Sixth World Symposium on Choral Music ... - NewMusicBox

NewMusicBox May 2003
6. Working With Composers You Commission
LINDA HOESCHLER: It is delightful to be with all of you here today. I come at this
moderation from both a personal and professional passion—probably one stems from the other.
For the last 25 years, my husband and I have been privately commissioning music. We have
commissioned three to five pieces of music a year. Many times we get the privilege of working
with choral composers. For about the last 11 years, I have been Executive Director of American
Composers Forum, which Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus founded about 35 years ago. So, this
is an opportunity for us to get to know composers whom I dearly love working with and find
great joy experiencing and participating in their creative process. Hopefully today we will learn a
little bit about how they approach their music, and then how best to perhaps work with
composers when you are commissioning them, or if you are performing a new work of theirs and
want some guidance from them about the pieces. So, we just heard Moses Hogan's piece a couple
of hours ago, which is wonderful, done by the Michigan State Children's Choir. A very
impressive piece, Moses! Why don't you talk to us about the text, the group, how you write
differently for children…
MOSES HOGAN: This is a unique tribute, challenge, I would say. Philip asked me, "Moses, we
would like you to do something a little different in terms of your normal musical offering." And I
said, "Well, you know, Philip, I have made a vow to at some level preserve the spiritual." And he
said, "Well, that's very nice. We would like you to write something with a sort of a gospel
flavor." Well, certainly I am not at all opposed to gospel music, as it was part of my early
upbringing. I grew up playing in a Baptist church. I started playing at a very early age. And as
matter of fact, my father relates that I was talented when I was very young, so I thought I was
playing by ear, because they said, "Oh, he's so talented, he plays by ear!" It's a Southern thing!
But, that was my initial exposure to music. And so, I have never had the opportunity to
document a written-out gospel arrangement and I thought that this was quite unique, having this
be my first composition with a gospel flavor to it. But I have a great passion for the spiritual, as
you know, if some of you have done some of my spiritual arrangements. So I thought this was a
wonderful opportunity to educate, because many times as I travel around and I listen to people
use the term "spiritual" and "gospel" interchangeably, and obviously, you know, there is a
historical difference. We make every effort in classical music which I love, to let people know
what the Renaissance period embraces in years, and then the Baroque period, and then the
Classical period, and so forth as we talk about music history. But we tend now to group all of the
African American music in one category—we want to call it all gospel music. And so what I
decided to do with this, I introduced this gospel composition with a spiritual, a very famous
spiritual entitled, "Over My Head I Hear Music in the Air." And it would give music educators
the opportunity, hopefully, not to just sing the song because there is a nice groove to it, but to
use it also as a historical lesson, to talk about the spirituals, and how the spirituals influenced
jazz and how the spirituals influenced the blues and ragtime and gospel music. And to give our
young people, who are basically only familiar with gospel music, a real history lesson. And so, I
took the text of the old, "Over my head, I hear music in the air. There must be a God
somewhere," and I used a couple of verses from that text, and then I reflected on what those
Composers’ Dialogue #1, 08/06/2002