Valerie Coleman - Umoja: Anthem of Unity | Chad Goodman | New World Symphony (2023)

Описание: By the time Valerie Coleman was 14 she had completed three symphonies and was winning top awards at flute competitions in her native Kentucky. She earned degrees from Boston University and Mannes School of Music and in 1997 founded Imani Winds, a wind quintet especially lauded for commissioning and championing music by African American and Latin American composers. Since leaving Imani Winds in 2018, she has devoted herself principally to teaching and composing. She served on the faculties of the Frost School of Music of the University of Miami and at The Juilliard School, and 2021 she joined the flute and composition faculty at Mannes. She was named to the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works commissioning program in 2021-22 and directs a recently created wind quintet workshop at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.

Many of her compositions feature the flute or chamber groupings of wind instruments, but she has also fielded symphonic commissions from Carnegie Hall, American Composers Orchestra and Hartford Symphony. Umoja straddles these worlds. She composed it initially as a choral piece, and in 2001 she adapted it as a movement for wind quintet, in which form it was chosen by Chamber Music America for its roster of the “Top 101 Great American Ensemble Works.” She greatly expanded it into a symphonic work on commission from The Philadelphia Orchestra, which introduced it in 2019 (with Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducting), making it the first “classical” work by a living female African American composer that ensemble had ever programmed. At that point, its title was expanded to Umoja, Anthem for Unity.

Umoja is, in fact, the Swahili word for “unity,” and the name attaches to the first of the seven days of the African diasporic celebration of Kwanzaa. A note printed in the published score explains that, in its original form, the umoja was a piece for women, singing as a choir, that “embodied a sense of ‘tribal unity,’ through the feel of a drum circle, the sharing of history through ‘call and response’ form, and the repetition of a memorable sing-song melody… The orchestral version brings an expansion and sophistication to the short and sweet melody, beginning with sustained ethereal passages [where] the melody is… sweetly singing in its simplest form with an earnest reminiscence of Appalachian-style music” launching a 10-minute journey through to a final ‘bold call of unity that harkens back to the original anthem.”

– © James M. Keller

Originally performed January 21, 2023.

#unity #peace #orchestra #symphony

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