CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Exploration: A Panel Discussion

Zankel Hall
Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 12:00 PM

Participants:
Gordon J. Davis
Michael Eric Dyson
Luvenia A. George
Laura Karpman
Cornel West
Rachael Worby

Performance:
Imani Winds

JASON MORAN Cane (New York Premiere)
DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN Five Chairs and One Table (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

A wide ranging discussion on music today ranging from hip-hop and jazz to contemporary orchestral music. The event will close with a performance by Imani Winds.

Sponsored by Ernst & Young LLP

Major funding for Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy has been provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Alice Tully Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation's New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, Howard University, and the A. L. and Jennie L. Luria Foundation.

The opening performance of Honor! is sponsored by Bank of America.

Honor! is made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2008-2009 season are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

JASON MORAN Cane (New York Premiere)

DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN Five Chairs and One Table (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)This work was commissioned by Carnegie Hall at the suggestion of Jessye Norman for the Honor! festival. I wanted this work to be theatrical—a composer’s response to the operatic, art song, and avant-garde work Ms. Norman has done throughout her career. I wanted to apply those theatrical elements to a work for five musicians with limited theatrical training. Working closely with the ever-courageous and daring Imani Winds, we were able to develop a musical language for the piece that incorporates these elements into what we hope will be a sensible and engaging manner.

In addition to Ms. Norman, I wanted to create brief musical portraits of the South African singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba (1932–2008), the folk singer Odetta (1930–2008), and the daughters of Barack and Michelle Obama, Malia and Sasha. I used the birth dates of Ms. Makeba and Odetta to help me organize the musical materials. I considered what small children often do in their classrooms; beating out rhythms on a table, especially as those rhythms overlap in their complexity, suggested the “serious play” of young children and their peers. I wanted to hear the sounds of harmonicas, as I feel the harmonica represents a truly original and American sound and voice (though its history is European), and the instrument is often associated with storytelling, African American timbres, and our collective American overtones. 

In all of this, Five Chairs and One Table hopes to speak to a brief history of African—and African American—song and struggle. I wanted to nudge the boundaries of what a traditional woodwind quintet usually performs by using a combination of traditional, numerical, prose-based, and graphic notation. I wanted to suggest the varied and complex responsibilities we share as citizens of our communities, by asking the musicians to jump, speak, and literally sing—a call to arms, armed with our instruments of imagination. Finally, by asking the quintet to sit at a table and make music devoid of their instruments, I want to illuminate those obvious, yet elusive, opportunities for all of us to sit next to one another in communion—if not conversation. 

— Daniel Bernard Roumain