Mary Lou Williams, born in 1910, was a pianist, arranger and composer from Atlanta, U.S. She was the first woman to be ranked with the greatest of jazz musicians and an important contributor to every aspect of jazz.
Her career began in the late 1920’s and lasted for more than half a century. She first started playing piano because of her mother, a classically trained pianist, picking out simple tunes at age two, she was a prodigy with perfect pitch and a highly developed musical memory by the time she was four years old. At age ten she was known as “the Little Piano Girl” and was performing for small audiences throughout Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her professional debut with big bands came in 1922, at age twelve, when she substituted for a pianist in the Buzz and Harris Revue, a traveling show.
By 1925, at just 15 years old, Williams was a full-time working musician with a solidified status as a jazz great. She helped develop the Kansas City swing sound of the 1930s. And in the 1940s, she mentored some of bebop’s most famous innovators like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.
Williams was an expert at her instrument and whatever she apparently ‘lacked’ for not being a man she made up for on the bandstand. Her musical ability allowed her to gain the respect of many men, both inside and outside of the jazz community. Mary Lou focused on the plight of her race and mourned the loss of the jazz heritage, and even later in her career tried to educate young blacks of the next generation about their jazz heritage. Mary Lou’s concerns and activities were noble and based on her preoccupation with racism.
She often had to legitimize her place on the bandstand through a demonstration of her musical ability. Simply because she was a woman, the men in her field did not expect her to have abilities equivalent to that of a man. The culturally appropriate place for Mary Lou was not on the bandstand, but rather in the home. Mary Lou broke the culturally appropriate gender roles by pursuing her music rather than motherhood.
In the 1960s and ’70s she composed a number of liturgical pieces for jazz ensembles, including Black Christ of the Andes (1962), a cantata; Mass for the Lenten Season (1968); and Music for Peace (1970), popularly known as “Mary Lou’s Mass.” In 1970 she also recorded a comprehensive performance-lecture entitled The History of Jazz. Five years later she was appointed to the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and in 1977 to the faculty at Duke University.
Mary Lou was privy to many race issues throughout her life and time as a jazz pianist. Race and gender combined to make life as a composer difficult for Mary Lou. Not only was Mary Lou Williams a woman, but she was a black woman, and black women in the first part of the twentieth century were not afforded many rights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktmyulf11sQ
Critics had a difficult time responding to Mary Lou’s music and classifying her as legitimate. While working for and touring with Andy Kirk’s band, the Clouds of Joy, Mary experienced first-hand the difficulties of segregation. Travelling even to a ‘northern’ city such as Kansas City, the effects of segregation remained rampant; even musicians’ unions were segregated. Luckily for Andy Kirk and the band, this did not prevent them from performing at many different venues. Conversely, later in her career, Mary Lou worked at Café Society Downtown, a club in New York City that practiced full integration and treated blacks and whites equally, and also she volunteered her time playing benefits for the NAACP as well as for the Committee for the Negro in the Arts.
For Williams, jazz was a vast and mighty tool of expression and one that, she believed, could serve as a crucial and necessary portal for black peoples to commune with and convey the complexities of their past. On many occasions, she set to writing — informally in unpublished essays and letters but also at times in public forums — in order to elaborate on the ways in which her own “modern music” was both a statement in aesthetic “progress” and yet, likewise, constitutive of old forms.
Her last recording was “Solo Recital” (Montreux Jazz Festival, 1978), three years before her death, a mixture of spiritual themes, ragtime, blues and swing. In 1981, Mary Lou Williams died of cancer in Durham, North Carolina, at the age of 71. Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and Andy Kirk attended her funeral at St. Ignatius Loyola Church. She was buried in the Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Looking towards the end of her life, Mary Lou Williams said, “I did it, didn’t I? Through muck and mud.” And to this day we remember her as “the first lady of the jazz keyboard.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk4nZe6bjRg
Research from: Npr Music, Cedarville university, NY Times, Wikipedia
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Each year the Shine School of Music in Barcelona hosts a concert. It’s a unique opportunity for students to perform for a live audience, and get a taste or experience of performing for a crowd and certainly a chance to show off what they have accomplished with their teachers.
Our concerts have grown, from one small concert once a year to now a series of concerts during the year, and each one just gets better and better! As we get ready for our first online music concert, we want to take a look back at some of our student’s and teacher’s performances over the years.
