Category: music composition

It’s 1999 at Houston Baptist University, a religious college nestled in southwest Houston. The constant whistle of tires on pavement from the neighboring Southwest Freeway is no match for a row of nondescript practice rooms where two violinists—teacher and student—face a Manhasset music stand. The teacher’s black hair is pulled back into a rubber band; her mane is so thick that the elastic need not be looped twice. Clad in relaxed denim bell-bottom jeans and a soft, electric blue cotton T-shirt, Chanda Dancy, the teacher, is thrilled to be in the presence of music. The teenage musician, me, is desperate to show Dancy that she practiced the Kreutzer études assigned the week before.

Dancy was not like other classical-violin instructors. Her violin was always within reach to convey direction when words failed to capture the essence of how she wanted her student to feel the music. Unrestrained by the classical genre’s preoccupation with precision, Dancy possessed a musical fearlessness, which has informed her career from HBU to Hollywood. In her current work as a film composer, she aims to create music that sonically illustrates characters’ emotional journeys. She has scored documentaries, including Aftershock, a doc about two women who died during childbirth; television shows, including The Defeated, a post–World War II crime-fighting Netflix series; and films, including the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody. Last year she released her most critically acclaimed score yet, for J. D. Dillard’s Devotion. 

Devotion is a heart-wrenching film about Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), the first Black Naval aviator, during the Korean War. Dancy’s score is an emotional excavation of what it means to be Jesse, a highly skilled pilot who hypes himself up for missions by reciting racist remarks to himself in the mirror. Listeners hear these internal tug-of-wars paired with lush orchestral phrasing that gains and loses altitude along with the story line. Thanks to the rich layers of harp, strings, and even synthesizers, you can actually hear the expansiveness of the seas the pilots fly over.  

Both the story of Devotion and its production are meditations on talented Black Americans in predominantly white spaces. The film has a Black director, J. D. Dillard; a Black orchestra conductor, Anthony Parnther; and Dancy, a Black film composer. There are very few Black film composers, a minuscule number of which are women. “I’m a Black woman composer. And yeah, I do have a slightly different point of view when it comes to my artistic approach,” Dancy told me over the phone. “That’s to my advantage because I don’t sound like anyone else.” The historical significance of being one of relatively few Black people in classical music is not lost on Dancy, and she doesn’t deflect from it. “I embrace it. I am who I am, and this goes back to being from southwest Houston, Texas. I was always allowed to be comfortable in my own skin.”

Dancy’s path to success began in the 1980s, when more and more Black Houstonians were moving beyond historically Black neighborhoods such as the Third Ward and Sunnyside and into the southwest neighborhoods of Alief, Sharpstown, and Westchase. With multiple integrated racial and ethnic communities, southwest Houston was fertile ground for Black girls like Dancy to chart their own pathways. Dancy didn’t think twice about teaching herself how to play guitar, harp, and keyboard while cultivating the deep devotion to anime that shows up in her music. (“The [Macross Plus] score by Yoko Kanno has always stuck with me.”) “I’m definitely influenced by jazz and thick textural chords, as well as minimalism,” said Dancy. “Then there’s a little bit of blues and what my publicist calls my ‘anime influence,’ ” she said, laughing. “It’s the sound of nostalgia.”

Dancy first learned the violin in third grade—relatively late for violinists, who can start as early as three years old—at Houston’s T. H. Rogers School. Within a few years, she was composing. “Officially, the first [time] that I wrote to have other people play [I] was around twelve years old.” From intonation to posture to breath itself, the allowance for error for young classical musicians is nearly nonexistent. Classical musicians are trained to replicate, not deviate. At least, that’s how most classical musicians are trained. “I saw instruments as a fun way to create your own stuff,” said Dancy, reflecting on her years as a young violinist. “My violin was not just to play Beethoven. I didn’t look at a piano to play Rachmaninoff. I looked at a piano and thought, ‘Ooh, what if I do this? And what if I do that?’ ”

While Dancy eventually graduated from prestigious composition academies, it was her undergraduate study at HBU (recently renamed Houston Christian University)—a Christian college with about 2,500 students—that transformed composition from an intuitive passion into a career. “The school was so tiny that the dean of the school of music was also my composition professor,” said Dancy. Her dean and teacher saw Dancy’s enthusiasm and created a composition curriculum specifically for her. Dancy directed and scored her own short films at HBU, the University of Southern California’s Screen Scoring program, and the Sundance Composers Lab, experiences that fueled her past two decades as a film and television composer.

