“Roots and Branches” - Music - University of California, Irvine

Nationalist era (c. 1920 - 1940). During this period, he wrote his Afro-American Symphony, which is probably his best known work.. Still was born in 1895
and died in 1978.
Fredrick Tillis
Frederick Tillis received a B.A. in 1949 from Wiley college in Marshall, Texas, an M.A. (1952) and Ph.D. (1963) from the University of Iowa in music
composition. His teaching positions included: The University of Massachusetts, Kentucky State University, Grambling College, and Wiley College. Tillis
developed an eclectic style using black music elements, African and Eastern idioms, serialism and other Europen styles. His works include: "Ring Shout
Concerto," "Hallelujah," "Spiritual Cycle," "Freedom," "Designs for Orchestra," "Music for Alto Flute, Cello, and Piano," and "Quintet for Four Woodwinds
and Percussion." He was a Danforth Associate (1969), United Negro College Fund Fellowship recipient, and recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant
(1978). His works are available from American Composer's Alliance.
Richard Thompson
Richard Thompson is a performer and composer whose work resists a single stylistic category. His compositions are in an eclectic third stream style,
combining European formal structures with ideas which are essentially jazz in nature. Originally from Aberdeen, Scotland, Mr. Thompson made his debut at
the Purcell Room, in the Royal Festival Hall in London. Videmus Records released in 2006 a CD of Mr. Thompson’s work, entitled *Poetry Prelude*. The
CD includes both song cycles*, The Shadow of Dawn *and *Dream Variation*s, performed respectively by Louise Toppin and Darryl Taylor. The recording
also contains *Six Preludes for Solo Piano* and an arrangement for jazz quartet of the Spiritual*, Wade in the Water.* The CD is distributed by Albany
Records. In 2008 Arabesque Records released Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. This CD contains eight of Mr. Thompson’s jazz arrangements of well-known
spirituals. Mr. Thompson is currently Associate Professor of Music at San Diego State University where he teaches jazz history and performance, and
classical theory. Mr. Thompson is preparing his chamber opera, entitled *The Mask in the Mirror*, for performance. The subject matter is the courtship and
marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar to Alice Ruth Moore. Richard Thompson earned his undergraduate degree in music from the University of Edinburgh,
Scotland. His Masters Degree is from Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also holds a jazz diploma from The Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Thomas G. Wiggins “Blind Tom”
Thomas Greene Wiggins was born on the Wiley Edward Jones plantation in Harris County, Georgia on May 25, 1849. He came into the world blind and
autistic but a musical genius with a phenomenal memory. Even after Emancipation, his former owners kept him, in the words of the late author Geneva
Handy Southall, "Continually Enslaved". His many concerts and the sale of his sheet music earned fabulous sums of money. Nearly all of it went to his
owners and their heirs. Mary Bethune became his piano teacher. Because she had studied with Professor George W. Chase, the highly respected New Yorktrained
pianist- composer-conductor, one can assume that Tom received a solid theoretical and technical musical foundation. Soon after, his love of music
and music-making led him to write original songs and imitate sounds of nature and other musical instruments on the piano. Before he was six years old,
Tom was being shown off to the Bethune family's neighbors. In October 1857, General Bethune rented a concert hall in Columbus and for the first time
"Blind Tom" performed before a large audience that had difficulty comprehending how a blind idiotic slave child could master the piano keyboard. One of
the earliest concert reviews published in the Baltimore Sun on June 27, 1860 announced to its readers that Tom was a phenomenon in the musical world--
"thrusting all our conceptions of the science to the wall and informing us that there is a musical world of which we know nothing." A command performance
before President Buchanan at the White House drew further attention and the press referred to him as the greatest pianist of the age whose skills surpassed
Mozart. The Bethune family was estimated to had made over $750,000 from Tom’s musical skills. After many legal proceedings over custody of Tom, he
ended up in the care of Eliza Stutzbach for the remainder of his life while he performed until four years up to his death in 1908.
What Is Art Song?
Usually a short composition for solo voice with piano accompaniment, based on a poetic text and composed in a fairly simple style
designed to enhance the significance of the text. The lied (art song)- differing from the folk (or popular) song, which is usually
unaccompanied, anonymously composed, and transmitted by oral tradition- is the personal creation of an individual composer aiming at
artistic perfection. In its deceptive simplicity, the lied conceals the artfulness with which its creator fused the three elements of text,
melody, and accompaniment into a unified whole.
Profusion of lyrical poetry in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century led to the flourishing of the lied. It requires greater freedom of
expression and a need to reflect ones intimate sentiments in compositions that blend words and music. Another important contributing
factor to lied's development was the growth of the middle class in which the women, instead of working, spent their time in pursuit of
cultural activities, i.e., learning to play the piano (at that time found increasingly in private residences), singing, and buying the increased
quantities of music distributed by the new commercial entrepreneurs, the music publishers.
In its most current forms, art song ranges from short and simple to rhapsodic. A song cycle can last an entire evening, or be as brief as five
minutes. Freedom of expression is a key element to the definition of art song. And collaboration; not only must the singer present the
melody of any given composer, but the responsibility for setting the mood of the poem, commenting on the action, elaborating the
vocalist's line through the anticipation or echo of a phrase, providing an interlude between stanzas, or concluding the song with an
instrumental postlude rests with the accompaniment. Through the years, the significance of the piano accompaniment presented a problem
to composers and critics concerned with the relative importance of words and music in the lied. Earlier writers indicated the interpretation
of the text as the duty of the singer. By the late eighteenth century, however, the piano accompaniments began to share in the support of the
vocal melody, sometimes through increased harmonic activities, other times through enrichment of the texture or embellishment of the
melodic line.
Source: Brody, Elaine and Fowkes, Robert. The German Lied and its Poetry. New York: New York University Press, 1971.