Kellen Gray • Conductor
Royal Scottish National Orchestra Associate Artist
English National Opera Assistant Conductor
African American Voices II
Artists
Kellen Gray, conductor
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Label
Linn Records
Distributed by
Outhere Music
Release Date
October 13, 2023 (Digital) & October 20, 2023 (CD)
Program
Margaret Bonds, Montgomery Variations
Ulysses Kay, Concerto for Orchestra
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Worship: A Concert Overture
Duration
47:48
About
Kellen Gray has reunited with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for a second instalment of African American Voices.
Though representing differing schools of thought regarding African American classical music, the composers here are united by their roots in black history, culture and its rich musical heritage. Drawing upon jazz and spirituals – ‘I Want Jesus to Walk with Me’ serving as the source material – Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations engages with African American history, namely the Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. In this work, re-discovered in 2017, Bonds tackles the themes of strength, resistance, determination and faith. Bonds’ contemporary, the prolific composer Ulysses Kay cultivated a neoclassical voice, as his Concerto for Orchestra exemplifies, very much in line with William Grant Still and his teacher Paul Hindemith. A versatile musician, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson comes a generation later. In his Worship: A Concert Overture, we can hear a blend of Baroque counterpoint, elements of the blues, spirituals and black folk music.
African American Voices
Artists
Kellen Gray, conductor
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Label
Linn Records
Distributed by
Outhere Music
Release Date
November 2022
Program
William Dawson, Negro Folk Symphony
George Walker, Lyric for Strings
William Grant Still, Symphony No. 1 "Afro-American"
Duration
60:01
About
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra teams up with its Assistant Conductor Kellen Gray to record works by three of the twentieth century’s greatest African American voices, which is released to coincide with Black History Month.
The two symphonies by William Levi Dawson and William Grant Still proved to be fundamental in the utilization of Afro-American idioms within the symphonic form. Each composer focused on one of the two original staples of African American music: folk and jazz. William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony takes its inspiration from West African folk idioms, American Negro spirituals and early African American folk rhythms and songs from Gullah culture. William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1 draws its influence from elements popular in jazz and pre-jazz. Although the latter is the more well-known figure in American music, Dawson was every bit as significant in the timeline of African American music, and his only published symphony is astonishingly mature for a composer’s earliest efforts at symphonic writing.
This programme also celebrates the centenary of George Walker’s birth with the inclusion of his Lyric for Strings.
