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Dancing Across America Program Notes
Come Sunday (2018)
Omar Thomas (b. 1984)
Premiere: November 15, 2018 | Illinois State University Wind Symphony
Omar Thomas was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Guyanese parents. After studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, he built a career as a composer, educator, and pianist, writing extensively for jazz ensembles, wind bands, and orchestras. At just twenty-three years old, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Harmony at Berklee, later joining the faculties of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Texas at Austin.
Come Sunday was originally composed for wind ensemble and quickly became Thomas’s best-known work. In 2019, it received the National Band Association/Revelli Award, making Thomas the first Black composer to earn the honor in the award’s forty-two-year history. The title comes from the spiritual-inspired song “Come Sunday” from Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige, a large-scale jazz-infused orchestral work first performed in 1943. Rather than arranging Ellington’s music directly, Thomas uses it as a point of departure for a broader meditation on the role of the Black church as a source of strength, community, and hope.
The composer provides the following notes about the work:
Come Sunday is a two-movement tribute to the Hammond organ’s central role in black worship services. The first movement, Testimony, follows the Hammond organ as it readies the congregation’s hearts, minds, and spirits to receive The Word via a magical union of Bach, blues, jazz, and R&B. The second movement, Shout!, is a virtuosic celebration - the frenzied and joyous climactic moments when The Spirit has taken over the service.
The title is a direct nod to Duke Ellington, who held an inspired love for classical music and allowed it to influence his own work in a multitude of ways. To all the black musicians in wind ensemble who were given opportunity after opportunity to celebrate everyone else’s music but our own - I see you and I am you. This one’s for the culture.
Come Sunday is scored for three flutes, three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, tenor saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings.
Amazing Grace (1998)
Jennifer Higdon (arr.) (b. 1962)
The text of Amazing Grace was written by English clergyman John Newton and published in 1779. Earlier in life, Newton had worked at sea, including aboard ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade. His experience of surviving a severe storm at sea led him to undergo a religious conversion and to study theology and enter the ministry. In later years, he became involved in the British abolitionist movement.
Newton originally wrote the hymn for a New Year’s Day sermon in 1773. Its text reflects themes of forgiveness, faith, and spiritual transformation. Although first published in England, the hymn became especially widespread in the United States during the nineteenth century, where it entered a variety of religious and folk traditions.
Jennifer Higdon’s arrangement was composed in 1998 as part of her larger vocal work Southern Grace. Rather than substantially altering the hymn, Higdon preserves the simplicity of the original while expanding its musical setting through orchestral color and texture. The arrangement allows the well-known melody to remain at the center of the work while placing it in a contemporary concert setting.
Amazing Grace is scored for string orchestra.
An American in Paris (1928)
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Premiere: December 13, 1928 | New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society under the direction of Walter Damrosch
George Gershwin’s musical voice was shaped by the cultural intersections of early twentieth-century New York. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he came of age amid the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, popular song, jazz, and the Yiddish theater district. As a teenager, he left school to work as a “song plugger,” promoting sheet music for publishers, before finding success as a songwriter in partnership with his brother, Ira.
Gershwin’s rise as a concert composer came quickly. In 1924, Rhapsody in Blue introduced audiences to a musical language that blended jazz and classical traditions. The work attracted the attention of conductor Walter Damrosch, who soon commissioned Gershwin’s Concerto in F. A second commission followed shortly thereafter from the New York Philharmonic as part of its centennial celebrations. That project became An American in Paris.
The piece grew out of Gershwin’s travels in France during the late 1920s. Hoping to deepen his knowledge of composition, he sought out several prominent European musicians, including Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger. Although neither became a formal teacher, both encouraged him to develop his own musical voice rather than imitate European models. An American in Paris drew directly on impressions from his recent travels. Gershwin described the piece as a “rhapsodic ballet” portraying an American visitor wandering through the city, absorbing its sights, sounds, and atmosphere. Yet he was careful not to present the work as a detailed narrative. Instead, the score offers a series of musical impressions, allowing listeners to imagine their own version of the traveler’s experience. The work premiered in New York in December 1928 under the direction of Walter Damrosch.
