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BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY NEWSLETTER

VOLUME XI, NO. 3, March 2004

AND PROGRAM NOTES

THE BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY

BARRY BRISK, MUSIC DIRECTOR

PRESENTS

AKIKO DOHI, PIANO SOLOIST

in a performance of the

Edward MacDowell

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2, Op. 23

FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 2004

Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College

Crenshaw Blvd. at Redondo Beach Blvd.

FREE ADMISSION & FREE PARKING

concert time: 8:15 P.M.

pre-concert lecture: 7:30 P.M.

Information: (310) 379-9725 or (310) 539-4649

Also featuring:

Cuban Overture by George Gershwin

Afro-American Symphony (Symphony No. 1) by William Grant Still

AKIKO DOHI is a highly acclaimed concert pianist, an award-winning composer, and a lecturer on Eastern and Western music. Born in Osaka, Japan, Ms. Dohi received a Bachelors degree in piano from Osaka College of Music. Her performance of the MacDowell Second Piano Concerto with the Osaka Philharmonic orchestra received glowing reviews, and she was featured on major radio and television stations including NHK-FM and Kansai TV.

    In 1970 Ms. Dohi won the P.E.O. International Scholarship and came to the United States. She earned her Masters degree in Piano from the University of Redlands and has been a resident of the Los Angeles area since then. She has appeared in solo and chamber music recitals broadcast on KFAC, KUSC, KXLU, and Radio Pacific Japan. She has also appeared as soloist four times with the Huntington Park Symphony and with the Redlands University Orchestra.

    An extremely versatile musician, Ms. Dohi has studied modern jazz, Latin music, Japanese music, and composition, in addition to her classical piano training  with Masutaka Kanazawa, Ferdinand Bruckman, Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Leonid Hambro, Daniel Pollack, and others. She toured with the pop vocal group Present Company as an arranger and pianist and has premiered several works written especially for her or her chamber ensemble by prominent American composers.

Ms. Dohi is herself a highly regarded composer who has won awards from ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) for seven consecutive years from 1997 through 2003. Her new CD, East Meets West: Pentatonic Music for Piano, will soon be released.

    Akiko Dohi has been teaching piano at Long Beach City College since 1999. She has also taught piano and music theory at Cerritos College, Los Angeles Southwest College Community Services, and Osaka College of Music in Japan. As a lecturer/recitalist her subjects include polyrhythms, Eastern and Western music based on pentatonic scales and harmonies, and women in Japanese music history.

In addition, she teaches privately at her studios in Rancho Palos Verdes and Torrance. Many of her students have become competition winners, successful musicians, and professional teachers. She is a member of the College Music Society and the Music Teachers Association of California.

    Ms. Dohi notes that the MacDowell Second Piano Concerto, reminiscent of works by Grieg, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, poses some major challenges. There is no time for the soloist to rest from beginning to end, she says. And because she has small hands, the extended chords are especially difficult. Nonetheless, critics have praised her deep understanding and well-balanced execution of the Second Concerto. Despite MacDowells European influences at this time, Ms. Dohi sees in the concertos syncopated rhythm and jazzy harmony a definite pointer toward twentieth-century American music.

HORST and KAY MARIE KUDER, are examples of community musicians who travel long distances to Beach Cities Symphony rehearsals and performances -- a 70-mile round trip from Anaheim, in their case. They also exemplify those altruistic couples who reach out to other nations and cultures to extend their own family units.

    Anna Sophie, who comes from Saratov, southeast of Moscow on the Volga River, became part of the Kuder family on December 14, 2001. Horst and Kay Marie traveled to Russia twice during those post-9/11 months: in October 2001 to sign adoption documents, and in December on the eve of the formal adoption day. The Kuders say of their daughter, now more than 2-1/2 years old: She has been a blessing to us. They are currently in the process of adopting a second Russian child, probably a boy this time; he will be joining the family in a month or two.

    Horst, who came with his parents from Stammheim, Germany, at age six, and Kay Marie, a second-generation Californian, met as teenagers when both were taking lessons from the same violin teacher in Anaheim. They were married in 1984 and have been playing with the Beach Cities Symphony nearly that long. Kay Marie, who plays first violin, left her job as an elementary school substitute librarian to care for their daughter. Horst, a computer programmer analyst, plays viola not only in our orchestra but also in the Peninsula and Topanga Symphonies.

    The Kuders esteem for Music Director Barry Brisk's musicianship and conducting skills is an important factor in explaining their loyalty to the Beach Cities Symphony over the years. Above all, in Kay Marie's words, we appreciate the privilege of playing in a quality orchestra.

AMERICAS MUSIC: OUT OF MANY, ONE

    The Beach Cities Symphony concert on March 12, partially funded by a grant from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, presents three composers who illustrate the diversity of America and the intersecting cultures from which its music arises. Music Director Barry Brisk has chosen works by Edward MacDowell, William Grant Still, and George Gershwin to recognize and honor our richly multilayered nation and the traditions which produced these pioneering artists.

    Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) is the first American composer to gain international recognition. His Second Piano Concerto reflects European teachers and influences such as Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, and Grieg. In fact, critics have commented that "his ambition was to be a fine composer who also happened to be American" (New Grove Dictionary of Music, 1980). MacDowell composed the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D Minor in 1885 while living in Germany. It is therefore interesting that our soloist on March 12, Akiko Dohi, recognizes elements of jazz-like syncopation in its rhythms. In his later, better-known Woodland Sketches, MacDowell, who was born in Boston and retreated to an old farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in l896, incorporated a New England Transcendental love of nature as well as strains of American vernacular music from the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century.

