Hartford Symphony Orchestra - Beethoven 5+5 - Adolphus Hailstork (Born April 17, 1941 in Rochester, New York)

Adolphus Hailstork (Born April 17, 1941 in Rochester, New York)

Four Hymns Without Words for Trumpet and Orchestra (2018, 2022)

World Premiere: July 16 2022
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, trombone, bass trombone, timpani, stringss
Duration: 10’

“I don’t write esoteric, ivory tower works to be performed by a few people in a loft for an audience of a few people,” says Adolphus Hailstork. “My music is tonal, lyrical and very rhythmic, like Aaron Copland. I’m not of the experimental school. That’s just not me. I’m a populist, but so was Verdi.” Hailstork was born in Rochester, New York on April 17, 1941, and grew up in Albany, where he learned to play violin, piano and organ, and sang in the school choirs. He started to compose before enrolling at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1959 as a student of Mark Fax. Upon his graduation from Howard in 1963, he won a Lucy E. Moten Travel Fellowship that enabled him to study with the celebrated pedagogue Nadia Boulanger
at the American Academy in Fontainebleau, France. He then earned a second bachelor’s (1965) and a master’s degree (1966) from the Manhattan School of Music, where his teachers included Nicholas Flagello, Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond. He completed his doctoral studies in 1971 at Michigan State University, studying principally with H. Owen Reed. Hailstork taught at MSU and Youngstown State University before joining the faculty of Norfolk State University in Virginia in 1977. From 1999 until his retirement in 2020, he served as Eminent Scholar and Professor of Music at Old Dominion University in Norfolk; in 2021, he received University’s Vianne B. Webb Award for Lifetime Achievement for his longtime involvement in the area’s cultural community.

Hailstork has written with much success in a variety of musical genres: opera (a 1994 work inspired by the Afro-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar composed on a commission from the Dayton Opera Association; Rise for Freedom, premiered by Cincinnati Opera in October 2007, takes the Underground Railroad as its subject), symphony, concerto (his Piano Concerto of 1992 was commissioned by a consortium of five orchestras for soloist Leon Bates), band, chamber, piano, song and chorus. Hailstork’s prominence in American musical life has been recognized with such distinctions as the Ernest Bloch Award, a Fulbright Fellowship (for study in Guyana), Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts, a residency with the Albany (Georgia) Symphony Orchestra, an honorary doctorate from the College of William and Mary, a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Manhattan School of Music, and the Strong Men & Strong Women Award from Dominion Energy of Virginia (“to provide our youth with positive role models, African-American men and women whose accomplishments and determination demonstrate true excellence in leadership”); in 1992, he was named a Cultural Laureate of the State of Virginia. His recent America’s Requiem: A Knee on the Neck, premiered in March 2022 at the Strathmore Music Center in
North Bethesda, Maryland, commemorates the death of George Floyd.

When Hailstork composed the Four Hymns Without Words in 2018 without using any existing material, he explained that they “are so called because each begins with melody and harmony that sound like a hymn tune.” Since he originally intended that they serve as music for processionals, recessionals, weddings or similar moments in church services, he accompanied the solo trumpet with just piano or organ, but four years later arranged them for trumpet and chamber orchestra for concert use.