Vol. 38, No. 18

1-18-2005
By: Susan Wittstock

Contemporary Music Festival features African American composers

Olly Wilson credits his music style — a contemporary blend influenced by jazz, blues, spirituals, West African and classical composition — to a childhood spent in St. Louis in the 1940s and ’50s.

During Wilson’s youth, the city that served as the ‘Gateway to the West’ in the 19th century was home to a mix of music inspired by the French, Spanish, Native Americans and African Americans who populated the area.

“It was a very fertile place for interesting music development,” said Wilson, who will be the featured composer at the Contemporary Music Festival 2005. “At any time you could hear ragtime, blues, religious music — a whole range of things.”

Wilson’s versatile style as a composer made him a logical choice as featured composer for the Contemporary Music Festival, which will take place Jan. 26-30. The festival, which is presented by Ohio State’s School of Music and the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, will include concerts in Weigel Auditorium and the Ohio Theatre, 39 E. State St.

“I’d call him the dean of African American composers,” said Don Harris, professor of music and organizer of the festival. “He is at the forefront of African American music today.”

The festival also will showcase a number of other African American composers, including Adolphus Hailstork, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Jeffrey Mumford and Alvin Singleton and performances by the Ritz Chamber Players, an ensemble of African American musicians from the United States and abroad, based in Jacksonville, Fla.

Harris said the inclusion of the Ritz Chamber Players, who will perform in a Sunday afternoon concert, added another dimension to the festival’s offerings. “I thought it was a wonderful way to showcase not just African American composers, but very dedicated African American performers who are committed to performing new music,” he said. “It’s not that difficult to find musicians who will play Rachmaninoff, but Al Singleton and Olly Wilson? That’s very unusual.”

Wilson will spend a week at the university. “He’ll work with students and will give a series of talks,” Harris said. “His presence will be known on campus.”

Wilson, who is a professor of music emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, said he enjoys working with young composers. “I enjoy the enthusiasm of their ideas and the freshness of their creative thought. It brings me back to the time when I was a young composer. It’s reinvigorating,” Wilson said.

Wilson’s career has included commissions and performances for the New York Philharmonic, Moscow Philharmonic, Chicago, Cleveland and Boston symphonies, among many others, as well as for chamber ensembles and electronic media. He has received awards from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Fromm and Lila Wallace foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995.

Wilson sees being African American as a factor in his work as a composer, but not necessarily as a definition. “I’m an African American composer in the sense that your cultural background is exceedingly important to what you do as an artist. Whatever your ethnic background is, you have certain ways of approaching the world,” he said. “I think of myself as an African American composer, but that doesn’t limit your exposure to the broader American culture — but how you interpret it is different.”

The Ritz Chamber Players will be performing Wilson’s piece, A City Called Heaven, on Jan. 30. The composition, which was commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva ensemble in 1989, takes its name from a spiritual familiar to Wilson as a child. “I wanted to do a work for a large chamber ensemble that would use various aspects of traditional African American music,” he said.

In the first section, Wilson plays with an abstraction of a blues riff, repeating it and changing it slightly again and again. “That’s very common in blues. I wanted to look at that from an abstract point of view,” he said. “When you hear the piece, it does grab you. It’s not strictly blues or strictly jazz, but it has the character of those riffs.”

Elements of the spiritual are used in the second movement. “The second movement is based on the thematic idea associated with the original spiritual, but altered and repeated,” Wilson said. “I take the familiar sound and treat it in a different way.”

The third movement emphasizes percussion. “I also wanted to allude to another aspect of African American music — a genre called boogie woogie.” Again, Wilson uses repetition to build on themes, in this case, performed by a percussionist and a pianist. “I don’t ever literally give you boogie woogie. As a composer, what I’m doing is taking ideas and reshaping and reorganizing these things into my own perspective.”

A chamber music concert on Jan. 27 will include two of Wilson’s electronic compositions, Echoes for Clarinet and Tape and Sometimes for Tenor and Tape. Wilson began experimenting with the genre in the 1960s. “I was fascinated with original sound. It opened up a number of possibilities when you create everything for yourself. You work like a painter,” he said.

Wilson began writing works for electronic media that were presented with live performers, including Sometimes, which was written by Wilson specifically for the tenor William Brown and includes references to the spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.

“He performed the piece all over the world. He was scheduled to sing it at Ohio State, but about six weeks ago he had a sudden fatal heart attack,” Wilson said. Tenor Todd Miller was asked to step in, and that evening’s concert will be dedicated to Brown’s memory.
Wilson’s music also will be performed by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra at concerts Jan. 28 and 29. The orchestra will perform Episodes for Orchestra, a piece recently commissioned for the Detroit Orchestra.

This marks the third time the Columbus Symphony has collaborated with the university in presenting the Contemporary Music Festival. “The first was with Krzysztof Penderecki and the second was for Lou Harrison,” Harris said. “I think we’re fortunate because most professional orchestras are very conservative in their programming, but the Columbus Symphony has opened its arms to doing this kind of thing.”

Wilson is looking forward to the upcoming concerts. “A composer is driven by the possibility of communicating something of your experience to others,” he said. “Hearing my music performed in a wide variety of places and by a wide variety of musicians is always very exciting.”

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• Contemporary Music Festival 2005

Tickets for campus concerts: $12 general admission; $10 OSU faculty, staff, Alumni Association; $5 senior citizens and students; free for OSU students with ID. Tickets for Ohio Theatre concerts: CSO ticket office, 228-8600.

Jan. 26: OSU Faculty, Alumni and Student Composers8 p.m., Weigel AuditoriumMarc Ainger: Annotations for Flute and ComputerDavid Morneau: Rhythm Variations (Winner 2004 Ruth Friscoe Prize in Composition)Jan Radzynski: Concert Duos for Clarinet and CelloRobert Tanner: Ornaments for Percussion Ensemble and Duo Momentum for Clarinet and ViolinPerformers include Ann Stimson, flute; Jane Ellsworth, clarinet; Charles Wetherbee, violin; William Conable, cello; and David Tolley, piano.

Jan. 27: Chamber Music of Olly Wilson8 p.m., Weigel AuditoriumOlly Wilson: Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano, Echoes for Clarinet and Tape, and Sometimes for Tenor and Tape Jeffrey Mumford: Linear Cycles VII (Cambiamenti II) for solo violinPerformers include Todd Miller, tenor (guest artist); Jane Ellsworth, clarinet; Charles Wetherbee, violin; William Conable, cello; Mariko Kaneda, piano (guest artist).

Jan. 28 and 29: Columbus Symphony Orchestra8 p.m., Ohio Theatre, 39 E. State St.Daniel Hege, conductorOlly Wilson: Episodes for OrchestraDvorak: Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op 95, From the New World

Jan 30: The Ritz Chamber Players3 p.m., Weigel AuditoriumTerrence Patterson, artistic director; Russel Mikkelson, conductor Alvin Singleton: Between SistersAdolphus Hailstork: Summer. Life. SongJonathan Bailey Holland: Between Days (World Premiere)Olly Wilson: A City Called HeavenTania León: Oh YemanjaColeridge-Taylor Perkinson: String Trio Performers include Susan Powell and Joseph Krygier, percussion.
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