Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was an American composer best known for his Americana-style music that paints a picture of American landscapes and open space in the American west. During his long career, Copland wrote music for ballets, chamber music, pieces for voice, and, of course, orchestral pieces. He wrote Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. This piece was inspired by a speech given by Vice President Henry A. Wallace, in which he proclaimed the dawning of the “century of the common man”.

The achievements of William Grant Still (1895-1978) in classical music were impressive and groundbreaking: he was the first African American to have a symphony performed by the New York Philharmonic, the first to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the first to have an opera staged by a major opera company, the New York City Opera, to name just a few landmarks. The son of a bandmaster and a high school English teacher, he began his musical career working as an arranger for W.C. Handy and Artie Shaw. Following his naval service during World War I, he made his home in Harlem, where he took part in the African American Harlem Renaissance artistic and cultural movement. By the time of his death in 1978, he had composed nearly 200 works, including five symphonies.

Many of Still’s works deal expressly with African American history, identity and musical traditions. He wrote over 150 compositions, including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works, and arrangements of folk themes and spirituals, plus instrumental, choral and solo vocal works. Symphony no. 1, known as Afro-American Symphony, was written in 1930 and premiered by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in 1931. The piece combines a traditional symphonic form with blues progressions and rhythms and features the tenor banjo in the third movement. Still referenced quotes from four poems by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as epitaphs for each movement of the symphony.

The third movement, “humor”, takes a quick turn into a place of high energy, featuring the distinctive twang of a banjo. Contrasting styles of staccatissimo—where notes are extremely short and detached from one another—and tenuto—held or sustained notes—give this movement unexpected bursts of character.

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was a Chicago-based composer and pianist. While she was a college student at Northwestern University, the extraordinary pianist and composer Margaret Bonds was invited to solo with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a part of the same concert when composer Florence Price’s music was first premiered. Thus, she became the first Black instrumental soloist in the ensemble’s history. 

During the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ̓60s, many American composers were moved to write music commemorating the fight for racial justice and the people who sacrificed their comfort and, in many cases, their lives to protest the brutal and oppressive system of laws known as Jim Crow. It was in this vein that Margaret Bonds composed her Montgomery Variations in 1964 to memorialize two seminal events of the movement, one inspirational and one tragic, both of which took place in Alabama. The piece bears a dedication to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was leading marches and protests across the South during this period.

Born in 1887 in Little Rock Arkansas, American composer Florence Price was the first Black woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a piece played by a major orchestra. Price studied music at the New England Conservatory of Music and was active in the Chicago classical music scene until her death in 1953. Price wrote over 300 works, including symphonies, concertos, choral works, and music for solo instruments.

Price’s Symphony No. 3 in C minor was written in 1938 and was first performed by the Detroit Civic Orchestra in 1940. The third movement, Juba: Allegro, takes inspiration from the Juba (known also as the Hambone), a dance style that includes stomping and body percussion, first made popular by the African American community in the mid and late 19th century. In this movement, you will hear glimpses of African American spirituals and lively syncopated rhythms.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) was one of America’s greatest musicians, most often credited with bringing jazz to the orchestra and large audiences around the world with Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris and the opera Porgy and Bess.

Gershwin’s most ambitious composition is the opera Porgy and Bess, written in 1935, which was based on a play, which itself was based on an earlier novel by DuBose Heyward published in 1925. Porgy and Bess is set in Jim Crow-era Charleston, South Carolina in a Black neighborhood called “Catfish Row”. Porgy and Bess was first performed in Boston in 1935 and moved to Broadway in New York City shortly after. In 1936 Gershwin wrote a piece based on this opera called Catfish Row. This piece He wrote this piece to make the music of Porgy and Bess more accessible for orchestras to perform, thus prolonging the life of his music.

Carlos Simon (b. 1986) is an American composer and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. He attended Morehouse College in Atlanta before earning his Master’s Degree at Georgia State University and his Doctorate Degree from the University of Michigan. His music ranges from concert music to film scores with influences of jazz, gospel, and neo-romantic styles. Simon is currently the Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the inaugural Boston Symphony Orchestra Composer Chair, and was nominated for a 2023 Grammy Award for his album Requiem for the Enslaved.

(The following notes come from Carlos Simon’s SoundCloud page):

Particularly in Black American communities, dance is and has been the fabric of social gatherings. There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of dances created over the span of American history that have originated from the social climate of American slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Simon’s piece Four Black American Dances is an orchestral study of the music that is associated with the Ring Shout, the Waltz, Tap Dance and the Holy Dance. All of these dances are but a mere representation of the wide range of cultural and social differences within the Black American communities.

‍Tap dance is a form of dance characterized by using the sounds of tap shoes striking the floor as a form of percussion. For this movement, I have emulated the sound of the tap with the side rim of the snare drum in the percussion section. The strings play in very short, disconnected passages alongside the brass drawing on jazz harmonies.

Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) is one of Argentina’s most prolific composers. He was heavily involved with promoting Argentine music and in developing the musical life of his country. His contributions in this area include setting up a league of composers that became the Argentine section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, participation in numerous international festivals of new music, and teaching at several prestigious schools in Buenos Aires, including his own alma mater, the National Conservatory. Ginastera’s ballet scores Panambí (1937) and Estancia (1941) were early successes that remain among his most popular works.

Estancia is Ginastera’s second ballet and premiered in 1952. Ginastera incorporated Argentinian nationalist themes and language into the musical score for the ballet. The ballet tells the story of the love between a city boy and the daughter of a rancher. The girl finds the boy lacking in courage when compared to the gauchos. However, by the end of the ballet, he wins her over by outdancing the gauchos in a competition.

The first dance “Los trabajadores agricolas” (The Farm Workers) depicts the laborers who come into town. This malambo is an Argentine folk dance that has been described as a battle between gauchos, who stomp to the music which Ginastera depicts by alternating between triple and duple rhythms.

Louis Wayne Ballard (1931-2007) was a Native American composer, educator, author, artist, and journalist. He is known for his Ballard graduated from the University of Tulsa in 1962 and was the first Native American to receive a graduate degree in music composition. In 1969, Ballard's Ritmo Indio, a three movement work for woodwind quintet, won the Marion Nevins McDowell Award for American Chamber Music. Ballard's Desert Trilogy, his second work for ballet, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 and in 1999, he was the first American composer to have a complete concert dedicated to his music at Beethovenhalle in Bonn, Germany. He has also received the National Indian Achievement Award four times.

Ballard wrote The Four Moons ballet was written in 1967 as part of celebrations for the 60^th anniversary of Oklahoma’s statehood that year. Its plot centeres around dances and traditions from four of Oklahoma’s prominent tribes: Shawnee, Choctaw, Osage and Cherokee. The ballet was based on the Trail of Tears and forced migration of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands within the US to less favorable land out west. During the time that it was written, there were four prominent Native American ballerinas in Oklahoma from the four aforementioned tribes, each performing solo movements in the ballet and the choreography was highly personalized to each ballerina’s story and style. The Four Moons ballet is 22-minutes in length, classified as a pas de quatre, featuring solos from each ballerina and an ensemble ending.

From the 1960s to today, John Williams (b. 1932) has composed some of the most memorable and popular movie music in Hollywood history, including scores for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, Schindler’s List, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws and Jurassic Park, along with music outside the world of films, such as four well-known themes for the Olympic Games that continue to be used in American broadcasts of the Olympics.