These days Dancy is happily settled in Los Angeles, but she still misses Texas. Well, specific aspects of Texas. “I miss the cost of housing and Tex-Mex,” she told me. She also misses Houston’s Vietnamese food. “There’s something about Bellaire Boulevard, like it just can’t be beat for good Vietnamese food.” After Devotion, she scored the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. She told me that both scores are rooted in recognizable character themes, approached with the utmost care and consideration for the real-life people the films honor. “The biggest difference is the sheer scale of the Devotion score, which was recorded with 109 musicians, including a choir,” she said. (I Wanna Dance With Somebody had about half of that.)

She remains booked and busy with a plethora of other projects she’s legally unable to discuss yet. Plenty of composers would be content with Dancy’s current success, but Dancy is already aspiring to accomplish more. “I would love to work on a big Marvel or Disney film,” she said. “The bigger the canvas, the better.”

Despite the early anticipation that Dancy might make history as the first Black woman nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score, Dancy wasn’t recognized for Devotion. Nor was she dismayed. “When I set out to do this score, I wanted to do something really big and really amazing and spread my wings. And it was shocking to get that Oscar buzz when it was just literally me just being myself,” said Dancy. “I’m having so much fun. And even though I didn’t get the nomination, it feels as if I did, because the doors have opened.”

A prolific composer whose work is represented on more than 60 CDs, including three solo discs of vocal, chamber and orchestral music, Tann wrote music that was performed worldwide, from Bangkok and Beijing to Cardiff in her native Wales and across the United States as well as locally. She was commissioned by festivals, ensembles and artists as varied as the North American Welsh Choir, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Empire State Youth Orchestra and pianist Max Lifchitz, a University at Albany professor and fellow composer.

“Her music has such honesty and passion to it, just like Hilary as a person,” said Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, a local violinist who knew and worked with Tann for more than 30 years. Schwartz played Tann’s compositions in the former St. Cecilia Orchestra, which Schwartz co-founded in the early 1990s, and several times with her current ensemble, the Musicians of Ma’alwyck, of which Schwartz is the director.

For more than 15 years the Musicians of Ma’alwyck collaborated with students in Tann’s composing class at Union, with the ensemble rehearsing the students’ pieces and then playing them for a live recording before an audience.

“It was very special to see their delight at hearing their pieces played live instead of on a synthesizer,” said Schwartz. “Hilary always made them all feel like they had valid musical ideas and a musical voice. That was a a real gift.”   

Reviewing a 2020 recording by the Sirius Quartet of Tann’s 2014 quartet “And the Snow Did Lie,” Times Union classical critic Joseph Dalton wrote, “Tann’s music is shimmering and weightless, effective and moving.” He continued, “The central portions of the piece are rich with tunes that spill out in a flow more generous than deliberate, still sweet and rapturous … (reinforcing) the grounded spiritual ecstasy that is Tann’s distinctive musical outlook.”

Tann’s most frequent source of inspiration was nature and its scenery. “I can’t write if I don’t have the image. That’s the seed,” she told the Times Union in 2005. Her large catalog of works includes orchestra pieces with titles such as “Adirondack Light,” “The Open Field” and “Through the Echoing Timber.” 

A 2005 piece titled “From the Feather to the Mountain,” commissioned and premiered by ESYO, was inspired by pen-and-ink drawings by the late local artist Arnold Bittleman; that same year, Lifchitz premiered her piano work “Light from the Cliffs.” Reviewing a 2010 concert in Manhattan by the Lifchitz-led North/South Chamber Orchestra that featured Tann’s “The Walls of Morlais Castle,” Steve Smith of The New York Times called it “a handsome piece for string orchestra, with dusky melodies and bracing, rustic rhythms.” 

Born in a coal-mining village in South Wales after the end of World War II, Tann received her undergraduate degree in musical composition from the University of Wales at Cardiff and went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees at Princeton University. She started at Union College in 1980, bringing a compositional bent to a department she would later chair for 15 years. She retired in 2019, retaining the title of an endowed chair, the John Howard Payne Professor of Music Emerita.

