From the Artistic Director

Dear friends,

Welcome to the second concert of Queer Urban Orchestra’s Chosen Family season! Thanks for choosing to escape the cold with warm friendship and music. Chosen family is as important to queer culture as just about anything, and is a fundamental building block of QUO’s identity.

Tonight’s program, With a Little Help from Our Friends, features music we can only play because of the help of others. Richard Strauss would never have considered writing the Oboe Concerto we get to play with the New York Philharmonic’s own Ryan Roberts tonight (pinch me — is this a dream?!) were it not for a little nudge from an improbable friend. Florence Price’s Fourth Symphony was assumed lost to the sands of time until a couple miraculously discovered the manuscript in a derelict home. Steven Stucky found new expressive possibilities in an obscure score by Henry Purcell nearly 300 years after it was written.

We all need our friends to make it across the finish line, and perhaps the only thing that feels better than our bff’s having our backs is when we get to help them. As QUO wraps up a banner year of championing queer artistry in the greatest city on Earth, I hope you’ll support our organization with a donation. We do a lot with a little, so gifts of any size make an outsized impact on our work. As we look forward to our 15th birthday next year, our ambitions for the impact we can have in our community are bigger than ever.

Thank you so much for being part of our chosen family, and happy holidays from all of us at QUO!

Lots of love,

David Bloom

Artistic Director, Queer Urban Orchestra

About the Music

Henry Purcell, orch. Steven Stucky: Funeral Music for Queen Mary (1695, arr. 1992)

Queen Mary II of England found her cousin, William of Orange, repugnant. Her sister, the future Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman’s character in The Favorite), likened his visage to that of the monster in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Rotten teeth aside, it can’t have helped that, at 5’11”, Mary soared five inches above William, who was 12 years her senior. Nevertheless, she was forced to marry him when she was 15, and by all accounts, she eventually warmed to him. In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Parliament removed Mary’s father, King James II, from the throne and installed the monarch duo known to history as William and Mary with a single objective: to save England from James’ move toward Catholicism.

Mary played an important role in government and made cracking down on sex offenses by soldiers a central part of her agenda. William was often away in battle, during which time she would run the empire on her own and even weigh in on William’s military decisions. Six years into her reign, she contracted smallpox and died in December of 1694 at the age of 32. Her funeral in March of the following year was one of the largest in royal history. William, heartbroken and in denial, could not bring himself to attend. For the occasion, England’s preeminent composer, Henry Purcell (1659-1695), was commissioned, and he wrote for voices, four flatt trumpets (the long ones with slides that are often depicted adorned with banners), and basso continuo.

The version of Funeral Music for Queen Mary we hear tonight was transcribed and elaborated by Steven Stucky (1949-2016), who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and a widely respected figure in music, holding residencies with both the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics and teaching positions at Cornell and Juilliard. Stucky chose three parts of the Purcell — a solemn march, the anthem In the Midst of Life We Are in Death, and a polyphonic canzona — and strung them together for woodwinds, brass, percussion, and (aside from harp) no strings.

“In working on the project,” Stucky wrote, “I did not try to achieve a pure, musicological reconstruction but, on the contrary, to regard Purcell's music, which I love deeply, through the lens of three hundred intervening years. Thus, although most of this version is straightforward orchestration of the Purcell originals, there are moments when Purcell drifts out of focus.” The result is a work that is as much Stucky’s as Purcell’s, with the full heft of the ensemble occasionally threatening to overpower the original through the mists of time. Perhaps Stucky’s most satisfying insight is his return to the opening march to end the work.

Richard Strauss: Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra (1945)

In May 1945, American Sergeant John de Lancie found himself sitting in the Bavarian alpine home of the already legendary composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949). An oboist back at home, de Lancie knew Strauss’ orchestral and operatic music for the oboe very well and found the courage to ask whether Strauss would ever consider writing an oboe concerto. The composer answered simply and decisively, “no.”

In 1940, Fritz Reiner had appointed a 19-year-old de Lancie to the post of principal oboe of the Pittsburgh Symphony, which he held until enlisting in 1942 and becoming an intelligence officer. As the Nazis fell, the US Army quickly occupied Germany, taking over any properties they deemed necessary and giving residents only minutes to vacate. De Lancie learned that another officer had granted the 80-year-old Richard Strauss permission to stay in his home in the same area de Lancie was stationed, so the young oboist paid the sage composer a visit. Defying the Army’s non-fraternization policy, the two developed a friendship, conversing at length over the ensuing days in their common language of French. Strauss, who avoided the Nazis in his resort village and went to great lengths to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law, must have been happy for the companionship.

