Serenade (1957)
William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Premiere: 1957 | Performed by the Great Falls High School Orchestra in Great Falls, Montana

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, William Grant Still showed musical promise from an early age. His mother encouraged him to pursue medicine, believing it offered greater security than a career in music. Although he initially followed that advice, Still ultimately left his medical studies behind to devote himself to composition. Over the following decades he achieved a series of milestones, becoming one of the first African American composers to gain sustained national recognition through performances by major orchestras, opera companies, and broadcasters. Trained in the classical tradition yet personally familiar with spirituals, blues, and jazz, Still built a career that resisted easy categorization. His path was shaped by a  range of experiences: studying composition with both the American traditionalist George Whitefield Chadwick and the French modernist Edgar Varèse, performing as a jazz musician, and participating in the artistic and intellectual life of the Harlem Renaissance.

Unlike many of the large-scale works for which he is best known, Serenade originated from a local educational commission. It was written for Great Falls High School in Montana. The work is cast in a straightforward three-part design. It opens with a lyrical idea introduced by the cellos before yielding to a more animated central section led largely by the woodwinds. The opening material eventually returns, bringing the piece full circle. This work exhibits qualities that appear throughout Still’s music: clear melodic writing, careful orchestral coloring, and an emphasis on expressive directness over complexity for its own sake.

Serenade is scored for flute, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, piano, and strings.

Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898-1900)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
Premiere: November 11, 1898 | Royal College of London

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was only twenty-two years old and still at the beginning of his career when Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast premiered in 1898. Yet the work quickly brought him international attention and remains his most frequently performed composition. In the decades that followed, it became a staple of British choral societies, achieving a level of popularity rivaled by such warhorses as Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

Born in London to an English mother and a father from Sierra Leone, he described himself as “Anglo-African.” His father, who had come to England to study medicine, returned to West Africa when Samuel was still a child, leaving him to be raised primarily by his mother’s family. A gifted violinist, Coleridge-Taylor entered the Royal College of Music at age fifteen, where he studied composition and attracted the attention of established musicians, including Edward Elgar, who enthusiastically supported the young composer’s work.

Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast is the first of three cantatas that make up The Song of Hiawatha, a larger setting of passages from the 1855 epic poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow’s text held particular appeal for Coleridge-Taylor. Its distinctive rhythmic style, derived from the Finnish epic Kalevala, gave the poetry a musical quality that lent itself naturally to a choral setting. The cantata depicts the wedding celebration of Hiawatha and Minnehaha, moving from moments of quiet anticipation to scenes of communal festivity.

The work’s success extended well beyond Britain. It was performed in the United States within a year of its premiere. In 1903, the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington, D.C., was founded specifically to perform the composer’s music. And during one of his American visits, Coleridge-Taylor was received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt—a remarkable honor for a Black musician in the early twentieth century. Coleridge-Taylor also developed personal relationships with important leaders of the African American community, including Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. For many Black Americans at the time, Coleridge-Taylor was the representation of the fulfillment of black potential during a period fraught with social, cultural, and political repression, and he was welcomed as a hero.

Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia in 1912 at the age of thirty-seven. Despite widespread acclaim, he had not seen his professional accolades translate into any kind of monetary success. Public reaction to his death helped spur conversations about composers’ rights in Britain and contributed to the establishment of systems that would better compensate composers for performances of their work.

Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast is scored for three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, string, tenor soloist, and SATB Chorus.
 

You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis,

How the handsome Yenadizze

Danced at Hiawatha’s wedding;

How the gentle Chibiabos,

He the sweetest of musicians,

Sang his songs of love and longing;

How Iagoo, the great boaster,

He the marvellous story-teller,

Told his tales of strange adventure,

That the feast might be more joyous,

That the time might pass more gayly,

And the guests be more contented.
 

Sumptuous was the feast Nokomis

Made at Hiawatha’s wedding;

All the bowls were made of bass-wood,

White and polished very smoothly,

All the spoons of horn of bison,

Black and polished very smoothly.

She had sent through all the village

Messengers with wands of willow,

As a sign of invitation,

As a token of the feasting;

And the wedding guests assembled,

Clad in all their richest raiment,

Robes of fur and belts of wampum,

Splendid with their paint and plumage,

Beautiful with beads and tassels.

First they ate the sturgeon, Nahma,

And the pike, the Maskenozha,

Caught and cooked by old Nokomis;

Then on pemican they feasted,

Pemican and buffalo marrow,

Haunch of deer and hump of bison,

Yellow cakes of the Mondamin,

And the wild rice of the river.

But the gracious Hiawatha,

And the lovely Laughing Water,

And the careful old Nokomis,

Tasted not the food before them,

Only waited on the others

Only served their guests in silence.

And when all the guests had finished,

Old Nokomis, brisk and busy,

From an ample pouch of otter,

Filled the red-stone pipes for smoking

With tobacco from the South-land,

Mixed with bark of the red willow,

And with herbs and leaves of fragrance.

Then she said, “O Pau-Puk-Keewis,

Dance for us your merry dances,

Dance the Beggar’s Dance to please us,

That the feast may be more joyous,

That the time may pass more gayly,

And our guests be more contented!”

 

Then the handsome Pau-Puk-Keewis,

He the idle Yenadizze,

He the merry mischief-maker,

Whom the people called the Storm-Fool,

Rose among the guests assembled.

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.