STRANGERS
CAIC’s broadcasts from the 2021 Collaborative Works Festival continue. This week’s broadcast is of the opening performance: CONCERT II: Strangers. Below is my program note.
One of the most intractable narratives about America is that we are a nation of immigrants. The notion is borne out by the wave after wave of immigrants who, over centuries, have arrived and made their homes in the United States. Yet questions remain: How welcome are these immigrants? How long does it take for new arrivals to be seen as fellow Americans?
Tonight’s second program of the 2021 Collaborative Works Festival examines the work of composers who migrated at some point during the course of their lives. Many of these composers immigrated to the United States because of the massive political upheaval in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Two of these composers migrated from the American South to the North and the West as part of the Great Migration of African-Americans in the last century. Three are present-day immigrants to the United States.
October 8th marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Chicago Fire, a pivotal moment in the history of Chicago’s own immigrant communities. The fire destroyed nearly three-and-a-half square miles of the city (including the original structure on the property where this evening’s performance is being held), killed roughly 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless. Reporting on the purported cause of the fire, a journalist named Michael Ahern capitalized on rampant anti-Irish sentiment and reported a fictitious story that the fire was caused by a poor Irish Catholic immigrant, Catherine O'Leary, when a cow she was milking kicked over a lantern and set her barn on fire. As the city struggled to recover and rebuild in the wake of the fire, the urgent demand for workers began to empower proponents of social reform. Many of the labor movements of the time were led by immigrants and bonded many of these disparate communities together in an important moment of solidarity.
This evening’s showcase of the work of immigrant and migrant composers in the Samuel M. Nickerson House, one of the many buildings rebuilt during this period, on the 150th anniversary of this watershed moment is a special reflection on the breadth of migratory experience.
THE RUSSIANS
While the song which opens this evening’s concert has been appropriated by a wide variety of political causes over its 103-year history, and in recent years has become most associated with quasi-fascist American nationalists, Irving Berlin’s (1888 – 1989) God Bless America has a rich immigrant history. Berlin was among the two and a half million Jews who emigrated to the United States as they fled pogroms and religious persecution in Eastern Europe during the final years of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. Berlin emigrated through Ellis Island at the age of 5 in 1893, and his family settled in New York’s Lower East Side. When the United States decided to enter the fray in World War I, Berlin decided to become a naturalized citizen in 1918 so that he could enlist in the army. He composed God Bless America and a handful of other patriotic American songs aimed at uniting Americans in the war effort, including Let’s All Be Americans Now and For Your Country and My Country. While he ended up holding the song back for 20 more years, the song was meant as an expression of gratitude to the country that had offered him refuge as a child. Describing Berlin’s intentions behind the song, his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett would later write: “He, the immigrant who had made good, was saying thank you.”
The song has a unique place in American history, having become an unofficial, alternative national anthem of sorts. It has been sung to protest racial and religious intolerance and injustice; it has been sung by labor movement protestors and civil rights activists; it was famously sung by police officer and tenor DanielRodriguez in the hopes of healing the nation in the wake of the September 11th attacks in 2001. It has also highlighted the strong currents of xenophobia that run through the United States, for instance when many questioned pop-singer Mark Anthony’s “right” to perform the song at the Major League Baseball All-Star game in 2013, perceiving him to be a foreigner despite being born in New York City and of Puerto Rican descent.
Both Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943) and Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971) ended up choosing to exile themselves from Russia due to the political turmoil of the Russian Revolution of 1917. When revolution broke out in February of 1917, Rachmaninoff was concertizing in Russia, and upon his return to his home estate, discovered that it had been confiscated by socialists. Seeing the deteriorating situation, he promptly materialized a Scandinavian concert tour as an opportunity to sneak out of the country and emigrate. He toured in Europe for most of1 918, but by the end of the year he and his family had relocated to New York. He would become a naturalized US citizen less than one year before his death in 1943.
