This gala conclusion to a gala season will feature a new piece commissioned from William Bolcom based on poetry by Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina’s poet laureate, who will be present. In fact, we plan three premières during the evening. James Stewart, who received a graduate degree from the North Carolina School of the Arts in June, won our collegiate student composition contest with The Desert, a piece built on his own poetry. Bill Stevens, our unofficial composer-in-residence, has created Three (not very) Old Ballads, which will be performed by as many PCS alumni as can be gathered. Its three movements conducted in sequence by PCS music
directors Don Armitage, James Allbritten and Bill Osborne.

The first half of the concert will also include works by William Billings, Amy Cheney Beach, Edward MacDowell, George Whitefield Chadwick and Norman Dello Joio. PCS joins an enormous number of performing organizations across the globe that have commissioned new pieces from William Bolcom, ranging from the Vienna Philharmonic to the Lyric Opera of Chicago. His accumulation of awards is vast, including a Pulitzer Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, four Grammy awards in 2005, a National Medal of the Arts in 2006, and designation as Composer of the Year in 2007 by Musical America. We hope that all of Winston-Salem will join us in welcoming him next May.

Director's Notes

            It isn’t often that you can spend an evening in the presence of three world premières, where the only truly dissonant piece on the program was written not in 2007, but in 1778.  Let me explain.
            When the PCS board made a decision to commission a new work as part of the group’s 30th birthday celebration, we also decided not to discriminate among several distinguished local composers, and also not to approach one of those prominent choral composers who turn out a constant procession of new works, some of which actually merit more than a single hearing.  Thus, we determined to ask William Bolcom, not realizing that in the intervening years, he would assume unprecedented prominence with his Composer of the Year designation by Musical America, four Grammies, and, most recently, first performances of his new Eighth Symphony by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  A letter sent in September 2005 explaining who we were and proposing a new work met with the response that normally he would have to decline, but that, having suddenly lost his longtime librettist and lyricist, Arnold Weinstein, the piece they intended to write for the Lyric Opera of Chicago had been put on hold, thus allowing an affirmative response.  We suggested the North Carolina Poet Laureate as a source of texts (and Kathryn Stripling Byer will also be with us the weekend of May 2–3); Dr. Bolcom, a brilliant pianist, has graciously consented to play the first of two performances on May 3.  My decision to repeat the piece that evening (the second time with our own Ivan Seng at the keyboard) is indeed unorthodox.  However, I have always believed that new works need to be assimilated more than once on the road to understanding, and the second time around will also allow the composer to experience his ideas from out front.  We again thank the Bakers for their generous support of the venture, and hope that you will find the result as evocative as we do. 
            If time allowed, it would be ideal to repeat the other new works, but, alas, that will not be possible.  As part of our celebration we decided to sponsor a composition contest, open to anybody who was an active student at a North Carolina collegiate institution.  Letters of invitation were sent to composition teachers across the state; the winner, James Stewart, is a local, who, although a student of Lawrence Dillon at the time of the contest, received a Master’s degree in composition from NCSA last June.  James is an active church musician who has also been involved with the Open Dream Ensemble, an outreach program of the Kenan Institute for the Arts at NCSA.  James chose to serve as his own poet, and I think that you will find his musical reaction to it wonderfully atmospheric. Composers Margaret Sandresky and Bill Stevens and I served as the evaluating committee.
            Bill Stevens, a longtime member of PCS and our unofficial, prolific composer-in-residence, in this instance also became his own poet.  His quirky title alludes to the fact that the words, although based on historical fact, are entirely his own.  The result, magical in effect, suggests vintage folk music, although everything is newly created.  It was my suggestion that the piece be in three movements to allow the sequential involvement of our three music directors in the chronological order of their service.  Thus the first movement will be led by Don Armitage, our founding conductor, and presently Cantor of Augsburg Lutheran Church; the second by Jamie Allbritten, artistic director of the Piedmont Opera Theatre and the Fletcher Opera Institute at NCSA; the final movement by yours truly.  We will be joined by a substantial number of alumni, who are gathering from as far away as New York City for this gala occasion.
            As to the rest of our repertory: Norman Dello Joio, over a long and distinguished career, has developed a distinct idiom, one that at times seems almost brashly and flamboyantly American, especially when he has teamed with Walt Whitman, as in this forthright assurance that “Our spirit sings a jubilant song that is to life full of music, a life full of concord, a life full of harmony.”  William Billings, a tanner based in Boston, was the most prominent and surely the most gifted of a large group of part-time itinerant singing masters who roamed New England offering classes that promised musical literacy.  They published their own textbooks (in this case, The Singing Master’s Assistant [1778] and The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement [1781]), in prose explaining all the rudiments of music and then offering a repertory to which the students could apply their newly learned skills.  Billings was unusual in that his collections contained only his own compositions, mostly written to his own words.  Thus, we first offer you his prescription for creating a piece of modern music in revolutionary America at the beginning of the 1780s, followed by a bit of “Jargon,” sometimes subtitled “Dissonance,” since it contains only a single conventional chord.  Billings was obviously intent on having a bit of fun; his preface contains a long petition to the “Goddess of Dissonance” explaining his motivation in writing such a striking few measures: “I have been sagacious enough of late, to discover that some evil-minded persons have insinuated to your highness, that I am utterly unmindful of your Ladyship’s importance; and that my time, as well as my talents, was wholly taken up in paying my divoto to your most implacable enemy and strenuous opposer, viz. the GODDESS of Concord.”  The Goddess then acknowledges receipt of this bit of musical Jargon, “it being the best piece ever composed, in full of all accounts from the beginning of time…”  “Consonance” will serve as an antidote, since, “Though diff’rent Systems all the Parts divide, By Music’s Chords the distant Notes are ty’d.”
            We also will share with you a celebration of the return of Spring from the pens of three prominent Victorian-Americans.  Amy Beach was certainly the most gifted of her contemporaries.  Her multitude of compositions in varied genres were published under the name of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach in deference to her considerably older husband, a Harvard professor.  Given the social conventions of the day, he frowned on any sort of public performance (composing, however, was considered an acceptable occupation), but after her death she resumed a considerable career as a virtuoso pianist.  Henry Hadley is probably recalled more today as an active conductor both in Europe and this country, where, among other accomplishments, he founded the San Francisco Symphony.  The vignette we will sing, based on those ubiquitous words from the fifth act of As You Like It, will probably feel like a delicate 20th century Elizabethan madrigal. G. W. Chadwick, a friend and mentor of Hadley’s, was also a prolific composer in various media who served for many years as director of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.  His lush late Romanticism fervently supports the poet’s assurance that “Spring has come up from the south again with soft mists in her hair…”
            Please come and join us for this gala celebration.  And join us as well for the supreme artistry of Bolcom and wife Joan Morris on Friday evening.