Samantha Ege: Black Renaissance
The Black Renaissance was a vital movement in the early 20th century. Tonight we celebrate that legacy through music and words.
In the United States, the first half of the 20th century was a time of great musical impact which celebrated African American folk tunes and spirituals while incorporating them into late 19th-century Romantic practices. It was a period of cultural rebirth that brought together different aspects of life such as music, theatre, art, dance and literature. This era was known as the Black Renaissance. Tonight’s recital, Black Renaissance: Music, Lives and Legacy, celebrates the great pioneers of this time including Florence Price, Nora Holt and Helen Hagan – in addition to Robert Nathaniel Dett and Zenobia Powell Perry.
This creative period influenced composers in the UK, too: most famously, the prominent British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912). He exhibited extraordinary musical talent at an early age and went on to study at the Royal College of Music alongside Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Elgar was a great admirer. Many of his compositions embraced African continental and diasporic cultures, such as Moorish Dance, Op 55 (1904). Samantha Ege reflects that the term ‘Moor’ has ‘developed derogatory connotations in relation to people from North Africa. However, this composition restores pride and power with its grandiloquent style and expressive gestures.’ The piece begins ‘with a suspenseful piano opening in a minor key that bursts into a forte flourish.’ It features a ‘highly syncopated main theme before a rhythmic passage that imitates the sound of horses that medieval Northern Africans rode.’
Meanwhile in the United States, singer, composer and music critic Nora Holt (c1885–1974) was born in Kansas and was the first African American to receive a master’s degree in music in 1918. During her European travels, Holt’s manuscripts were lost or stolen, which is why, out of some 200 compositions, only two self-published pieces remain, including Negro Dance. The work exhibits characteristics of a ragtime with its rhythm and jolly spirit.
Praised by Nora Holt for her ‘extraordinary attainments and wonderful fortification of technique and musicianship’, Helen Hagan (1891–1964) was an American pianist and music educator from New Hampshire. She was the first known Black woman to graduate from Yale School of Music in 1912. The same year, Hagan performed her C minor Piano Concerto with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
The concerto opens with a bold minor theme featuring grand chords in the piano’s lower register and intricate passage work. This is followed by a second theme which showcases the tender side of Hagan’s compositional voice.
She went on to perform the two-piano arrangement of her concerto, which brought praise for her virtuosic skill. It was common for concertos by Black Renaissance composers to be arranged for two pianos due to discrimination, limited access to orchestras and a lack of resources in Black classical communities.
The Concerto in One Movement by Florence Price (1887–1953) was also arranged for two pianos; she gave its premiere in Chicago in 1934. It’s dedicated to Price’s friend and patron Helen Armstrong Andrews. It comprises three distinct parts: a grand introduction followed by a virtuosic cadenza, a lyrical adagio section, and an allegretto which draws inspiration from the African American juba, a folk dance that was popular in the years before the Civil War.
Black Canadian American composer Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943) was also influenced by African American spirituals and folk songs and used them as the foundations for his piano and choral works. Dett drew influence from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as well as his contemporary Percy Grainger. In a letter to the latter, Dett wrote of his seven-movement suite, Tropic Winter (1938) ‘I am rather proud of this suite, as I think it represents an advance in musical thought for me …’ The work strays from Dett’s previous folk influences and ‘The Day Break Charioteer’ features a notably modernist approach.
One of Dett’s students was the Oklahoma native, Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004). In 1990, Perry wrote Homage for the 90th birthday of her teacher, fellow composer William L Dawson. The main theme comes from one of his favourite spirituals – I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned. Samantha Ege points to the use of ‘blue notes to flavour the harmonies’. At the close, Perry revisits one of the earlier, blues-inflected passages ‘as if to show that the music has not strayed too far from home’.
What does she want the audience to take away from this recital? Samantha states: ‘It’s one thing to learn about a composer’s biography and to understand the social, cultural and political conditions they were living in, but it’s another to hear their voice under your fingertips,’ she reflects, ‘to feel connected through the responsibility you have to interpret and communicate their intentions to an audience who may or may not be familiar with their music. So along this journey, I also want to share with you what inspires me about the repertoire, what I like about how it sounds and how it feels to play.’