Shortly before his death, Rachmaninoff would migrate west again, moving from New York to California, where another famous Russian émigré had also recently relocated: Igor Stravinsky. While Rachmaninoff came quickly to the states after fleeing Russia, Stravinsky remained on the European continent for the first chapter of his self-imposed exile from Russia. At the outbreak of World War I, Stravinsky chose to settle in Switzerland. A few years later, the unfolding of the Russian Revolution made it apparent he could not return to Russia, and he eventually settled in France. In 1941, he relocated again to Los Angeles, California. He became a US citizen in 1945.
Both works by these two composers on tonight’s program stem from roughly the same period, just before the revolution that spurred their westward emigration. Stravinsky’s Two Poems of Paul Verlaine are his first attempts at musically setting a language other than his native Russian, and were composed in 1910, just after his wildly successful debut in Paris. Rachmaninoff’s famous Vocalisewas composed in 1915 and premiered in 1916, roughly a year before he would flee his homeland. Written against the backdrop of World War I and the impending violent collapse of the Russian monarchy, the song would become one of Rachmaninoff’s best-known melodies.
THE GREAT MIGRATION
From the years of 1915 through roughly 1970, millions of African Americans fled the lynchings and flagrant civil rights violations of the Jim Crow South for the Northern and Western regions of the country in what came to be called the Great Migration. In her book, The Warmth of Other Suns, author Isabelle Wilkerson outlines three primary tributaries of migration: one leading up the East Coast, with black migrants from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia moving up to Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and Boston; a second cutting up the middle of the country, in which migrants from Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee would relocate to Midwestern cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit; and a third to the west in which Black Americans fled Texas and Louisiana for the cities of California, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.
Florence Price (1887 – 1953) followed this second tributary of the Great Migration, migrating from Little Rock, Arkansas to Chicago in 1927. Fearing that her youngest daughter was being targeted to be lynched, Price escaped north with her two children. Upon her arrival in Chicago, Price became a major fixture on the city’s music scene, soon making history as the first black woman in history to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Frederick Stock performed her Symphony No. 1 in e minor in 1933.
Price’s song Sympathy is a setting of a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906), one of the first Black American writers of influence. The poem has inspired many, including Maya Angelou, who used an excerpt as the title of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Out of the South Blew a Wind is a setting of a poem by one of Price’s close colleagues, Fannie Carter Woods, a respected singer who premiered many of Price’s hundreds of art songs. Both of Price’s songs are paired on tonight’s program with Irving Berlin’s song Supper Time from his musical revue, As Thousands Cheer. The song, written for the singer and actress Ethel Waters, is a woman’s reaction to the news that her husband has been lynched.
Shortly after his birth in Dennison, Texas, Robert Owens’ (1925 – 2017) family followed the third migratory path, leaving Texas for Berkeley, California in 1927, the same year Price fled Arkansas for the Windy City. Owens would go on to follow another migratory path that many Black American artists like Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and Nina Simone would traverse: leaving the United States for Europe. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Army during World War II, Owens relocated to Paris, where he completed his musical studies. He eventually settled in Münich, Germany, where he would live for more than 50 years. Owens began composing art songs after meeting the poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967), who gifted him a copy of his collection, Fields of Wonder, suggesting he “see what he could do” with the poems. Both Havana Dreams and Heart are from his song cycle, Heart on the Wall, one of many song cycles Owens composed using Hughes’ poetry.
WORLD WAR II
World War II would prompt the displacement of millions of people, creating one of the greatest refugee crises in human history. Both Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897 – 1957) and Kurt Weill (1900 – 1950) were among the many Austrian and German Jews who fled Europe as Nazis rose to power. Weill, already a well-known and outspoken artist, became an early target of the Nazi regime. Just weeks after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, he fled for Paris, where he sheltered for 2 years until he emigrated to the United States. Korngold, a young Austrian prodigy who had come to international attention with the successes of his operas, was brought to the United States around the same time, at the invitation of the Austrian film director Max Reinhardt, who wanted him to score his movie version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He would frequently travel back and forth across the Atlantic, working on film projects in Hollywood and operatic ones in Vienna. In 1938, as the outbreak of war loomed and the annexation of Austria by the Nazis making it unsafe for Jews in Vienna, Korngold opted to remain in the United States. Both Weill and Korngold would become naturalized citizens of the United States in 1943, the same year as Rachmaninoff.
