A Langston Hughes Celebration

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

The poems of Langston Hughes are like songs just waiting to happen.  It's no accident that the rhythms of blues and jazz permeate his writing--he collaborated with composers to develop musical ideas of his own, and his 1961 work Ask Your Mama comes with a verbal jazz "score" written in the margins alongside the poetry.  On the page, many of his poems even have the look of song lyrics, with their clear, everyday language, their intense lyricism of expression, their compact length and clarity of purpose, their first-person point of view, and even their rhyming structures.  Hughes's directness, acute observation of both the world around him and the heart within him, his complexity and his faith all seem to tumble his words into music.  He offers the musician politics without polemics, anger without rage, humanity without sentimentality.

Tonight's program unites composers from a variety of musical spheres, brought together by their admiration of Langston Hughes.  We're leading off with "Lovely Dark and Lonely One" by African-American composer Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949).  He is best known today for his now-classic arrangements of spirituals, which first brought that music to the concert stage and before a wide general audience.  Burleigh was a scholarship student at New York's National Conservatory of Music in 1892; there he came into contact with the conservatory's director Antonin Dvo_ák, and introduced the Czech composer to Negro spirituals, which were to become a feature of  Dvo_ák's American compositions.  "Lovely Dark and Lonely One" dates from 1935, just a few years after Hughes wrote the poem.  Margaret Bonds (1913-1973) is another composer whose name is most immediately associated with arrangements of spirituals.  Born in Chicago, she eventually came to New York to study piano at Juilliard.  "Minstrel Man" is drawn from her 1959 cycle Dream Variations, one of many of Bonds' compositions inspired by Hughes's poetry--songs, choral works, and stage pieces; they also maintained a close friendship.

For the complete text of these program notes, please e-mail us at:  info@nyfos.org.