The college credits Tann with being an important part of the creation of its Taylor Music Center, a 14,000-square-foot project that included a 120-seat recital hall, Emerson Auditorium. It opened in 2006.

In addition to nature, Tann was inspired by Japanese culture and the traditional music of Japan, leading her to taking seven years of lessons on the shakuhachi, an ancient Japanese vertical bamboo flute. She traveled to Japan to study with a shakuhachi master.

“She knows more about it than most Japanese, and that’s no hyperbole,” Bullard, also a longtime student of Japanese language and culture, told the Times Union in 2005. A professional organist, Bullard married Tann in 2002. She, after many years of living solo in the Adirondacks, moved to the Marshall House, a Schuylerville home of historic significance that dates to the Revolutionary War and has been in the Bullard family for about a century.

Tann was also an aficionado and practitioner of haiku. She was for many years a member of a Saratoga County haiku group, whose monthly meetings lasted five or six hours, with members reading aloud a dozen or more new haiku that were then discussed. She coordinated Union’s 2015 hosting of the Haiku North America, the largest and oldest gathering of haiku poets. More than 100 people attended from around the world. 

“Haiku keeps me in the moment,” Tann told the Times Union in 2005. “With composing, one is always projecting ahead. (Haiku) pulls me back to the ‘A-ha!’ of the day.”

Funeral arrangements were unclear Thursday. Schwartz said she hopes to include a Tann composition in the Musicians of Ma’alwyck’s concert in June. A scholarship named after Tann and her predecessor as Union’s music department chair, called the Hugh Allen Wilson & Hilary Tann Annual Music Fund, was established by a 1990 Union graduate. It provides four to five students per year with scholarships to cover instrumental or voice lessons.

The Denison Department of Music presents music events for the community to enjoy. Tickets are required for some events. For information and tickets contact Phil Meyer at 740-587-6544 or visit denison.edu/events/arts. Events include:

• Saturday, Feb. 11, at 7 p.m.: The Department of Music presents contemporary sounds featuring electric flutist Melissa Keeling in the Burke Recital Hall of the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts (240 West Broadway).

• Friday, Feb. 17, at 7 p.m.: The Department of Music presents its annual Bluegrass and American Roots Festival: Muleskinner tribute in Swasey Chapel (200 Chapel Drive). Ticketed event.

• Saturday, Feb. 18, at 12 p.m.: The Department of Music presents a festival of bluegrass and American roots music and workshops in the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts (240 West Broadway).

• Saturday, Feb. 18, at 7 p.m.: The Department of Music presents its annual Bluegrass and American Roots Festival: The McLain Family Band in concert in Swasey Chapel (200 Chapel Drive). Ticketed event.

• Monday, Feb. 20, at 7:30 p.m.: The Department of Music presents a senior degree recital by vocalist Allie O’Connor in the Burke Recital Hall of the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts (240 West Broadway).

• Tuesday, Feb. 21, at 7 p.m.: The Department of Music presents Paulina Villarreal, mezzo-soprano, performing with Sun Min Kim, piano in the Burke Recital Hall of the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts (240 West Broadway).

• Thursday, Feb. 23, at 7:30 p.m.: The Department of Music presents a senior degree recital in composition by Jaelyn Roth in the Burke Recital Hall of the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts (240 West Broadway).

• Friday, Feb. 24, at 7:30 p.m.: The Department of Music presents the Denison Chamber Singers in concert in the Burke Recital Hall of the Michael D. Eisner Center for the Performing Arts (240 West Broadway).

Information submitted by Denison University.

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Denison University Department of Music announces February concerts

Composer Burt Bacharach, whose hits such as Do You Know the Way to San Jose and Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head provided a mellow alternative soundtrack to rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s and 1970s, has died at the age of 94, his publicist said on Thursday.

Bacharach died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in the Los Angeles area with his family by his side, Tina Brausam told the Reuters news agency.

His songs, many written in a 16-year collaboration with lyricist Hal David, were neither rock nor strictly pop. They filled American radio broadcasts and were featured in major movies, making them as frequently heard in the 1960s and early 1970s as works by the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.

