SKU: BT.ALHE31725

French.

For drum kit and piano.

SKU: PR.141400980

ISBN 9781491112953. UPC: 680160671229. 9 x 12 inches. Text: Stanley Moss. Stanley Moss, Ubuntu.

The opening of Stanley Moss’s poem unfurls the spirit captured in Zwilich’s musical setting for Bass Voice, Djembe (African drum), and Piano: “I salute a word, I stand up and give it my chair, because this one Zulu word, ubuntu, holds what English takes seven to say: ‘the essential dignity of every human being.’ I give my hand to ubuntu —” Zwilich’s six-minute work proudly declaims Moss’s message, using a djembe to add African-inspired color and punctuation to the musical whole.

SKU: PR.140401330

ISBN 9781491134412. UPC: 680160684939.

Nathaniel Dett was among America’s leading composers in the early 20th century, and MAGNOLIA SUITE is a beautiful example of his rich, hybrid style. Deeply inspired by the music and mission of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Dett’s piano music springs from the late Romantic traditions of florid texture and embellishment, along with programmatic titles and raw emotion. It is notable for melody writing inspired by and paraphrasing African-American song. The 18-minute MAGNOLIA SUITE contains five movements, any of which may also be performed separately. This edition by Lara Downes provides a clean, new engraving that corrects the many errors and unclear indications appearing in the historical printing.
Robert Nathaniel Dett was born in a place that was built on freedom. The little village of Drummondville, Ontario was founded by enslaved Africans – Dett’s ancestors among them – who traveled the Underground Railroad out of the American South into Canada. Their journey brought them to a safe haven, a place where fortunes and futures could be transformed in the span of one generation, to lives full of new possibilities. You could call it “the place where the rainbow ends,” which is the title of the last movement of Dett’s Magnolia Suite.When Dett wrote these pieces, he was a young teacher at Lane College in Tennessee, a historically Black college that had been founded in 1882, the year of his birth. A place built on freedom, with the purpose of educating newly-emancipated slaves – a place designed to nurture the blossoming of ideas, the vibrant flowering of minds set free. This music is inspired by the gorgeous splendor of the magnolia blooms on that college campus, and also by the shared histories, experiences, and aspirations of the community that Dett found there.These five pieces pay affectionate tribute to lineage and legacy. They express gratitude for the bittersweet beauties of the present; nostalgia for the past (a bit romanticized, as the past always is); and an effervescent optimism for the future that awaits us in the place where the rainbow ends.