Taking a Band Stand : UCI Program Will Celebrate the Music of William Grant Still and Other African American Composers

Contributions by black Americans to popular music and culture are well known; contributions to classical and band music are less so. But “a lot of great American band music was written by African Americans,” says Alfred Lang, the director of instrumental music at UC Irvine.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of African American composer William Grant Still, which Lang will observe by conducting the UCI Wind Ensemble tonight in works by Still, Julian Work, Adolphus C. Hailstork and Hale Smith at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“I decided to use the concert to stress our cultural brotherhood,” the conductor said recently. “The beauty of music is that people can close their eyes and just listen to it. It doesn’t matter what color you are. It’s important that people remember that. It doesn’t matter who wrote it: Beautiful music is beautiful. People are people.”

And “bands are much more universal than orchestras,” Lang continued. “Whereas orchestras began in Western Europe, there have been bands all over the world.”

Since Lang decided to program tonight’s concert, he noted, “we have had the regents’ vote on affirmative action, the decision in the O.J. Simpson trial, the student hunger strike on [the UCI] campus about affirmative action. All sorts of things. So the concert has taken on added significance.”

Julian Work was born in 1910 in Nashville, Tenn., and lives in New York. Hailstork, born in 1941, teaches at Norfolk State University in Virginia. Still and Smith have Orange County connections. Still and his family lived in Mission Viejo before his death in 1978 (his daughter, Judith [Anne] Still Headlee, remained there until she moved to Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1987) and Smith, now a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, was at UCI earlier this year as a Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer in Residence.

“I studied with Hale at the University of Connecticut,” Lang said. “I knew he wrote band as well as orchestral music. I figured, rather than an all-William Grant Still concert, I could highlight others including Hale because I have so much respect for him.”

The program will include Still’s “Fanfare for the 99th Fighter Squadron” and “From the Delta”; Work’s “Driftwood Patterns”; Hailstork’s “Spiritual,” and Smith’s “Take a Chance,” “Expansions” and “March and Fanfare for an Elegant Lady.”

“I think of the Still works as the bookends of the concert,” Lang said. “The ‘Fanfare’ will open the program, and the suite [‘From the Delta’] will close it.”

“From the Delta” is a three-movement work about 10 minutes long. The first movement is called “Work Song,” the second is “Spiritual,” and the last, “Dance,” is described by Lang as “very celebratory and upbeat.”

Work’s “Driftwood Patterns” is a very impressionistic piece. Hailstork’s “Spiritual” lives up to its title.

The three works by Smith range from aleatoric or “chance” music, to mosaic and expansive, to an inspirational march.

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Speaking from his home on Long Island, Smith described “Take a Chance” as “a very controlled set of variations which allow for the study of improvisational structure . . . certain players are given a series of tones which they can play within a given segment of measures, in any order they chose.”

All three works reflect his working method, succinctly described in the title of the second piece: “Expansions.”

“Expansion,” Smith said, “is the key to all my writing, no matter what it is, although the elaboration may be more or less conscious. In this case, it’s small intervals expanding to larger intervals, and of course the necessary contractions. Also, small rhythms would be expanded to their larger forms. There would be the expansion from just one or two instruments to the entire texture of the band.

“My general way of looking at music is based on the motive and deriving from that motive the entire piece. That’s what characterizes all great masterworks, from Monteverdi on through. They all exhibit this type of inner unity, of some little core motive from which all of it derives.”

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The final Smith work, “March and Fanfare for an Elegant Lady,” was commissioned by the Freeport (N.Y.) High School Band in conjunction with the unveiling of the refurbished Statue of Liberty.

When the work premiered in 1986, Smith recalls, he and the mayor of Freeport sat on an outdoor podium as “the band came down and played this piece. Then I had to say a few words. Freeport is probably as Republican as Orange County. I made a point of [explaining] the meaning of that title. I really do think she’s elegant, even though I don’t have any historical, personal reasons for looking at her with reverence. My ancestors didn’t come here by way of Ellis Island.

“But among those lines--’Send me your tempest tossed’--are ideas . . . I said, ‘If we paid attention to what that symbol really means, maybe this country could take care of some really serious business. Until we start paying some serious attention to these issues, we really are not getting to get through them.’ That ruffled a few feathers.”

* Alfred Lang will conduct the UCI Wind Ensemble in works by William Grant Still, Julian Work, Adolphus C. Hailstork and Hale Smith tonight at 8 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $11 ($6 for students). (714) 854-4646.