Fantasy and Interlude on “Going Home”, arr. Curtis Stewart (ft. Harlem Samba)

Описание: American Composers Orchestra
Tito Munoz, Conductor

Harlem Samba
Dana Monteiro, Conductor

Mary Flagler Cary Hall, The DiMenna Center for Classical Music
March 7, 2025

CURTIS STEWART, Fantasy and Interlude on “Going Home” (inspired by Alice Coltrane’s Lord of Lords)

About the Work

“Going Home” is considered by many to be one of America’s greatest Negro spirituals, despite being sourced from the beautiful slow movement of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony and set to text by one of his New Englander students William Arms Fisher in the late 1800s. It was championed by Paul Robeson and recorded by Alice Coltrane on her album Lord of Lords (which also has a reworking of Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite). The spiritual is arranged for strings, keyboards, harp and percussion, with the highly ornamented keyboard and strings creating an almost raga-like atmosphere around the original harmonies and melody. These orchestral interludes are a fantasy on all of the above—a musical thought reflected on a thought between a thought from a thought. Paired with the traditional drumming of Harlem Samba, this original orchestral work questions the nature of where “home” is and to where it refers, depending on who is framing the iteration of cultural memory.