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Harlem |
Composed: 1950 Estimated length: |
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Born on April 29, 1899, in Washington, D.C.; Died on May 24, 1974, in New York, NY. |
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First performance: January 21, 1951, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra; symphonic arrangement premiered in 1955 at Carnegie Hall. |
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First Nashville Symphony performance: January 15, 1995, with Kenneth Schermerhorn conducting at Andrew Jackson Hall. |
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One of the preeminent shapers of American music, Edward Kennedy Ellington received encouragement for his musical gifts from an early age. He later began crafting his signature piano technique playing gigs at night while working as a sign-painter during day hours. He once explained that his nickname “Duke” was conferred in high school by a friend “who felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship I should have a title.”
Ellington recalled that he wrote Harlem in the summer of 1950 while sailing back home from a European tour to fulfill a commission for an even larger suite requested by the NBC Symphony. Yet its director, the aging Arturo Toscanini, never conducted Harlem; the first performance was given as part of a benefit held at the old Metropolitan Opera House in January 1951 by Ellington’s band. Harlem subsequently appeared in numerous guises, whether for his own jazz band, with its celebrated roster of soloists, or for a fusion of his band with symphony orchestra. The latter seems to have been the model Ellington had in mind when he described Harlem, as “a concerto grosso for our band and the symphony.”
Luther Henderson (1919-2003), a Juilliard-educated musician and prolific orchestrator of Broadway musicals, was a long-term collaborator with Ellington and prepared the orchestration of Harlem that we hear on this program, with further contributions by the composer’s longtime friend Maurice Peress. Harlem unfolds as a single movement but is kaleidoscopic in its variety of moods. One of the principal challenges of the symphonic version is to maintain a sense of soloistic, even improvisational individuality within the ensemble framework of the orchestra.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Ellington’s compositional economy is extraordinary. Much of the piece develops from an ultra-simple motif at the beginning—the trumpet’s bluesy two-note phrase (a falling minor third), immediately echoed—which Ellington said was a musical elucidation of the word “Harlem” itself. The clarinet also plays a key role in an introspective linking section at the center. After this, the trombone introduces the suite’s other main theme, a nostalgic melody. Ellington interweaves this material into a new synthesis in the final section with flawless imagination.
In Music Is My Mistress, the memoir he published the year before his death, Ellington provided his own unsurpassable description of the piece: “[Harlem] has always had more churches than cabarets. It is Sunday morning. We are strolling from 110th Street on Seventh Avenue, heading north through the Spanish and West Indian neighborhood toward the 125th Street business area. Everybody is nicely dressed, and on their way to or from church. Everybody is in a friendly mood. Greetings are polite and pleasant, and on the opposite side of the street, standing under a street lamp, is a real hip chick. She, too, is in a friendly mood. You may hear a parade go by, or a funeral, or you may recognize the passage of those who are making our Civil Rights demands.”
Scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 5 saxophones (2 alto, 2 tenor, 1 baritone), 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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