    Like MacDowell, William Grant Still (1895-1978) looked to Old World antecedents in developing the symphonies, operas, and chamber works that form his contribution to American music. However, along with Stills formal training at Oberlin College in the European tradition, he played oboe with the great blues innovator W. C. Handy in New York. The movements of Stills Symphony Number 1, subtitled the Afro-American Symphony, reflect this dual influence. Its four formal movements bear the subtitles of Longings, "Sorrows", "Humor", and "Aspirations". Musicologist Eileen Southern finds in this opus elements of folk songs, spirituals, shout songs, and jazz tunes. Stills symphony was the first such work by an African American to be performed by a major American orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, in 1931.

    The greatest exemplar of interweaving traditions in American music is George Gershwin (1898-1937), whose Cuban Overture opens our concert. Born Jacob Gershwin to Russian immigrant parents in Brooklyn, Gershwin came to classical music after years as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. Moreover, notes music historian J. W. Struble in The History of American Classical Music (1995), not only was Gershwin "unashamed of his popular music origins, but [also he] considered his popular song writing to be an equal or greater expression of his creativity than his symphonic works". The head-spinning plethora of elements in Gershwins musical sources include Yiddish theater, vaudeville, ragtime, Gullah and Latin American (especially Cuban) music, hits by Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, and serious European composers such as Ravel, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Cuban Overture, which premièred in 1931, "exploits Gershwin's remarkable facility for cross-rhythms and polyrhythms" and is important as a warm-up piece for the 1935 folk opera Porgy and Bess.

THE DATE OF OUR LAST CONCERT FOR THE 2003-04 SEASON HAS BEEN CHANGED TO FRIDAY, MAY 28!

May 28, 2004 (re-mark your calendars)

Leroy Southers, Serenade (world premier)

Artists of the Future soloists

Beethoven, Consecration of the House Overture

The 2004 Artists of the Future Concerto Competition takes place on Sunday, February 1. This years winners will be announced in the program booklet for our March 12 concert.

WELCOME TO OUR NEW MEMBERS:  Steve & Anna Taylor Cassandra Cust Guenter Daub 

MATCHING FUNDS CORPORATIONS: Boeing Cadence Design Systems 

Thank you for supporting our organization! 

Information line: 310-379-9725 or 310-539-4649 

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Text: Toni Empringham  

Graphics: Ralph Dame  

Editor/Advisor: Margaret McWilliams

PROGRAM NOTES

Afro-American Symphony: Symphony No. 1 

William Grant Still (1895-1978) 

William Grant Still broke the color barrier in several directions. In 1931 the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra performed the Afro-American Symphony, making this the first performance by a major symphony orchestra of a major composition by an Afro-American composer. Still was the first black musician to conduct a major symphony orchestra, and he was the first Afro-American composer to have an opera performed by a major company (A Bayou Legend, 1941). Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi, in 1895. After the death of his father, the town bandmaster, the family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. Still began studying the violin and matriculated at Wilberforce College. He intended to study medicine but became involved with music and left Wilburforce without graduating. Still worked with several music ensembles, including W. C. Handys in 1916, and enrolled at Oberlin College, where he was encouraged to compose. After a two-year stint in the U.S. Navy during World War I, Still moved to New York in search of work and became associated with Handys publishing company. Important composers such as Edgard Varse and George Chadwick encouraged him to write in the larger forms and to write specifically American music. Still became known for his nationalism, incorporating black tunes into his work. His music has a freshness and individuality such as we hear tonight in his finest work. 

Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor, Opus 23 

Edward MacDowell (1861-1908) 

It was Franz Liszt who, after hearing MacDowell play his first piano concerto and examining other works by the American composer, persuaded MacDowell to devote himself to full-time composing. Through Liszts support MacDowell's works began to be performed in Germany, and his First and Second Piano Concertos were both published by the German firm of Breitkopf and Haertel. Liszts death in 1886 caused the heartbroken MacDowell to decide to return to the United States and make his permanent home here. MacDowell was important not only for the quality of the compositions he produced, but also in a broader sense because he was the first to show that given the background and opportunity, an American could write serious music of distinction in the larger forms--this in spite of the fact that he himself detested chauvinism in any form and did not want to be recognized simply because he was an American. MacDowell was his own soloist in the first performance of his Second Concerto in Chickering Hall, New York City, on March 5, 1899, under the direction of Theodore Thomas. The following month MacDowell played his new concerto with the Boston Symphony. 

Cuban Overture 

George Gershwin (1898-1937) 

From 1925 to the end of his tragically short life in 1937, George Gershwin rarely missed a year in which he did not produce one of his larger works along with musical comedies. In 1932 he produce no musical comedy, but for him it was a full musical year nonetheless. The Second Rhapsody was premiered by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony in January, and in March a correspondence was initiated with DeBose Hayward which led to Porgy and Bess. The month before, Gershwin had made a visit to Havana and was fascinated by the indigenous instruments, several of which were new to him. In July he spent a month composing a Rumba for orchestra that employed some of the native Cuban instruments he had brought back to New York. By August he was busy orchestrating the Rumba; it was performed for the first time in Lewisohn Stadium on August 16, 1932. The little travel piece was later retitled Cuban Overture.

Program Notes added on March 16, 2004.

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