The music for Weill’s Youkali was composed as a tango number that was featured amongst the incidental music he wrote for the play Marie Galante, one of the first projects he took on after his escape to Paris in 1933. He would later add text to the tune in 1946, opting to use the words of the French actor and lyricist Roger Fernay. Korngold’s Five Songs, Op. 38 are the final set of songs that he composed. The first two songs of the set, which are featured on tonight’s program, are his first settings of German poetry in nearly 15 years. The final song of the set is a setting of Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, one of his favorite authors throughout his life, and the creative force behind his initial journey across the Atlantic.
Born to an American fatherand German mother in Harrow, England, Rebecca Clarke (1886 – 1979) spent the early part of her life in England, where she received her musical training. After a family dispute with her father, she was forced to cut off her musical studies in composition and support herself as a performing violist. A pioneer as both a virtuoso violist and woman composer, Clarke entered her 1919 viola sonata in a competition at the Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music. The rules of the competition required anonymous submissions, and the piece placed a very close second to an entry by Ernest Bloch. When it was revealed that the viola sonata so loved by the jury was composed by a woman, the judges were astonished. The piece would go on to become central to the instrument’s standard repertory and the publicity about her near-win cemented international her reputation as a composer. After extensive international performing tours from 1916 through the early 20’s, Clarke returned to her home in London in 1924 until the outbreak of World War II.
Visiting family in the United States in 1939 when England decalared war on Germany, Clarke found herself stranded in America, unable to obtain a visa to get back across the Atlantic. She remained in the states until her death in 1979. Published shortly after she composed her famous viola sonata, The Cloths of Heaven is a hauntingly beautiful setting of William Butler Yeats’ famous poem. While the composition date and performance history of her setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem Up-Hill are unknown, tonight marks the song’s first-known performance.
TODAY
The music of the composers of today who have immigrated to the United States is represented on tonight’s program with songs by Marta Ptaszyńska, Jorge Sosa, & Chen Yi.
Born in Warsaw, Poland the same year that Korngold, Rachmaninoff, and Weill became naturalized American citizens, Marta Ptaszyńska (b. 1943) relocated to the United States in 1972 when she came to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Her music has been performed and commissioned all over the world, including at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Salzburg Festival, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the Polish National Opera. She has been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1998. Her song Autumn Rain is excerpted from her cycle, Songs of Loneliness and Despair, and is a setting of a poem by Polish poet Leopold Staff.
Born in Mexico and currently residing in New York City, Jorge Sosa has worked in a wide-range of styles, recently focusing in on compositions for the classically trained voice. His song A Letter Home is a setting of a letter from an Irish woman to her brother, who had emigrated to Philadelphia some years before, detailing the horrific struggles of those who were left behind.
Born in Guangzhou, China just before the Cultural Revolution, Chen Yi (b. 1953) was among the millions to be separated from her family and sent to the Chinese countryside to work hard labor constructing military structures. When the revolution ended with the death of Mao Tse-Tung, Chen was among a talented handful of composers and musicians who enrolled at the Central Conservatory in Beijing in 1977, all to go on to wildly successful international careers. She would become the first woman to receive a master’s degree in composition from the institution, and shortly thereafter moved to the United States in 1986 to pursue a doctoral degree at Columbia University. She has served on the faculty the University of Missouri Kansas City since 1998. Her song Bright Moonlight is a setting of a text Chen wrote in English, following a structure borrowed from ancient Chinese poetry, and meditates on the feeling of homesickness on a moonlit night.