Cincinnati Pops Orchestra - Kumbaya

Topic: Art Song
The realization that distinct cultural groups who shared a common market town had different music traditions began dawning in the middle-1700s in England. Prior to this there was a general recognition the arts of the court differed from those of the people, the populus.

The career of Franz Josef Haydn reflected the emergence of commercial non-court traditions. He managed the music for the court of Nikolaus Esterházy from 1761 until his death in 1790. His heir reduced the money he spent on art and Haydn needed to find a new audience. [1] He began incorporating folk and folklike elements into his orchestral music. He introduced these innovations when he visited the center of the Hanoverian court in London between 1792 and 1795. [2]

Haydn’s concerts in London for the rising middle class coincided with the emergence of Napoléon. After Bonaparte destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and emerging Prussian empires fought to fill the vacuum. Intellectuals from principalities that were being absorbed resisted by glorifying their groups’ traditions. Some composers began creating orchestrations of folk songs, and others followed Haydn by incorporating folk motifs into their more formal compositions.

Bohemian Antonín Dvorák produced Three Slavonic Rhapsodies in 1878, and a Polanaise in 1879. While he was in the United States, he heard a Black baritone, Henry Thacker Burleigh, sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." The flute theme in the adagio first movement of his ninth symphony of 1893, From the New World, quoted it. [3]

American composers like Virgil Thompson [4] and Aaron Copland [5] started using folk melodies in their works in the middle-1930s. However, unlike Dvorák who made brief allusions in his New World symphony, they essentially created orchestrations of folk songs within the framework of their film scores and ballets. This literal use has characterized the way later classical composers treated traditional music: they tended to make tone poems that told stories like Jean Sibelius’s "Finlandia" of 1900.

The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra recorded "Kumbaya" in 2015. It must have been included in the program of Stephen Foster music to broaden the representation of American music. Because spirituals were created before the Civil War, the music first had to evoke that period. Ever since Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary on the war [6] that has been a single fiddle and muffled drum.’

The orchestra needed to convey another piece of information: spirituals were the creation of African slaves. Therefore, the work needed African elements, which meant drums, although they were the one instrument generally forbidden on plantations. The symphony employed a djembé. [7]

Performers
Soloists: Timothy Lees, Kathryn Woolley, Gabriel Pegis, Scott Mozlin, all violinists

Instrumental Accompaniment: Cincinnati Pops Orchestra conducted by John Morris Russell

Rhythm Accompaniment: Richard Jensen, djembé

Credit
Traditional
Arr. Timothy Berens

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5

Basic Structure: repetitions of the four-line melody with increasingly more instruments.

1. Single violin with plucked strings sounding like a muffled drum

1 End. Djembé begin repetitions after end of repetition

2. Single violin with djembé and plucked strings

2 End. Strings pulse in time between repetitions

3. Single violin with djembé and strings playing rhythmic figures

4. One violin and second playing a counterpart; djembé and strings continue

4 End. Strings repeat the last line three times, the second time slower and softer; the third time slower and by-lower pitched instruments

5. More violins

6. Several violins begin on a higher note and play faster

6 End. Repetitions of final melodic line slower and with fully chords. Then, djembé solo

Notes on Performers
The arranger, Timothy Berens, went to school in suburban Dayton [8] and graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music in 1983. [9] He began with the symphony as a guitar player, and became their principal arranger in the late 1990s. [10]

Richard Jensen played djembé. He grew up in Seattle where he studied with the local symphony’s percussionist. He began working for the Cincinnati Pops in 1972, and later graduated from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. [11]

As would be obvious from their names, both men were white.

Availability
CD: American Originals. Recorded January 2015; released 11 September 2015. [12]

YouTube: uploaded by NAXOS of America, 12 September 2015.

End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Joseph Haydn."

2. Patricia Averill. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 46. The London symphonies were numbered 93-104.

3. Harry Thacker Burleigh. Quoted by "African American Influences." Dvorak American Heritage Association website.

4. Virgil Thompson. The Plow That Broke the Plains. Score, 1936.

5. Aaron Copeland. Billy the Kid, 1938; Rodeo, 1942, and Appalachian Spring, 1944.

6. Ken Burns. The Civil War. PBS miniseries, 23-27 September 1990.

7. A djembé was a goblet drum popularized by the Guinea dance troupe, Les Ballets Africains. (Wikipedia. "Djembe.")

8. "Bio." Tim Berens website.

9. "About Tim Berens." Facebook.

10. Berens website.

11. "Richard Jensen." Northern Kentucky University website.

12. "American Originals Album." Cincinnati Pops website.