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Dominican University
7900 W Division
River Forest map…
Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center
220 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago map…
Jeremy Jordan, piano
Jonita Lattimore, soprano
Apostolic Church of God Sanctuary Choir
Gospel Choir of the College of Lake County
Paul Freeman, conductor
Gustav Mahler
Adagietto from Symphony No. 5
Serge Prokofiev
Piano Concerto No. 1
Martin, Coretta, and Rosa:
A Tribute in Words and Music
text by Lerone Bennett, Jr.
Gospel Music
Combined voices of the Apostolic Church of God Sanctuary Choir and others
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Luther King, Jr. CD and download to your MP3 player. Be sure to send
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Jeremy Jordan, piano
Lerone Bennett, Jr.
We’ll rock the house with an explosion of sound when a massive, interdenominational choir joins the orchestra on stage. Capture the essence of Dr. King’s message with the orchestra that personifies it and brings all people together to celebrate his dream.
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Featuring Steinway Competition winner Jeremy Jordan on piano and the world premiere narrative Martin, Coretta, and Rosa: A Tribute in Words and Music with text by African-American historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., the musical emissaries of the Chicago Sinfonietta, under the baton of Maestro Paul Freeman, present a richly diverse program that will stir your soul.
All Artists, Programs, Dates and Locations subject to change.
Dr. C. Charles Clency, a native of Chicago, is completing his third year as director of choirs at the College of Lake County. The college is located about 45 miles north of Chicago in Grayslake, Illinois. The college serves 15,000 students, which includes a music program of nearly 200 participants. Since his affiliation with CLC, Dr. Clency has re-organized and expanded the college’s Gospel Choir. (The choir is featured in today’s presentation, along with the CLC Singers and the North Shore chapter choir of the Gospel Music Workshop of America.)
Dr. Clency holds master and doctoral degrees in choral conducting from Indiana University and the University of Miami, respectively. He earned the Bachelor of Arts in music education with honors at Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Clency has taught at all academic levels and, for eleven years, served as Associate Professor of Music at the Florida Memorial University in Miami, Florida.
While still a college student, Clency held the distinction as accompanist-arranger for the renowned gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson, serving in this capacity for the last six years of the singer’s life. Other positions held by Clency include Artistic Director of the Houston Ebony Opera Guild, the Miami Oratorio Society, the Indiana Choral Society, and his own Voices of Melody, a Chicago-based chorus of 60+ singers, who still enjoy renown for their choral versatility and numerous recordings.
Committed to high artistic standards of musical excellence, Dr.Clency holds professional membership in the American Choral Directors Association, National Collegiate Choral Organization, the National Association for Music Educators (MENC), the Chicago Music Association and the Gospel Music Workshop of America. Clency is married to Pamela, who teaches in the Evanston school district 65.
The Choirs of the College of Lake County The College of Lake County Vocal Music department, under the leadership of Dr. Charles Clency, consists of three choral organizations: the CLC Singers, the Gospel Choir, and Choir of Lake County. Nearly 100 singers comprise the choirs, whose aim is to provide opportunities for serious study and performance of a broad diversity of choral music, ranging from early 17th century to present-day contemporary choral styles. To this end, the ensembles perform throughout the year on campus and at community and civic events at religious, civic, and academic venues.
Mark D. Jordan, born in Chicago, Illinois, began his professional musical journey at the age of twelve playing the piano and organ at Bethlehem Healing Temple in Chicago. Mark is from a musical family where his mother was the church head organist and his father was Bethlehem’s first organist. As music educator, Mark Jordan developed one of the Chicago Public Schools’ finest choruses and bands that have received recognition from the mayor’s office to the White House. His 200 voice children’s chorus and concert band have produced two recordings, television commercials for WTTW-Channel 11, appeared in concert on ABC, CBS, and WGN television, and performed a full dedication concert at the opening of Chicago’s new Symphony Center. His leadership as administrator in the Chicago Public Schools led to his implementation of the highly regarded system-wide Summer Arts Program in conjunction with Gallery 37. Conducting church choirs and choral workshops for over 40 years, Mark served as accompanist for the acclaimed Barrett Sisters and has traveled throughout Europe and the United States including performances at Carnegie Hall and the White House. A founding board member of the Suzuki Music Academy of Chicago, Mark is frequently sought after for his opinions on educational issues, including his work as panelist with Vice President Al Gore, his address at the National Presidential Symposium on America’s Culture at Risk and his service on the selection committee of the Golden Apple Awards. Mark is the recipient of the Chicago Music Educator of the Year Award- Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, WFMT and the International Music Foundation, The Education Achievement Award of Cook County, National Distinguished Educator Award-Milken Family Foundation, National Teacher of the Year Award- Burger King Foundation and the Council of Chief State School Officers, Kate Maremont Dedicated Teacher’s Award-Chicago Region PTA, and the Professional Best Leadership Award-Learning Magazine. Profiled in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers and Who’s Who in American Education, Mark is married to educator and musician Verna.