We hope that you tune in with us for the concert this year. It will be a first for us, in that it will be streamed online. We really look forward to what our talented students and teachers have put together.
The recent Black Lives Matter protests in the US and all over the world have triggered a positive interest in educating ourselves on understanding racism and acknowledging its prevalence in our societies. Knowledge of our history can empower us all to make the right changes to move forward and build a world that is equal, and that celebrates different cultures.
The history of music is no different, and it is impossible to not recognise the genius of a multitude of black musicians, or ignore their contributions and advancements of the art. Despite this, in the past 200 years, many black composers have almost been forgotten or overlooked, and struggled against the odds to be heard. Even now, their symphonies and operas, concertos and quartets are often ignored, and remain underperformed.
Shine Music School made its start in post apartheid South Africa, and we are well aware of the institutionalised inequalities in our everyday lives. Even so, we still have a long way to go in educating ourselves. Let’s stop being silent, stop standing by and advocate for change! Let’s uplift and support black musicians and composers. In today’s article, we look at 6 fascinating musical composers and highlight some of their works.
Listen to their music, play and perform their pieces, and applaud their contribution!
Our first composer is non other than Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799). If you are a music history buff you will have heard of him. This guy led an extraordinary life. Full of swashbuckling adventure, politics, kings, queens, drama and last but not least music! It’s the stuff of movies! Born in the French Caribbean, the son of a wealthy plantation owner and a 16 year old female slave; Joseph Bologne, or Saint-Georges (as he is better known) was brought to France at a young age by his father, where he continued to spend most of the rest of his life.
St-Georges grew up in French high society but his heritage restricted him in many ways. He was both unique because of his colour and status, but for the same reasons was never able to marry and although his musical expertise was recognised, he was not allowed to take on certain appointments, such as the director of the Académie royale de musique, the Paris Opéra.
He made a name for himself as a champion fencer, even fighting off four men in an attempted assassination for his political involvements. At one point he lived in the same house as Mozart, and indeed may have influenced his younger counterpart. He was a prolific composer (with a multitude of operas, violin concertos, symphonies and numerous chamber works under his belt) and talented violin player. Saint-Georges even played intimate concerts for Marie Antoinette, and a performance of of his second opera, La Chasse was performed at her request at the royal chateau at Marly. He became a colonel in the French Legion during the Revolution. After the Revolution shattered France, St-Georges was forced out of the army with little to show for his accomplishments, he returned to his music, and continued to compose and perfect his violin playing. He died at the age of 53 from what seems to have be gangrene. Read more about his music and fascinating escapade here.
Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869 – 1954) was the first African-American to write an opera (Epthalia, 1891) that was successfully produced. He was a composer, musician, conductor and music teacher and founded the Freeman School of Music and the Freeman School of Grand Opera. During his lifetime, he was known as “the black Wagner.”
Around 1908, Freeman moved his family to the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City where the Harlem Renaissance was just getting into swing. Freeman’s work was already well renowned and sometime in 1912, ragtime composer Scott Joplin, who was then living in New York, asked Freeman to assist in revising his three-act opera, “Treemonisha,” production of which had halted the previous year. Freeman opened a music school in New York.
Freeman composed a number of operas and other musical work, most famous, his opera Voodoo.
“The last couple of decades of his life he struggled to get any performances of his work. Almost all of his music was unpublished at the time of his death, and no recordings of his work have ever been released commercially. Twenty-one of his operas, as well as many of his other works, survive in Freeman’s own manuscripts, and are kept in a collection of his papers at Columbia University” (source)
Scott Joplin (1868 – 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Nicknamed the King of Ragtime, he was most renowned for his ragtime pieces, including his most famous composition “Maple Leaf Rag” which today would be considered the Billboard all time number one hit of ragtime. He was a prolific composer, and wrote two operas, although these were less popular, and he struggled to become recognised for his classical compositions. He taught piano, and although his popular hit helped to support him for the duration of his life, he frequently found himself in financial straits and the score to his first opera, A Guest of Honor, was confiscated in 1903 with his belongings for non-payment of bills, and is now considered lost. (source) None of his operas were performed in his lifetime, and ragtime music died with him. He was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in the 1970s, and Treemonisha was finally performed. His ragtime compositions have influenced jazz and big band swing music.
