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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > February > 07
Saturday, February 7, 2009
A rarity: Ellington’s ‘Sacred Concert’
Pencil it in: On Feb. 22, Austin audiences will get the relatively rare chance to hear Duke Ellington’s “Sacred Concerts” when Austin Chamber Music Center joins forces with Huston-Tillotson University to present selections from the three sweeping musical works that the jazz maestro himself called the most important music he had ever written.
The free concert is at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 22 in the King-Seabrook Chapel at Huston-Tillotson Univ., 900 Chicon St. That’s right, the concert is free.
In the last years of his life, between 1965 and 1973, the jazz genius Ellington composed three massive works he called the ‘Sacred Concerts.’ They were performed in cathedrals and churches around the world. Based on Ellington’s own astute spiritual writings, the concerts are sprawling collections of songs and suites that juxtapose gospel music with jazz, classical music, spirituals, blues, choral music and even dance and oratory.
But because of the sheer scale of the ‘Sacred Concerts’ — they require huge choruses, ensembles of musicians, dancers, solo singers — they have rarely been performed in a grand scale since Ellington’s death in 1974. Also complicating things, the scores were never published in a definitive version.
ACMC artistic director Michelle Schumann has worked for several years now to assemble the kind of collaborators to mount a Schumann’s teamed up with Texas State Univ. prof Keith Winking who will lead a big band. Soprano Gloria Quinlan, Huston-Tillotson music professor and director of choirs, will solo and lead the Huston-Tillotson Concert Choir.
The Feb. 22 concert promises to stunning, accomplished — and moving. Ellington himself wrote expressively in the program notes for the first ‘Sacred Concert.”
“As I travel from place to place by car, bus, train, plane … taking rhythm to the dancers, harmony to the romantic, melody to the nostalgic, gratitude to the listener … receiving praise, applause and handshakes, and at the same time, doing the thing I like to do, I feel that I am most fortunate because I know that God has blessed my timing, without which no thing could have happened—the right time or place or with the right people. The four must converge. Thank God … .
… In this program, you may hear a wide variety of statements without words, and I think you should know that if it is a phrase with six tones, it symbolizes the six syllables in the first four words of the Bible, “In the beginning God,” which is our theme. We say it many times … many ways.”
[The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (Oxford University Press, 1993)]