Apostolic Church of God’s Sanctuary Choir has been an anchor for the music ministry of the Apostolic Church of God throughout the sixty-plus year history of the church. The music focus of the Sanctuary Choir is centered on quality presentations of sacred music including anthems,gospel,hymns and inspirational songs. Under the pastorship of Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, the 300-member choir has established itself as a powerful presence in the revitalized South Shore/Woodlawn community and throughout the music ministry of the Church. The Sanctuary Choir appears regularly on the church’s weekly television ministry and its annual acclaimed Christmas and Easter concerts.Other Notable performances include previous appearances at Chicago’s Gospel Festival, Millennium Park Opening Festivities with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Gospel Joins Symphony with the Canton, Ohio Symphony Orchestra, and in Disney’s The Lion King, as well as for the inauguration ceremonies of the Honorable Rod Blagojevich as Governor of Illinois. The Sanctuary Choir has also appeared in concert with renowned artists Yolanda Adams, Kirk Franklin, Gladys Knight, Dwayne Lee, Wynton Marsalis, Donnie McClurkin, Elizabeth Norman, Sharon Pulliam, Kirk Whalum, CeCe Winans, Smokie Norful, Babbie Mason, and Cook, Dixon, and Young—formerly known as Three Mo’Tenors.
Jeremy Ajani Jordan is a seventeen- year-old senior at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago .He is in his third year as a member of the prestigious Collegiate Scholars Program at the University of Chicago. Jeremy studies piano with Professor Regina Syrkin at DePaul University. As a member of The Mephisto Trio he appeared on the nationally acclaimed From the Top, a program designed to showcase America’s exceptional, pre-college classical musicians, and performed at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. He makes his solo debut on From The Top: Live from Carnegie Hall on PBS national television in spring 2007. At the age of 9 Jeremy received much notoriety after his televised performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 before a live audience of over 3000. Jeremy has written numerous piano compositions of which his Fantasie No.3 won first place in the Music Teachers National Association’s Young Composer’s Competition. After winning the Steinway Piano Concerto Competition he made his orchestral debut in May 2006, performing the Prokofiev Piano concerto No. 1 with the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra; and his European debut in November 2006 with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague. The recipient of the Dick Wang Jazz Piano Award from the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Jeremy plays with the Merit Music Honors Jazz Ensemble and the Gallery 37 Advanced Arts Education Jazz Band. Jeremy has received gold medals at numerous competitions and is a recipient of the National Achievement Award, National Merit Award, and Commended Student Award of the National Merit Program.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., is a historian and Executive Editor Emeritus of Ebony magazine. He has authored articles, poems, short stories, and ten books on African American history and current political challenges. He attended Morehouse College with Dr. King and covered the Kings and Rosa Parks from the Montgomery Boycott to 2006. Bennett, who calls himself “a witness- participant”, is the author of What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and Forced Into Glory, a reinterpretation of Abraham Lincoln. He began his career as a journalist for the Atlanta Daily World in 1949. In 1953, he became associate editor of Jet. In 1953, he moved to Ebony as associate editor,was promoted to senior editor in 1958, and executive editor in 1987. Bennett’s first book, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, has been called “one of the most popular single-volume histories of blacks ever written.” Bennett has been awarded the prestigious Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Patron Saints Award of the Society of Midland Authors and the Salute to Greatness Award, the highest award of the Martin Luther King Jr.Center. He has served on a number of national commissions, including the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and the Presidential Commission on the National Museum of African American History.