One of the score’s most memorable features is Gershwin’s use of authentic Parisian taxi horns, which he purchased during his visit and brought back to the United States for the premiere. Their distinctive sound joins jazz-inspired rhythms, blues-inflected melodies, and colorful orchestration in creating a vivid sense of place. Unlike Rhapsody in Blue, whose orchestration was completed by Ferde Grofé, An American in Paris was orchestrated entirely by Gershwin himself, offering a particularly direct glimpse into his musical imagination.
Gershwin died unexpectedly in 1937 from a brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight. Although his career was brief, he helped expand the possibilities of American concert music by drawing freely from popular song, jazz, and classical traditions. An American in Paris captures a particularly revealing moment in that journey: an American composer encountering Europe on his own terms and transforming those experiences into a work that remains unmistakably his own.
An American in Paris is scored for three flutes with third doubling piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three saxophones (alto, tenor, baritone), two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, and strings.
Danzón No.2 (1994)
Arturo Marquez (b. 1950)
Premiere: 1994 | Mexico City, Mexico
The story of Danzón No. 2 begins long before Arturo Márquez became a composer. The danzón itself emerged in nineteenth-century Cuba from the meeting of several musical traditions: European social dances brought by Spanish and British colonizers and rhythmic practices rooted in West African musical culture. The resulting distinctively Cuban rhythm called clavé underlies and grounds this unique style of music. From Cuba, the dance spread across the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz and eventually Mexico City, where it became a fixture of dance halls and social clubs.
Márquez did not grow up immersed in the tradition. Instead, his fascination developed in the early 1990s through friends who were passionate dancers. In 1993, painter Andrés Fonseca and dancer Irene Martínez introduced him to the world of the danzón through trips to Veracruz and visits to the famed Salón Colonia in Mexico City. There, Márquez encountered not only the music itself but also the culture that surrounded it.
Danzón No. 2 is not a traditional dance piece but a concert work inspired by the style. The work uses shifting syncopated clavé rhythms and accents and features many of the instruments as soloists. The interplay between soloists mimics the interplay of dancers on the ballroom floor. The melodies are sensual and sultry and nostalgically call to mind an earlier era in Mexico’s dance salons and ballrooms. Márquez described the work as a tribute to the communities and traditions that keep the danzón alive.
For audiences in Mexico, the work carried a particular resonance. The danzón had long been associated with an older generation and with the dance halls of Veracruz and Mexico City. Márquez’s piece brought those sounds into the concert hall, inviting listeners to hear a familiar tradition in a new setting.
Danzón No. 2 is scored for two flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings.
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1957, 1961)
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
Suite premiere: February 13, 1961 | New York Philharmonic under the direction of Lukas Foss
When West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, it brought together an unusually ambitious creative team. Leonard Bernstein composed the music, Arthur Laurents wrote the book, Jerome Robbins conceived and choreographed the production, and a young Stephen Sondheim provided the lyrics. Drawing on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the creators relocated the story from Renaissance Verona to New York City’s Upper West Side, where tensions between rival gangs—the Jets and the Sharks—frame the tragic relationship between Tony and Maria.
The musical emerged at a moment when Broadway was increasingly willing to engage with contemporary social issues. Rather than presenting a romanticized vision of city life, West Side Story confronted questions of immigration, prejudice, identity, and belonging. These themes gave the work a particular immediacy for audiences in the 1950s, even as its central story remained rooted in Shakespeare’s centuries-old drama.
Bernstein’s score reflects the cultural landscape of the city in which the story unfolds. Jazz, Latin dance rhythms, popular song, and classical techniques coexist throughout the music, often within the same scene. The result is a score that captures both the energy of urban life and the emotional complexity of the characters. This can be heard musically in the contrast between the sharp rhythmic drive associated with the rival gangs, the exuberance of the dance sequences, and the expansive lyricism of Tony and Maria’s music.
The Symphonic Dances from West Side Story was assembled by Bernstein in 1961 shortly after the release of the film adaptation. The stage work transforms material from the Broadway stage into a concert piece for orchestra. Rather than following the musical’s plot scene by scene, the suite presents a sequence of interconnected episodes drawn from across the score. Familiar numbers such as “Somewhere,” “Mambo,” “Cha-Cha,” and “Cool” appear alongside instrumental transitions that preserve the dramatic flow of the original work.
West Side Story Suite is scored for three flutes, three oboes, four clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, alto saxophone, timpani, percussion, piano, celesta, and strings.
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