Florence B Price (1887-1953) was a classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. She became the first African American woman to have a work played by a major orchestra. In 1933 the Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E minor for the first time. Although she is considered to be successful in her life time, her numerous compositions are rarely played today. If you consider the era when she was writing and performing music, her accomplishments are enormous.
Florence grew up in the American south. Her family was well to do and she was a whip-smart, valedictorian of her class. She escaped some prejudice by identifying as Mexican during her studies in Boston, but later returned to the south and married only to move again during what is known as the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow conditions in the deep south. The Price family eventually settled in Chicago. Despite the odds of being black and a woman, she studied composition, orchestration, and the organ with the best teachers in the city, and published four pieces for piano in 1928. Her marriage fell apart and Florence worked hard to support herself and her children. Price made considerable use of characteristic African-American melodies and rhythms in many of her works. (source) She won various musical awards and wrote numerous pieces for Orchestras, and for film and advertising under a pen name. Despite this she was almost forgotten until “in 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers were found in an abandoned dilapidated house on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois.These consisted of dozens of her scores, including her two violin concertos and her fourth symphony. As Alex Ross stated in The New Yorker in February 2018, “not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.” (source)
Her work has currently received some more airplay and recognition:
Francis “Frank” Johnson (1792 – 1844) was another prolific African-American composer during the Antebellum period. You can read more about that time period in our article on The Banjo. African American composers were scarce in America during this period, but Johnson was among the few who were successful. This guy could do it all! Performing on the (now rare) keyed Kent bugle and the violin, he wrote hundreds of compositions in a multitude of styles— Operatic airs, Ethiopian minstrel songs, patriotic marches and various dances. Johnson was the first African American composer to have his works published as sheet music. His dance music was published and played at balls across the country. Only his manuscripts and piano transcripts survive today. He even performed for Queen Victoria. He also was the first African American to give public concerts and the first to participate in racially integrated concerts in the United States.
Since no actual recordings of his work exist and critic of the day did not go into much details, historians surmise that Johnsons work included many details which are not recorded on the actual publications of his transcripts. According to wikipedia:
“Available accounts show that his composition and playing must have had qualities which cannot be reconstructed from the surviving manuscripts. Historical accounts suggest that his performances infused stylistic rhythmic changes, differing from the written versions, which were either inferred by performers or instructed verbally. This is presumed to be similar to the improvisations made by jazz musicians today, although the current practices and idioms are probably vastly different from the ones used by Johnson. He was able to create interesting music, harmonies, and effects that differed from the diatonic harmonies and triadic melodies that were popular at that time.”
His performances must have been something to see!
And finally George Walker, (1922 -2018), was the first black American classical composer to be awarded the Pulitzer prize for music (for Lilacs, a piece for voice and orchestra, in 1996) while still alive. Walker balanced a career as a concert pianist, teacher, and composer. He was a man of firsts, first black instrumentalist to appear with the Philadelphia Orchestra, first black instrumentalist to be signed by a major management, the National Concert Artists. He became first black recipient of a doctoral degree from Eastman School of Music and the list goes on! Walkers’ body of work included over 90 works for orchestra, chamber orchestra, piano, strings, voice, organ, clarinet, guitar, brass, woodwinds, and chorus. However, for all his accomplishments, he still remains a cult figure in the world of contemporary composition. (read more here)
You may not think you are good at singing, but everyone can sing! Even if you sing on your own, in your room with headphones on and no-one around! There are some surprising health benefits to singing out loud! And just the same as anything, with a little help and training you can improve your singing. So if you ever wanted to enjoy singing even more, we can encourage you to take a singing lesson! If the following reasons don’t make you want to give it a go, at least keep on singing in the shower!
Singing strengthens the immune system
Research conducted at the University of Frankfurt, confirmed that singing boosts the immune system. The study included testing a profesional choir during a rehearsal singing Mozart’s “Requiem”. The researchers observed that the amount of Immunoglobulin A (a protein in the immune system that work as antibodies), were much higher right after the rehearsal. The same increases were not seen in the choir members who passively listened to the music.
Sounds are believed to improve specific aspects of your health and there are at least 5 different sounds you can sing to improve your bodies overall function:
Singing the short “a” sound (as in ahh) for 2-3 minutes will help you to stop feeling sad. It forces oxygen into the blood & brain, which in turn triggers a release of endorphins.
The short “e” sound (as in ‘echo’) makes the thyroid gland produce hormones that help to improve digestion & metabolism.