Jonita Lattimore, a Chicago native, made her Lyric Opera of Chicago debut in Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and was also seen on Lyric’s stage as Micaela in Bizet’s Carmen.She recently performed the role of Countess Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro with Tulsa Opera, and debuted in the title role in the world premiere and recording of James Niblock’s Ruth at Blue Lake Fine Arts Festival.With the Houston Grand Opera, Lattimore appeared as Marguerite in Faust, First Lady in Die Zauberflöte, and presented the world premieres of Harvey Milk, The Book of the Tibetan Dead, and Jackie O (recorded on Decca). She made her Paris debut at the Bastille Opera as Serena in Porgy and Bess. Recent oratorio and symphonic performances include the Dvorak Requiem with the N.O.Tonkunstler Orchestra of Vienna and the Brahms Requiem in her debut with the Northern Israel Symphony. She sang Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Albany Symphony), Britten’s Spring Symphony (Grant Park Music Festival), and Bernstein’s Songfest (Chicago Sinfonietta). Lattimore appeared at the Edinburgh Festival and debuted in Italy with the Orchestra della Toscana in concerts and radio performances. She is the soprano soloist in Robert Avalon’s Sextet de Julia de Burgos, recorded on Centaur. A frequent recipient of awards, Lattimore has been honored by the Birgit Nilsson Competition, the Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition, the Sullivan and George London Foundations, and Opera Index, Inc.
The pianist and composer George Walker hails from a family who loved music. His father was a physician and self-taught musician, his mother oversaw his first piano lesson when he was only five years old, and his sister Frances was a concert pianist. Walker has published over seventy-five works and has received commissions from may important orchestras and institutions in the United States and England. In 1996, he was the first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra, a piece commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Lyric for Strings is one of his earliest works, written in 1946 as a lament for the death of his grandmother. It was introduced that year under the title Lament in a radio concert by the student orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music. It received its professional premiere in 1947 under the title Adagio by the National Gallery Orchestra in the annual American Music Festival in Washington. The composer subsequently changed the title to Lyric for Strings.
Lyric for Strings is in the form of a single, short movement, simple but expressive. In it, the various instruments enter one at a time until there is a large,warm ensemble.After the exposition, development, and climax of is warm and straightforward theme, the piece ends in serene resignation.
Prokofiev is the composer of the ballet Romeo and Juliet, children’s favorite Peter and the Wolf, the film score and cantata Alexander Nevsky, and many more compositions of various genres. He spent much of his life abroad, but returned to the Soviet Union permanently in 1934, where his music was regulated by the socialist government.
Prokofiev showed precocious talent as a pianist at a very young age, and composed the Piano Concerto in 1911 at the age of 20. The first and last movements have a clear thematic relationship; the concerto ends with the same spacious D flat major theme.The middle movement (A flat/G sharp minor) is darker but hardly less glorious than the other two, its climax brilliant rather than overbearing.
This is perhaps the first collective musical portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks—three towering figures who transcended race, gender and time and called us to “the holy dream we were meant to be.”
History united them and made them one in the catalytic Montgomery Bus Boycott that opened a new era in our history. And it is appropriate to celebrate them together for they were, as the narrative says, three faces of the same phenomenon, three notes of the same song, three stages of the same dream. In celebrating them we celebrate all who marched with them and created a new South and a new Chicago and a new North.
Martin, Coretta and Rosa celebrates the historic trio in a musical tribute that combines African-American Spirituals and musical themes from William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony and Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony.
This is a continuation of a growing tradition that includes T. J. Anderson’s Runaway, David Baker’s Black America, Adolphus Hailstork’s Epitaph for A Man Who Dreamed, and the Freedom Concerts given by concert singer Coretta Scott King in the fifties and sixties.
Martin,Coretta and Rosa combines different elements of the tradition, using an original narrative and existing music, including the songs of “the black and unknown bards of slavery,”who anticipated and called for a King in their music. The composition breaks new ground by situating three historical figures in a real musical dialectic which is still evolving and which says that you are the ending and that the ending of this story will depend on what you do— and what you don’t do—today and tomorrow.
Martin Luther King Jr., the youngest person at that time (1964) to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, was the acknowledged leader of the Freedom Movement that changed racial patterns in the North and South. A graduate of Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary, Dr. King started his ministry at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, some fourteen months before Rosa Parks triggered a yearlong boycott by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus. He later led protests in several cities and was stoned during a march in Chicago’s Gage Park on August 5, 1966. He delivered the celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
Rosa Parks,“The Mother of the Movement,” was named one of the twenty most influential figures of the twentieth century. Mrs. Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 14, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, and moved later to Montgomery, where she married Raymond Parks. After the boycott, she moved to Detroit and continued to speak out against war, racism, and poverty. She died on October 24, 2005, and U.S. flags flew at half-staff on the day of her funeral. She was the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
Coretta Scott King, who was called “The First Lady of the Movement,” was born in Marion, Alabama, on April 30, 1927, and died on January 30, 2006. She attended Antioch College and was studying to be a concert singer when she met Martin Luther King Jr. They were married on June 18, 1953. She opposed the Iraq War and supported racial and economic justice, women and children’s issues and lesbian and gay rights. She was largely responsible for establishing the King Center in Atlanta and creating the movement for a national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Four former or present U.S. presidents and more than 14,000 people attended her funeral in Atlanta.
