Black Pierrot

Commissioned by conductor Paul Crabb for the University of Missouri University Singers and the Mizzou New Music Ensemble (Stefan Freund, director) with funding from the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation through the Mizzou New Music Initiative. Based on seven poems by Langston Hughes, it is scored for SATB Chorus (divisi) and Chamber Ensemble (Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Violoncello, Percussion, and Piano). Duration: 32:30 Contents: 1. A Black Pierrot 2. Breath of a Rose 3. Jazzonia 4. Justice 5. Song for a Dark Girl 6. Silhouette 7. To a Dead Friend

Jazzonia : From Black Pierrot

From the large work Black Pierrot, Jazzonia (1923) describes the scene in a Harlem café of the 1920s in which “six long-headed jazzers play,” and beautiful girls dance. After a short introductory section, the music moves into a lively ragtime—complete with drum set—that forms the background for the remainder of the piece. Altogether, it is something of a poetic and musical glance at the era of the Harlem Renaissance in which so much African-American music, art, and poetry emerged as vital forces in the arts. Duration: 4:30

Little Black Book : A song cycle that fails the Bechdel Test

On Recollecting

These songs were commissioned by the Mohawk Trail Concerts in Charlemont, Massachusetts in honor of Ruth Lloyd Black, their co-founder. The first performance was on August 30, 2015, soon after her death. My recollections of Ruth over some sixty years of friendship were a mixture of laughter and tears. She was a tireless advocate of chamber music, a fine musician, and possessor of a delightfully British sense of humor. Emily Dickinson has her tongue firmly in her cheek in these poems. There is serious purpose under the lyrics, but the surface is pure word-play. She juggles the terms “forgetting” and “recollecting” in each poem until they almost take each other’s meaning. The firstpoem may have accompanied a gift of flowers to a grieving neighbor: she shares the grief, but assuages it with humor. The first statement of “blithe” fingers should be happy, the second drenched in sorrow. I love the way the second poem opens like a puzzle: is she forgetting to remember, or remembering to forget? In either case, it ends with the touching image of a lost child. She continues to confuse us in the third song: is it sunrise or sunset that is “the other one?” The setting sun is her subject in many wonderful poems: here, she would rather “die divinely” in glorious color (echoes of Sarah Bernhardt?) than merely wane away. -Alice Parker