Mary Watkins’ Soul of Remembrance


This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.

https://youtu.be/by0xgq_Pu8k


Mary Watkins (born 1939) is known for her jazz works as well as classical compositions. She began studying music when she was four, and her earliest compositions date from when she was eight. Watkins said, “I started this musical journey in Pueblo, Colorado, as a little piano student. I was not quite four years old and didn’t have any idea why I was being given piano lessons. . . . From the very beginning I was admonished to confine my piano playing to the written notes on the page because it was of great importance that I be ‘literate.’ . . . For that reason, I was not interested in piano lessons though I did as I was told. Not until I dared to cross that forbidden line (using my ear), did I really become interested in music.”


She received a degree in composition from Howard University and then performed with jazz combos in and around Washington, DC. A few years later, she moved to the West Coast and formed her own jazz quartet. Her classical compositions include chamber and orchestral works as well as operas. Her opera based on the story of Emmett Till is scheduled to premiere some time in 2021.


When asked in 2016 what her proudest moment had been to that date, Watkins said, “It was in 2009 when I was in Chicago standing in the corridor outside the auditorium. I heard the orchestra rehearsing the second movement of my suite for orchestra ‘Five Movements in Color.’ The music wasn’t flashy, technically challenging, or anything like that. It was serene, beautifully executed, and I let go of whatever it was I had been holding on to. It was the first time I really felt validated as a composer.”


That second movement, Soul of Remembrance, is indeed serene, but it is so much more than that. John P. Varineau said, “Mary Watkins wrote Five Movements in Color on commission from the Camellia Orchestra in Sacramento, California. Intended to be part of Black History Month, she called the work ‘a statement about the African-American experience’.”  Watkins described Soul of Remembrance: “A melody floats over a march. I saw my own people in their long march to fully express themselves as fully human. It’s bittersweet and nostalgic, a song of sorrow and a song of hope.”


My classical music post for today is Mary Watkins’ Soul of Remembrance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

William Byrd's "The Battell"

Image
Throughout September, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates the music of 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century England. https://youtu.be/jomZcpqkfUI The great English composer William Byrd (1543–1623) wrote his wonderfully descriptive virginals piece "The Battell" after the great Armada victory of 1588, although most musicologists believe that it is more likely to have been inspired by a smaller skirmish, perhaps an uprising of some sort. Sally Mosher has said of "The Battell": "By the 17th century, battle pieces had become a popular genre, so Byrd can be said to have launched a new keyboard genre in addition to composing the first English keyboard suite. All in C major, sections of ‘The Battle’ are harmonically very simple; for the most part they alternate between the tonic and the dominant, using no more than a handful of chords. Like the march, they often suggest trumpets and drums, but they also quite successfully suggest the sounds of soldiers marching, of ho
Read more

Edmond Dédé’s Chicago, grand valse à l'américaine

Image
This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum. https://youtu.be/gBeigjxviQc Edmond Dédé (1827–1901) was born in New Orleans. Following childhood studies on the clarinet and violin, he went to Paris and studied at the Conservatoire. He then became a conductor, mostly for ballet companies and also at the Folies Bordelaises. He continued composing and his works all met with success. Many of his scores can be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Lester Sullivan says, “In 1852 Dédé's melody Mon pauvre coeur appeared. It is the oldest surviving piece of sheet music by a New Orleans Creole of color. He supplemented his income from music with what today would be characterized as his day job: he was a cigar maker, as were a number of other local musicians.” Dédé’s Chicago, grand valse à l'américaine was p
Read more

Lili Boulanger’s Vieille Prière Bouddhique

Image
This March, the Daily Classical Music Post will introduce you to some of the most wonderful music ever composed—and, yes, it will all be by women composers! https://youtu.be/xF9SltYJAT8   The French composer Lili Boulanger (born 1893, died 1918) was the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger. Lili’s talent was obvious from the age of two, and her parents (both of whom were musicians) took her to all the best people for instruction, including Louis Vierne, Paul Vidal, Georges Caussade, and Gabriel Fauré. When Lili was 19, she won the Prix de Rome for her Faust et Hélène; she was the first woman composer to win. Lili had been chronically ill almost from birth, and she died from what is now known as Crohn’s disease at the age of 24. Adrian Corleonis says, "Artists who die young leave behind such an aura of promise that one examines their musical remains with divinatory care, for glimpses of what might have been. Lili Boulanger . . . tantalizes in this way. . . . [W]hat strikes one about L
Read more