Bacharach wrote more than 500 songs, many featuring a tinkling piano and subtly seductive horn hooks. He penned hits for singers ranging from Dionne Warwick to the Carpenters. More than 1,200 artists performed his songs, which won six Grammys and three Oscars. Bacharach and David had 30 Top 40 hits in the 60s alone.

“He was just different,” David once told an interviewer. “Innovative, original. His music spoke to me. I’d hear his melodies, and I’d hear lyrics, I’d hear rhymes, I’d hear thoughts and I’d hear it almost immediately.”

For Bacharach, his talent was simple: “I’m a person that always tries to deal with melody.”

With suave good looks and a cool demeanor, Bacharach was described by songwriter Sammy Cahn as “the only songwriter who doesn’t look like a dentist”.

Bacharach’s songs were recorded by an A-to-Z of artists, literally – from Aretha (Franklin) to Zoot (Sims).

“The shorthand version of him is that he’s something to do with easy listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album Painted from Memory with Bacharach, said in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press. “It may be agreeable to listen to these songs, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try playing them. Try singing them.”

A box set, The Songs of Bacharach & Costello, is due to come out on March 3.

In addition to six Grammys for his songs, he was honoured with a seventh for an instrumental album and the lifetime achievement award,

He received two Academy Awards in 1970 for the score of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and for the song Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, which he shared with David. In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, won an Oscar for Best That You Can Do, the theme from the movie Arthur. His other movie soundtracks included What’s New, Pussycat?, Alfie and the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale.

Bacharach was a frequent guest at the White House whether the president was Republican or Democrat. In 2012, he was presented the Gershwin Prize by Barack Obama, who had sung a few seconds of Walk on By during a campaign appearance.

Married four times, Bacharach formed his most lasting ties to work. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to write Alfie and might spend hours tweaking a single chord. Sager once observed that Bacharach’s life routines essentially stayed the same – only the wives changed.

Bacharach was essentially a pop composer, but his songs became hits for country artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues performers (Chuck Jackson), soul singers (Franklin, Luther Vandross) and synth-pop musicians (Naked Eyes). He reached a new generation of listeners in the 1990s with the help of Costello and others.

In the 21st century, he was still testing new ground, writing his own lyrics and recording with rapper Dr Dre.

He was married to his first wife, Paula Stewart, from 1953 to 1958 and married for a fourth time to Jane Hansen in 1993. He also wed the actor Angie Dickinson. He is survived by Hansen as well as his children Oliver, Raleigh and Cristopher, Brausam said. He was preceded in death by his daughter with Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach.

A pianist passionate about jazz, Bacharach was born on May 12, 1928, in Kansas City, Missouri, and studied the art of composition in several American universities.

Bacharach was drafted into the army in the late 1940s and was still on active duty during the Korean War, but officers stateside soon learned of his gifts and wanted him at home. When he did go overseas, it was to Germany, where he wrote orchestrations for a recreation centre on a military base.

After his military service, he was hired by Marlene Dietrich as an arranger and musical director for her tours.

The young musician and ageless singer quickly clicked, and Bacharach travelled the world with her in the late 1950s and early 60s. During each performance, she would introduce him in grand style: “I would like you to meet the man – he’s my arranger, he’s my accompanist, he’s my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer, but that isn’t true. He’s everybody’s composer – Burt Bacharach!”

In 1957, he met David, who died in 2012 and with whom he would form one of the most successful partnerships in the music industry.

Working in a tiny office in Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building, they produced their first million-seller, Magic Moments, sung in 1958 by Perry Como. In 1962, they spotted a backup singer for the Drifters, Warwick, who had a “very special kind of grace and elegance”, Bacharach recalled.

The trio produced hit after hit. The songs were as complicated to record as they were easy to hear. Bacharach liked to experiment with time signatures and arrangements, such as having two pianists play on Walk on By, their performances slightly out of sync to give the song “a jagged kind of feeling”, he wrote in his memoir.

The Bacharach-David partnership ended with the dismal failure of a 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon. Bacharach became so depressed he isolated himself in his vacation home in Del Mar, California, and refused to work.

“I didn’t want to write with Hal or anybody,” he told the AP in 2004. Nor did he want to fulfil a commitment to record Warwick. She and David both sued him.