The long “e” sound (as in ‘see’) stimulates the pineal gland, boosting your alertness & learning. Try this before studying!
The long “o” sound (as in ‘open’) helps the pancreas and can regulate blood sugar after a meal.
The double “o” sound (as in ‘cool’) makes the spleen/immune system to boost infection-fighting white blood cells.
Let’s get singing to help our bodies fight off Corona Virus! We certainly need all the help we can get!
Singing is a workout
Have you ever found yourself tired after a good Karaoke session? Singing can be an excellent form of exercise, especially for those who are unable to like the older generation or those who are physically disabled. If you’re healthy, your lungs will still get a serious workout if you use the correct singing techniques. And you may be working muscles that you don’t generally use in other forms of exercise. Singing stimulates your overall circulation. And we all know that more oxygen benefits your whole body! Singing may even help to increase your aerobic capacity and stamina.
Singing improves your posture
The more you sing, the stronger your lungs become. As you work your chest muscles, your chest cavity expands, your shoulders and back align, and eventually it all works together, lifting and straightening your posture. Standing up straight is part of correct technique for singing. Your singing teacher will agree. And a good posture relieves back and neck strain!
Singing helps with sleep
Do you snore? Does your partner? Who can sleep with all this snoring going on? Well singing may be the answer to sweet dreams! According to a health article in Daily Mail Online, experts believe singing can help strengthen throat and palate muscles, which helps stop snoring and sleep apnea.
Singing combats Anxiety & Depression
As you sing, your brain triggers a release of endorphins. These help to alleviate depression, anxiety, and stress. Studies have even shown that singing can decrease our cortisol levels, which are responsible for stress. Singers often experienced improved mood and increased relaxation.
Barcelona is well known for being a hot spot for musicians, from all walks of life. Maybe it’s the beach and mountains, maybe it’s the unusually warm weather or the carefree attitude that its people exude, but whatever it is, Barcelona has a unique energy that inspires and nurtures artistic expression. Flamenco chords rising from random street corners, hustling reggae musicians singing with a raspy voice in the metro, Latin American Orchestras searching for their own sound. The city has always been bursting with a creative energy that has gifted us with many extraordinary artists. In fact many of our own teachers form parts of Bands or perform solo in Barcelona!
Let’s have a look at some of Barcelona’s famous exports:
One of such talents is Joan Manuel Serrat. Born to an anarchist father in the popular barrio of Poble Sec, Serrat became the voice of a generation, singing in Catalan when it was frowned upon if not openly prohibited, and singing about the daily life in Catalunya after the civil war. Infused with the sensibilities of the “coplas” and traditional music of his early childhood, his sound captures the essence of Mediterranean nostalgia, and built acultural bridge between latin american and catalan music in the XX century.
Coming out of the rock scene from the early nineties, Pau Dones and his band Jarabe de Palo, redefined what was to be expected from spanish rockers. Their intensely popular song “la flaca” propelled them to international stardom, breaking records across all the spanish speaking world. Not to be defined by their early success, they have kept pushing the envelope and constantly surprising their audiences with their creativity.
Too punk for rock, to rocker for punk, José María Sanz Beltrán, better known for his stage name, Loquillo, has had a tumultuous career. Alongside his band Los Trogloditas, and recently by himself, he has earned his place in the rock pantheon of Barcelona´s greats. Navigating easily between popular genres, he has eluded being pigeonholed by his style and continues to be one of the cities favorite prodigal sons.
Barcelona has always been characterized for being a melting pot of identities. The city lends itself for cultural cross-pollination. It’s no surprise then, that a group like Ojos de Brujo found its footing in the streets of el Raval. A genre-bending experiment in musical creativity, these talented musicians have fused their influences in a large pallette of sounds that they have come to define as jipjop flamenkillo, a tongue twister of a name but a clear and focused execution of modern fusion styles.
Walk around the streets of the gothic quarter on a Friday evening and you will soon understand why this city is loved by the creative types. Maybe it’s the fact that the city defined itself in a opposition to the XX century dictatorship in the country, or the amount of talented immigrants who like to call Barcelona their home, whatever it is, the musical effervescence felt around every corner has surely inspired many souls, and lures the artist with its energy.
Do you wanna be part of the music revolution? Learn more at the Shine Music School, we offer combo and band lessons! And don’t forget to browse our Teacher pages, where we have featured videos of many of our teachers performing!