Though the matter of the concerto was dropped after de Lancie popped the question, the idea evidently took root in Strauss’ still vibrantly creative mind, and four months later, de Lancie was surprised to learn that Strauss was publishing an oboe concerto. Strauss made sure to grant the right to the American premiere to his unlikely friend, but when de Lancie started his new job with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1946, he was a section oboist, not the principal, and was not able to play the work. De Lancie later served as principal in Philadelphia for 23 years, but his only public performance of the concerto was with the orchestra at Interlochen Academy in 1964.

Strauss’ concerto is the crown jewel of the oboe repertoire, and indeed its merits transcend the narrow context of oboe music. The composer is well known for his towering music for large orchestras, including the operas Der Rosenkavalier and Salome and the tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which opens both Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. His Oboe Concerto is much more intimate, cast for a small orchestra in a traditional three-movement form and focusing on the lyrical qualities of the oboe. The first movement, featuring cozy duets between the oboist and solo flute, clarinet, and viola, moves seamlessly into a nostalgic second movement. The finale let’s loose a youthful playfulness that its octogenarian creator never lost.

Florence Beatrice Price: Symphony No. 4 in D minor (1945)

Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) penned her monumental Fourth Symphony in 1945, the same year that Strauss and de Lancie’s chats more or less accidentally resulted in a work that was immediately preserved in perpetuity with a handsome published score. Price’s symphony, by contrast, was not only unpublished, it only narrowly escaped permanent obscurity. Such a fate befell her Second Symphony, which was never performed and remains lost without a trace.

Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to a businesswoman and the city’s only Black dentist. She played her first piano recital at age four, graduated from high school as valedictorian at age 14, and went on to study piano, organ, and composition at New England Conservatory in Boston. In the 1920s, despite her past university teaching posts in Arkansas and Georgia, she was denied admission to the Arkansas Music Teachers Association because of the color of her skin, and after a white child was allegedly killed by a Black man in Little Rock, white residents made threats on the life of Price’s youngest daughter. The family fled to Chicago, where Price’s husband later became violent towards her.

After a divorce in 1931, Price finally turned in earnest to composing, and the 1930s became her most productive period. Even during the Chicago Black Renaissance, a person of her gender and race was expected at most to write small parlor works, but she didn’t wait around for someone to ask her to write the vast orchestral works she dreamed of. She took the initiative herself and produced symphonies, concertos, suites, and tone poems, drawing on her knowledge of the repertoire and her sensibilities as an organist to paint on the large canvas of a symphony orchestra.

With the world’s eyes on Chicago’s World Fair in 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra did its part in covering up the nation’s gross injustices against Black Americans by premiering Price’s First Symphony, marking the first time a major American orchestra performed a work by a Black woman. Important as the landmark was, it was the only time Price heard her music performed by such an ensemble. Like the rest of her symphonies, there was no commission for her First. She wrote it on spec, submitting it to a competition (which it won) and tirelessly advocating for a premiere and additional performances.

Some scholars speculate that Price wrote her Fourth Symphony in anticipation of a planned trip to Europe, where she hoped to promote her music, but she was never able to make the trip. The symphony remained unperformed and was presumed lost after her sudden death in 1953. Fast forward to 2009: a couple was starting to renovate a collapsing, abandoned property in St. Anne, Illinois that happened to be Price’s former summer home. There they found piles of handwritten music that bore the name Florence Price, miraculously dry and unblemished. After a little Googling, they learned who she was and got in touch with archivists at the University of Arkansas, where some of her papers were kept. The find — which included the Fourth Symphony, three concertos, and many other works — was the most significant discovery in the history of American music, if not classical music writ large. In 2018, 63 years after the score was completed, the world premiere of Price’s Fourth Symphony took place in Arkansas.

The symphony opens with an expansive and profound first movement, with taught march rhythms and expressive melodies vying for prominence. Midway through the movement, a quotation of the Negro spiritual Wade in the Water emerges. The tune is so natural to the fabric of Price’s music, which is steeped equally in the idioms Western classical and traditional Black music, that it could easily be missed. A lovely second movement demonstrates Price’s deft orchestration with luscious colors unfolding effortlessly.

The third movement takes the form not of a scherzo (she saves that for her brilliant finale), but of a Juba dance, a form that enslaved people brought from the African Kingdom of Kongo to the American South. The traditional Juba features body percussion — slapping and patting the arms, legs, chest, and cheeks — making it practical on plantations where slaves were forbidden to possess instruments like drums. The movement, the last of Price’s several Juba dances, is brimming with spirited syncopations, whimsical melodies, and delightful percussive sounds like sandpaper blocks and an Indigenous American frame drum. It makes one hope for more Price discoveries soon.