Bacharach and David eventually reconciled. When David died, Bacharach praised him for writing lyrics “like a miniature movie”.

Meanwhile, Bacharach kept working, vowing never to retire, always believing that a good song could make a difference.

“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before,” he told the AP in 2018. “It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do to it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.”

Movie Event Premieres During Holy Week and Features Pope Francis, Michael W. Smith, 2CELLOS, Tori Kelly, Clara Barbier Serrano, Tauren Wells, and More

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

NASHVILLE, Tenn., Feb. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Trinity Broadcasting Network, Fathom Events, and Impact Productions announce the debut of their new musical documentary, THE JOURNEY: A Music Special from Andrea Bocelli, coming to theaters nationwide for four nights only on April 2-4 and April 6, 2023. THE JOURNEY follows world-renowned tenor Andrea Bocelli and his wife Veronica as they travel through Italy’s beautiful terrain on horseback to complete parts of the unforgettable Via Francigena — a historical pilgrimage in which Christians journey to Rome to worship at grand cathedrals and visit the burial sites of revered saints and apostles.

Tickets can be purchased online at Fathom Events. A complete list of theater locations is available at the Fathom Events website (participating theaters are subject to change).

Watch the trailer here: TheJourney.movie.

Combining world-class musical performances with intimate conversations across the awe-inspiring Italian countryside, THE JOURNEY: A Music Special from Andrea Bocelli is an exploration of the moments that define us, the songs that inspire us, and the relationships that connect us to what matters most. You’ll be swept away by THE JOURNEY of beautiful music, creation, faith, and love.

Also featuring a blessing by Pope Francis, and musical performances by Michael W. Smith, 2CELLOS, Tori Kelly, Clara Barbier Serrano, Tauren Wells, TAYA, Matteo Bocelli, 40 Fingers, and Katherine Jenkins, THE JOURNEY will inspire audiences with powerful performances and spectacular scenery.

“We are so excited to be bringing THE JOURNEY to theaters across the country,” said TBN president Matt Crouch. “This was such a life-changing documentary to film and I hope it will reignite the faith and passion of audiences as we bring Via Francigena to their hometowns.”

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“Andrea Bocelli is a masterful tenor and his voice, combined with the beautiful footage and music in THE JOURNEY make for an incredible event,” said Ray Nutt, CEO of Fathom Events. “This documentary of Andrea’s faith-filled pilgrimage will be an incredible addition to theaters this Easter holiday.”

For more information, visit TheJourney.movie.

About Trinity Broadcasting Network:

Trinity Broadcasting Network is the world’s largest and most watched faith-and-family broadcaster, reaching over 175 nations across the earth with inspirational and entertaining programming 24 hours a day in 17 languages and on over 30 global networks. As the world’s most influential non-profit religious broadcaster, TBN has led the way in expanding the impact of faith-based television across the earth through the creation of innovative content designed to reach every viewer demographic with the life-changing message of hope and grace. To find out more about the TBN Networks, visit us at tbn.org.

About Fathom Events:

Fathom is a recognized leader in the entertainment industry as one of the top distributors of content to movie theaters in North America. Owned by AMC Entertainment Inc. (NYSE: AMC); Cinemark Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CNK); and Regal, a subsidiary of the Cineworld Group (LSE: CINE.L). Fathom operates the largest cinema distribution network, delivering a wide variety of programming and experiences to cinema audiences in all the top U.S. markets and to more than 45 countries. For more information, visit www.FathomEvents.com.

About Impact Productions:

Impact Productions has built a reputation for unifying inspiring messages with captivating entertainment. Over the last two decades, Impact has partnered with TBN to produce hundreds of hours of inspirational programming, collaborating with top faith leaders like Joel Osteen, Steven Furtick, Joyce Meyer, and T.D. Jakes. Impact’s team of storytellers has created content for NBCUniversal, Harper Collins, Sony Pictures, Disney+, and more. Impact creatives have overseen the creation of an extensive catalog of content for brands like VeggieTales, MikeRoweWorks, and singer Andrea Bocelli.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tbn-presents-the-journey-a-music-special-from-andrea-bocelli-coming-to-theaters-nationwide-beginning-april-2-301741373.html

SOURCE TBN; Fathom Events; Impact Productions