Three songs from H. Leslie Adams’s The Wider View


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/0xJ-YfqpvkQ


H. Leslie Adams (born 1932) is best known for his vocal music but he also has composed many instrumental works. He studied both piano and voice growing up and then at Oberlin, California State University-Long Beach, and Ohio State University. He has won numerous awards. His music incorporates many elements; describing his piano etudes, Maria Corley said, “They are highly representative of his compositional language, including jazz-inflected syncopations, neo-romantic harmonies, and the strong melodic sense one would expect of such a brilliant composer of songs.”


The Wider View, for voice and piano, contains six songs. The program notes given on the composer’s website say: “The Wider View is a panoramic portrait of human emotions, from songs of love and the blues to songs of nature and the human spirit. It seeks passion's source and its ability to be sustained. The journey begins with a need to fulfill an inner yearning, resulting in a search. That experience is depicted in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s stirring verse, ‘To the Road!’ Varying degrees of self-fulfillment reveal a need to pause and reflect which in turn evoke past memories and yearnings. This period of introspection is portrayed in Langston Hughes’ dialectical ‘Homesick Blues.’ Continuing onward, relationships are created that are so magnified as to move beyond physical limitations. In ‘Li’l’ Gal’ and companion ‘My Man,’ Paul Laurence Dunbar employs vernacular verse, light-heartedly depicting affection between two people in an amorous relationship. Recognizing the broad spectrum of devotion, the journey turns to experiencing loss in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s "Love Come and Gone." Such poignancy creates an unsettling question to the soul. A new horizon is identified in R. H. Grenville’s ‘The Wider View.’ The learned, imitated and expressed nature of true tenderness emerges, coming from within and lasting forever. James Dillet Freeman’s ‘Love Rejoices’ summarizes the power of passion as a profound inner expression projected outward. At this point, the journey comes to an end on a note of celebration.”


My classical music post for today is three songs from H. Leslie Adams’s The Wider View.

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