© Aaliyah Booker
Details
Programme and performers
Introduction
Robert Nathaniel Dett ‘The Day Break Charioteer’ from Tropic Winter
Reading: Zenobia Powell Perry speaks about studying with Robert Nathaniel Dett (2003)
Zenobia Powell Perry Homage
Reading: Helen Hagan in the ‘Philadelphia Tribune’ (1915)
Helen Hagan Piano Concerto in C minor (arr two pianos)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Moorish Dance
Reading: Florence Price reflects on American music (1938)
Nora Holt Negro Dance
Reading: Florence Price letter to Serge Koussevitzky (1943)
Florence Price Piano Concerto in One Movement (arr two pianos)
Samantha Ege piano
Artina McCain piano
Adjoa Andoh narrator
Artist biographies
Dr Samantha Ege is an Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2020–22). She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of York and a BA in Music from the University of Bristol. She taught music internationally for almost a decade after graduating from Bristol.
She is a leading interpreter and scholar of the African American composer Florence Price. Her publications and performances shine a light on composers from underrepresented backgrounds. In 2021 she received the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award for her Black Renaissance Woman recording project. In 2019 she received both the Society for American Music’s Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship for her work on women’s contributions to concert life in interwar Chicago. Her first book is called South Side Impresarios: Race Women in the Realm of Music (forthcoming from Univ of Illinois Press).
She made her Barbican debut as a pianist last year in a recital including the UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová’s Sonata appassionata. This followed her London debut at the 2021 London Festival of American Music in which she gave the world premiere of Florence Price’s complete Fantasie Nègre set.
She released her debut album in 2018 on Wave Theory Records: called Four Women, it features solo works by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland and Bonds. This was followed by a second album in 2021 – Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price – on Lorelt. Her third album (also on Lorelt), Black Renaissance Woman, features solo music by Price, Bonds, Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King and Helen Hagan, while a fourth, a collaborative project with the Castle of our Skins string quartet entitled Homage: Chamber Music from the African Continent and Diaspora (Lorelt), has just been released.
Artina McCain has a built a threefold career as a performer, educator and speaker. As a recitalist, she has performed at prestigious venues including Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall and Merkin Hall in New York City. She has also appeared with the Dallas, Fox Valley and Memphis Symphony orchestras.
She is dedicated to promoting the works of Black and other underrepresented composers, and has curated concerts exploring this repertoire for many arts organisations. Her solo piano recordings of these works have led to several awards, including, for her recent project Heritage, a Gold Global Music Award. In 2021 Hal Leonard published her transcriptions of 24 Traditional African American Folk Songs.
She has broadcast widely on radio and television, including features on CSPAN for the MLK 50 Commemoration. She is a three-times Global Music Awards winner, including for the collaborative projects I, Too – African American Spirituals with soprano Icy Monroe and Art Songs and Shades, a collaboration with her husband and duo partner Martin McCain.
After not performing for six years while battling a performance injury, she now enjoys a prolific concert career.
She graduated from Southern Methodist University, received her Master of Music from Cleveland Institute of Music and her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently Associate Professor of Piano and Coordinator of the Keyboard Area at the Rudi E Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis and Co-Founder/Director of the Memphis International Piano Festival and Competition.
One of Britain’s leading actors, Adjoa Andoh won global acclaim as Lady Danbury in the Netflix smash Bridgerton – a role that saw her nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress at the 2021 NAACP Image Awards. Other recent highlights include the roles of Dr Isaacs in the psychological thriller Fractured, DI Nina Rosen in BBC One’s Silent Witness and Nenneke in the Netflix fantasy drama, The Witcher. Her many other television credits include regular appearances in Doctor Who, Casualty and Law & Order UK.
On-stage, she has been celebrated for lead roles, including Condoleezza Rice in Stuff Happens and Serafina Pekkala in His Dark Materials (National Theatre); Portia in Julius Caesar, Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida and Helen of Troy in The Odyssey (Royal Shakespeare Company). In 2019 she conceived, co-directed and played Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in the UK’s first all women-of-colour production.
She made her Hollywood debut in 2009, starring alongside Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon in Clint Eastwood’s biographical sports film Invictus. Other film appearances include Adulthood, Brotherhood and I Is A Long Memoried Woman.
Adjoa Andoh is an Associate Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Senior Associate Artist at the Bush Theatre. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, British Shakespeare Association, Rose Bruford College, Arts University Bournemouth and the Shakespeare Association of America. And she was recently appointed as the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre (University of Oxford).