Notes by Lerone Bennett, Jr.
This piece belongs to the genre that began as “plantation songs,”community-composed folk songs, which served as a liason between early African slaves and their God in the United States during the 17th century. Later, these songs were known by various names: slave songs, sorrow songs, jubilees, and shouts; since 1870,however, the songs have been commonly known as spirituals.The spirituals were passed down through oral tradition to succeeding generations and gave voice and hope to the slaves’ continued struggle for freedom and equality, as well as traditions of worship. The lyrics of “I’ve Been ‘Buked” recall the experiences of the slaves’ captivity, oppression, slave labor, and physical abuse, all, a result of slave owners’greed and love of money and power.The lyrics of the last stanza embrace the hope, faith, and conviction of the slaves: ain’t goin’ lay my ‘ligion down, children.
Notes by Charles Clency
According to McAfee, Spirituals are Bible stories set to music. They originated in the cotton and corn fields on the plantations in the south and are the basis of the first true Native American music.
When blacks were brought to this country as slaves, they were forced to abandon their African culture. Two things weren’t forgotten, however: their great sense of oral tradition and their highly developed understanding of complex rhythms. Both of these factors were incorporated when the slaves adopted a new religion – Christianity – and began composing their own religious songs.
Not being schooled in the Bible, nor even allowed to read, they learned their Bible stories second-hand, from house servants who overheard it being read or from itinerant preachers. Then, in their own words, the Bible stories set to music became a new creation – the Spiritual.
In Bright Mansions Above, from the Gospel of St. John, is from the words of Christ comforting his disciples before His ascension. The slaves take on this comforting message that there is a better place “up yonder” and they want to go there. The final phrase quotes Christ in a haunting chant: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.”
In the summer of 1741 Handel, at the peak of his musical powers but depressed and in debt, began setting Charles Jennen’s Biblical libretto to music at his usual breakneck speed. In just 24 days, Messiah was complete and received its first performance in 1742. Handel conducted Messiah many times, often altering it to suit the needs of the moment. Many more variations and rearrangements were added in subsequent centuries. In consequence no single version can be regarded as the “authentic” one.
The most famous movement is the Hallelujah chorus, which concludes the second part of the three part Sacred Oratorio. The text is drawn from three passages in the New Testament book of Revelation (Revelation 19:6, 11:15, 19:16). The Quincy Jones production and Mervyn Warren arrangement of selections from Messiah released in 1992 as Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration includes the Hallelujah, a rendition in the Gospel tradition that evokes pure enthusiasm that surely demands the spontaneous clapping of hands and tapping of feet – or may cause one to proclaim, as the co-executive producer of this arrangement Gail Hamilton did, “I’m sure grateful to Handel for accepting the vision to put to music the simple truth: Messiah, a deliverer promised by God who did come and live and walk and change lives… this presentation of expression will introduce the Messiah to you in terms you may not have thought of before.”
A cum laude graduate of Howard University with degrees in vocal performance and piano, in addition to graduate work in ethnomusicology and a Masters of Divinity, Richard Smallwood is a world-class pianist, composer and arranger credited with changing the face of gospel music. He can impeccably blend classical movements with traditional gospel, and arrive at a mix that is invariably Smallwood’s alone. His classical collaborations include his accompanying of the legendary opera diva Leontyne Price as part of the White House Christmas celebration during the Reagan administration.
Smallwood’s Anthem of Praise is a rousing anthem in the gospel music tradition. Based on text from the 150th Psalm, Anthem of Praise implores the listener to praise God with all their might including using instruments – the trumpet, psaltery, harp, cymbals and dance.
The male voices open Anthem of Praise with powerful commands, “Praise Him with the timbrel and dance. Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet. Praise Him with the psaltery and harp. Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.” An anthem of triumph, this polyphonic contrapuntal piece is music that empowers the soul in the true sense of “Hallelujah!”
Notes by Mark D. Jordan
Program Notes by Peter Fodor except as indicated.
A
program fit for King memorial
Chicago Sun-Times review
Sinfonietta's diverse program
reflects King's legacy
Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest
This performance generously sponsored by:
Official Restaurant & Hotel
Special Pre & Post-Concert 3-Course Menu, $35/person.
$9 valet parking during the concert with dinner purchase.