycle her style is, as ever, fluid, expansive, richly chromatic (‘My Dream’ is a prime example) and highly individualistic; a very personal fusion of western art song with blues, jazz or, ‘Don’t you say no to me’, with ragtime. Rosner’s orchestration is generally subtle with only touches of brass and its intriguing textures derive mainly from divisi strings, tuned percussion and a large woodwind section. While gentle in tone for the most part Rosner’s cycle leans in to the more bittersweet, sometimes angular moments in Price’s songs. ‘Beside the sea’, for example, is mostly a song of yearning (‘if you could with me…my sad thoughts would then be put away’) yet powerful outbursts at the words ‘so cold’ and ‘sad thoughts’ give away the speaker’s current situation, evidently far from the idyllic scene of the poem. The final song, ‘Travel’s End’, is hymnlike in its longing for repose and for the peace of childhood. Price’s setting comes to rest in a beautifully simple, and compassionate, major chord.

Harmonium

John Adams (b. 1947)

Adams’ music has been described as ‘minimalist’ or sometimes ‘post-minimalist’. While he deploys some minimalist techniques and styles he fuses them with larger-scale structures and a sense of dramatic momentum that derives from more long-standing, and considerably less minimalist traditions. Indeed, in the case of his 1981 Harmonium, ‘minimalist’ does not refer to the size and scale of performing forces, but to the repetition of musical gestures and the use of static harmonies. As Adams puts it in his programme note on the piece, when the harmony does move in this context, it takes on ‘a new and exciting meaning’. He adds that ‘when properly handled, it could accomplish the effect of a kind of celestial gear shifting.’ This can be detected in the opening movement, ‘Negative Love’ when the choir moves from its repeated ‘No no no no’ to the text of Donne’s poem; later in the verse, when the music has begun to resemble a full-blown cantata, it shifts magically into a different key centre, with repeated high notes for the sopranos (which, heroically, they maintain nearly throughout this movement).

Adams’ minimalism (or post-minimalism) here can also create a world in which audience response is part of the process. In other words Harmonium does not vigorously assert its Big Ideas, but allows a space for meditative interaction, or for interpretive gaps to be filled by the listeners. In this aspect, Adams found a meeting of minds with the poet Emily Dickinson, whose remarkably modern-sounding poetry is built on short phrases, separated by ellipses or hyphens, and a striking refusal to be pinned down to certainty. Adams describes the second movement, to Dickinson’s poem ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’, as ‘a sequence of tableau-type images about the arrest of time’. It has a glowing, often sweetly nostalgic quality, though periodically undercut with a more ominous, tolling figure – death making its presence felt throughout. Towards the end it builds to the aptly titled ‘Wild Nights’ finale, an uninhibited, sparkling movement for the whole ensemble, featuring the stratospheric sopranos once more, plus a characterful cameo for trombones. Its frenetic activity does not prepare us for, in another ‘celestial gear shift’, the utterly transcendent conclusion.

© Lucy Walker