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Symphony director hopeful James Blachly.
For New Haven Symphony Orchestra Music Director candidate James Blachly, conducting was partly about finding a listener’s perspective. “What drew me to this field in the first place was a magical experience as a listener, and I spend my career trying to continue that experience for other listeners and musicians, in every hall I enter.”
That’s not to say that musical and thematic links are not a significant factor for Blachly. Judging by the program he’ll present on Sunday at SCSU’s Lyman Center for the Performing Arts, the conductor is eager to explore all manner of threads that tie the pieces together.
With “Soul Force” by Jessie Montgomery, the personal is at the forefront. Blachly describes his long friendship with Montgomery, who has become a star composer in the contemporary classical music world: “She always had tremendous musicianship and would sightread difficult pieces that I composed. I was very excited when she began composing,” he said.
In 2014, when Blachly was conducting a concert in New York commemorating the death of Eric Garner, he advocated for the orchestra to commission Montgomery to write a piece for that occasion. That piece turned out to be “Soul Force,” and Blachly conducted its premiere. He found out only later it was Montgomery’s first piece for orchestra, which he describes as a masterful example of symphonic writing. “It has a great depth, and a real trajectory,” he said.
In her own program notes, Montgomery describes “Soul Force” as “drawing on elements of popular African-American musical styles such as big-band jazz, funk, hip-hop and R+B … the piece pays homage to the cultural contributions, the many voices, which have risen against aggressive forces to create an indispensable cultural place.”
One can easily see what ties “Soul Force” to the following piece, William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony,” which is receiving its first performance under Blachly’s baton this Sunday. Both are the work of African American composers, and both adapt various forms of traditional and popular music into a symphonic context. But Blachly goes again into the personal in the programming link: “It’s a real tragedy that Dawson was not championed more in his lifetime, was not commissioned to write more for the orchestra. Nothing makes me happier than to see [Montgomery’s] music taken up by orchestras around the country. To me, the fact that she is now helping to define American orchestral music feels like an example of how things can go right.”
Sunday’s performance of William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” will be the NHSO’s first-ever performance of the piece, Blachly noted, reflecting a growing trend of orchestras programming previously underperformed works by composers of color since 2020. According to Blachly, between 2010 and 2020 the piece was performed only 14 times in the world. Since 2020 the number of performances has “exploded.”
“A lot of people’s reactions will be ‘Why haven’t I heard this before?’ ‘Where are his other symphonies?” Blachly said. An early version of the work received a premiere under the baton of Leopold Stokowski in 1934, but after that the piece was never properly published, making future performances of it exceedingly difficult to stage.
Dawson (who died in 1990 at the age of 90) revised the piece in 1952, after visiting nine countries in West Africa. Blachly notes that the decades of care Dawson put into this piece show in the craft, the use of motives, and the development of ideas. Dawson, in his own words, wanted the work to sound “like unmistakably not the work of a white man,” and accomplishes this by using different Black spirituals as the musical source for each movement’s development.
Blachly sees Dawson’s command of the orchestra as tightly organized, pulling a lot of music out of a small motif — the kind of evolving musical development that audiences often associate with Beethoven, especially the Violin Concerto that rounds out the program. Both pieces feature musical ideas just a few notes in length at their core that develop into full movements from those simple beginnings.
Upon discovering he was matched with soloist Simone Porter, Blachly did his homework, discovering a video where Porter spoke about some of her favorite pieces of music, focusing on the Beethoven concerto. For Blachly, the selection was obvious.
“I love Beethoven for his urgency and direct communication — he always takes the listener on a journey,” he said. Blachly mentioned he was thrilled to be working with Porter, citing her obvious passion for the music.
The sequence of the program — reverse chronological order from Montgomery, to Dawson, to Beethoven — is important to Blachly. Audiences will hear two very different attempts to sonically convey aspects of the Black American experience, with Montgomery’s piece seeming to comment on Dawson’s. Then Dawson’s formal mastery will “help audiences hear more” in the Beethoven on the second half of the program.
There is a chance, Blachly feels, that the New Haven Symphony Orchestra can really become a model for orchestras nationwide, based in part on the work the organization has already done in the last few years. “I’m impressed at how unified the orchestra has been in addressing the issues of our time. And I’m excited about how the orchestra can continue to engage the community in deeper ways,” he said.
Blachly seems to understand that by making a concerted effort to broaden and deepen the canon, orchestras stand a better chance of attracting new audiences. This seems in line with some of the programming strategies current music director Alisdair Neale has employed. For Blachly, this expansion of the canon is about accessibility, and about making the audience feel welcome.
“I find [in the NHSO] an organization that I believe reflects my own values — of serving an entire community, of being creative to find ways to welcome people to the experience of this music, of thoughtful programming that lets the music speak for itself,” he said.
James Blachly conducts the New Haven Symphony Orchestra with works by Jessie Montgomery, William Levi Dawson, and Ludwig van Beethoven, April 16, 3 p.m., at SCSU’s Lyman Center for the Performing Arts. Visit the symphony’ s website for tickets and more information.
