BBC Radio 3 Highlights Forgotten Composers

The orchestral works of three ‘forgotten’ composers are premiering on BBC Radio 3 in an effort to highlight ethnically diverse composers. The premiere of composers Margaret Bonds, Ali Osman, Kikuko Kanai, Robert Nathaniel Dett, Julia Perry, Isaac Hirshow, Joseph Bologne and Chevalier de Saint-Georges are part of a concert produced via a collaboration between the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council who are funding research into Black, Asian and ethnically diverse composers.

According to BBC news, the seven researchers who were awarded funding have been “excavating pieces of music that have rarely been performed, and in some cases, never recorded.”

Margaret Bonds

Margaret Allison Bonds (3^rd March 1913 – 26^th April 1972) was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher. One of the first Black composers and performers to gain recognition in the United States, she is best remembered today for her popular arrangements of African-American spirituals and frequent collaborations with Langston Hughes. Her most popular interpretation of the spiritual He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands has been recorded numerous times and became widely known.

Ali Osman

Ali Osman Alhaj (1958 – 16^th February 2017) was a Sudanese composer of contemporary classical music. He was active in Egypt’s contemporary music scene and a specialist of Sudanese music. He also played the guitar, drum kit, and double bass. As artistic director and principal conductor, he worked with the Al Nour Wal Amal (Light and Hope) Orchestra for blind female musicians.

Kikuko Kanai

Kikuko Kanai (née Kawahira, 13^th March 1911 – 17^th February 1986) was a Japanese composer and one of the first Japanese women to compose classical music in the Western tradition. She was born on the Ryukyu island of Miyako-jima, Okinawa, and studied voice at the Nihon Music School and composition at the Tokyo Academy of Music with Kanichi Shimofusa and Kishio Hirao. Working as a composer, she produced songs and orchestral music using the Ryukyuan pentatonic scale.

“Much of her prolific output has never been recorded, but the Radio 3 project will allow works like Shrine Maiden Dance, Good Harvest Dance and Karate to be heard for the first time outside Japan.” BBC

Robert Nathaniel Dett

Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) was lauded as the first American composer to fuse Negro folk music with the European art music tradition in a sophisticated way.  As a seminal figure in the preservation and study of spirituals, both as a writer and choral leader, and as a great teacher and inspirer of African-American musicians in later generations, he is acknowledged to be one of the most important musicians in American history.

Dett’s writings include The Emancipation of Negro Music, which won an important literary prize at Harvard University in 1920, and Album of the Heart, a volume of poems. He was also deeply attracted to philosophical inquiry and involved with Rosicrucianism as well as Christianity. He was also interested in other cultures; ancient Hebrew legends, African chants, and Hindu poets all have a place in his music. Particularly toward the end of his life, Dett’s music expresses messages of human oneness, which speak to people now with the same meaning and urgency that it did in his time.  Through the efforts of Nathaniel Dett, what he called “Negro folk music” is a gift to the world. BBC Radio 3 will highlight his lesser-known solo piano works.

Julia Perry

Julia Amanda Perry (25^th March 1924 – 25^th April 1979) was an American classical composer and teacher who combined European classical and neo-classical training with her African-American heritage. She studied at the Westminster Choir College, Julliard School and in Paris under Nadia Boulanger. Living through the civil rights movement in the 1960s influenced her music writing, whereby she included more references to popular non-classical styles of the time such as jazz, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll. Julia Perry’s early compositions focused mostly on works written for voice, however, she gradually began to write more instrumental compositions later in life. By the time she suffered from a stroke in 1971, she had written twelve symphonies.

Isaac Hirshow

Isaac Hirshow (born Yitzak Gershov, 1883 – 1956) was a Russian-born, naturalised British cantor who in 1939 became the first person to obtain a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Glasgow. He served at Garnethill Synagogue for thirty years.

One outcome of the BBC/Arts and Humanities Research Council project is the first full performance of The Hope of Israel, written as his final degree piece, is to be premiered and performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and additionally will be discussed in an 8^th February 2022 documentary.

The University of Edinburgh have a short film about Hirshow in their Points of Arrival series, and the University of Edinburgh postdoctoral research fellow Phil Alexander, who is funded to study Hirshow’s life and works as part of the initiative, has said of him:

“His music and his musical life kind of straddles east and west.”

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (25^th December 1745 – 10^th June 1799), was a French classical composer, virtuoso violinist, a conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris, and a renowned champion fencer. Born in the then French colony of Guadeloupe, he was the son of Georges de Bologne Saint-Georges, a wealthy married planter, and Anne, his wife’s African slave.

He is considered to be one of the most important musicians of pre-Revolutionary Paris as well as the first classical composer of African ancestry. Saint-Georges composed a multitude of works while leading Le Concert des Amateurs who were one of Europe’s best orchestras, while US President John Adams called him “the most accomplished man in Europe.”

The music will be premiered on Radio 3’s Afternoon Concert, performed by the BBC Philharmonic, with piano solos performed by Clare Hammond. Students from the Royal Northern College of Music will also play two rare string quartets by Saint-Georges.

The programme will be complemented by two podcasts hosted by Christienna Fryer, with a second concert scheduled for this autumn.

Also by Michelle Sciarrotta: