Master’s Recital

Program
Florence Price (1888 - 1953) - Dances in the Canebrakes (1953) arr. William Grant Still
Samuel Barber (1910 - 1981) - Adagio for Strings (1936)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) - Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (1800)

University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Music, Tew Recital Hall; Friday, 5:30 pm EST, 7 March 2025

“Remember that there is only one important time and it is Now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person with whom you are, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making that person, the one standing at your side, happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.

~ Leo Tolstoy, The Emperor’s Three Questions

Preparing this program has brought me constantly back to two overarching themes: unity and transfiguration. As American newsfeeds are consumed with a constant barrage of “Breaking News” that oftentimes feels like we are the ones being broken, we’re forced almost constantly to think about who we are and who we want to be. Largescale political, social, and economic struggles occupy so much of our collective consciousness in the (sometimes miniscule) space left over from just trying to survive, and clinging to the examination of who we are is sometimes all we can do.

Dances in the Canebrakes - Florence Price
Florence Price lived an exceptional life during the first half of the 20th Century. She grew up in an upper middle-class family in Little Rock, Arkansas, with a dentist father and a music teacher mother. She was educated at the New England Conservatory, and held several music teaching positions throughout her life. She wrote art songs and piano primers, settings of African American spirituals and the poems of her friend Langston Hughes, and eventually began writing symphonic orchestral music as well. In a life that spanned the transition from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, Price is perhaps the most successful, multi-talented African American woman composer in American 20th Century music. Her works are thoroughly permeated with ties to her African American identity. Of Dances in the Canebrakes, composed shortly before her death in 1953, she highlights its inclusion of “authentic Negro rhythms.” So much of Price’s works combine her own musical heritage with the forms and conventions of Western European concert music. Her extant symphonies follow clear symphonic conventions, but are so uniquely full of Price’s own distinct voice that they are clearly not the works of a European master, but of something new, and fantastic, and American. Working through Dances in the Canebrakes, a suite composed of three settings of different Ragtime dances, I have felt a profound kinship with the way Florence Price situated her works so squarely within the intersections of her identity and the social context in which she lived. She did not entirely eschew the practices of Western European musical traditions, but she brought to bear her own wealth of female African American experience that is, I believe, at the heart of the American cultural identity. In refusing to deny her own self, she composed unique works that still resonate today, the better part of a century after her death.

Adagio for Strings - Samuel Barber
Samuel Baber initially composed the Adagio as the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11. Much of his other works were well-received, but once Barber was convinced to orchestrate Adagio for a full string orchestra and it was performed by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, none of his other works would come close to Adagio's success. It has been compared to Elgar’s Nimrod and Purcell’s Dido’s Lament as essential “anthems” of mourning, and has been performed at critical moments throughout history, such as at the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Adagio has been used in films such as The Elephant Man (1980) and Platoon (1986) to accompany scenes of immense tragedy and grief, and has been performed around the world to commemorate victims of terror attacks and natural disasters. Barber himself was frustrated by the overwhelming success of Adagio, believing he had written better works that should have been performed more frequently. He requested that Adagio, although it had become an iconic work of mourning, not be performed at his funeral.
Barber never worked as anything but a composer; through his family’s wealth and, later, his own successes, he was able to pursue composition with a single-mindedness that few modern composers are afforded. His compositional faculties were well-honed and refined, but the simplicity of Adagio resonated more powerfully with the public than Barber could ever have anticipated. Music historians disagree on whether the source of the sadness recognized in Adagio can be found in Barber’s struggle to fit into the “seemliness” of West Chester, Pennsylvania, in his homosexuality and the puritanical response to it within prevailing Western European thought of the time, or was just a result of his compositional talents. Uniformly, though, biographers and contemporaries agree that Barber’s was a melancholic nature, and that Adagio was undeniably an expression of some discrete aspect of his character. The work grew to have different shades of meaning for different listeners, but unified audiences and artists alike in the expression of grief. In the near-century since its composition, Adagio has transcended the bounds of anything Barber could have intended, with other artists and listeners attributing their own meanings to the work and breathing a longevity and universality into Adagio that the works of American composers have rarely attained. In it, everyone can find sorrow for loss, and an unfulfilled longing that serves to remind us of our shared humanity and the bonds that connect us all.

Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 - Ludwig van Beethoven
The origins of the word “symphony” translate basically to “sounding together.” The term, in a Western European musical context, grew to have the meaning of a substantially developed work for orchestra. Over time, composers like Mozart and Haydn established relatively clear formulae for what constituted a symphony; their concepts are where a young Beethoven began his work as a symphonist. He would find so much success as a symphonist that the composers of symphonic music that followed him would struggle to develop their own utilization of the form, and all symphonies that came after Beethoven’s arrival in the medium would be compared back to his nine symphonies as a test of formal and developmental success.
Beethoven’s first symphony is perhaps the most “traditional” and recognizable in terms of the works of his predecessors. It is comprised of four movements, with the first, second, and fourth being composed in a traditional sonata form. Notably different, however, are the tempi of the second and third movements. The second movement, marked Andante cantabile con moto and with the eighth note with a metronome marking of 120, is markedly quicker than the traditionally slow movements of other symphonists’ works. Here, Beethoven also combines the woodwinds with the strings in ways that previous composers had not, broadening the sonic pallet with which he was composing firmly creating a new and important role within the orchestra for wind instruments. He foreshadowed this orchestration in the opening chords of the first movement, with the winds sustaining and resolving while the strings provided pizzicato reinforcement, but by the end of the second movement, it is clear that Beethoven has given the wind section much more responsibility and integrity in carrying and developing thematic material, not just supporting the strings. The third movement, marked Menuetto but also Allegro molto e vivace with a the metronome marking of a bar at 108, is quicker enough than the traditional minuet to be considered a different style altogether - a scherzo (German - joke/prank). This fusion of a recognition of his predecessors (the Menuetto marking) but a uniquely new voice (the scherzo style) signaled that this was a new symphony from a new composer for a new age in music. It is no wonder that the shift from the Classical period to the Romantic occurred during Beethoven’s life and professional activity. The synthesis of older models into new and exciting output is present in some of the earliest of Beethoven’s works, and set the stage for him to rewrite the “rules” of the symphonic game for every generation that followed.

Orchestra

Violin I
Line Roussel, concertmaster 
Emma Hughes
Jennifer Aikey
Enshi Li 

Violin II
Malik Winston
Molly MacKellar
Anna Tschiegg 

Viola
Lyndie Enchategui
Cullen Nowicki
Joyce Cho
Kierra Thompson 

Cello
Davis Lingner
Venus Currie
Terrance Jones
Evan Khul 

 Contrabass
Dominic Kilgore
Tyler Lau

Flute
Emma Phelps
Sharneshia Joyner
Amrutha Koteeswaran
Sam O’Hare 

Oboe
Kate Caldwell
Hailey Cohen 

Clarinet
Wyatt Roper
Caleb L’Heureux 

Bassoon
Emily Klinkosky
Erik Traheim 

Alto Saxophone
Crystol Lewis 

Horn
Kai Summerlin
JT Sandlin
Savanna Nelson 

Trumpet
Hannah Markun
Ninon Kirchman
Calvin Godfrey 

Trombone
Isaac Dusek
Ka’Shella Sturgis

Harp
Georgianna Antoniou 

Timpani
Eli Alvarez Lopez 

Percussion
Shelby Perez-Hendricks

With particular thanks to my professors,
Dr. Jonathan Caldwell and Dr. Jungho Kim.