Program Notes

Jonathan Bailey Holland, Dean and Composer

Jonathan Bailey Holland, Dean and Professor of Music at ­Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music, was raised in Flint, Michigan, by parents who worked for the Flint schools. ­Music was always playing on the radio or from his father’s extensive record collection of everything from jazz to classical. Jonathan says that all styles excited him from an early age and he reacted to “any kind of music that made you move!”

Jonathan began piano at ten and added trumpet a year ­later, inspired by his dad’s recordings of Miles Davis and other jazz greats. Then an excellent band teacher encouraged him to take music seriously. When he was in eighth grade, a poster for Interlochen Arts Academy piqued his interest, so he sent away a postcard for a catalogue. The very idea of Interlochen ­excited him, a place where everyone was focused on music and the arts. He convinced his parents that Interlochen was the best high school for him.

Jonathan played the trumpet seriously during his four years at Interlochen and began to focus more on composition, ­winning a school-wide award for his very first piece. He ­recalls an assignment to compose a solo violin piece. When he sat down to write, however, he’d just had an argument with a friend; that argument found its way into his work! 

Interlochen prepared Jonathan well for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he earned his Bachelor of ­Music degree, and Curtis prepared him well for Harvard, where he earned his PhD in composition. And composing is one of his passions. He often sits down at the piano to try out ideas for a new piece and, when it’s partially formed, will transfer what he’s written to his computer, where a notation program plays back his draft and lets him make changes.

Once a piece is ready for public performance, it’s “always ­interesting to hear someone else play your music. It’s a bit humbling and amazing to watch someone spend so much of their time and energy on something you’ve composed!” We asked how he reacts if a performance doesn’t quite hit it. “Someone will do something that’s not quite what I wrote,” he said, “but that can be okay, even interesting. Other times a conductor may make changes. You have to let the current performance happen and wait for another one in the future. If something isn’t quite what you’d like it to be, you can’t do anything about it!”

We hope the ESO’s performance of Motor City Dance Mix lives up to Jonathan Bailey Holland’s expectations! 

—Kelly Brest van Kempen

Cuban Overture “Rumba”

George Gershwin (1898–1937)
10 minutes (1932)

When Aaron Copland returned from the sun-baked visit south of the border that inspired El Sálon México, he wrote, “Other tourists will pull out their snapshots to show you what a country looks like, but a composer wants to show you what a country sounds like.” The year before, 1932, George Gershwin left the bustle of his beloved New York City for a holiday in Havana and, like Copland, returned home with his own musical postcard. Gershwin planned to swim and play tennis and visit the gaming halls to relax from the pressures attendant upon the Broadway successes of Strike Up the Band, Girl Crazy and Of Thee I Sing and the composition of such orchestral works as An American in Paris and the Second Rhapsody, but his fame preceded him, and he was showered with constant attention from the Cubans, including a moonlight serenade by a sixteen-piece rumba band beneath the window of his Almendares Hotel suite.

Before Gershwin left Havana, the idea for an orchestral work based on Cuban music was spawned. He acquired a number of native percussion instruments for the score and had them shipped back to New York, since his immediate plan was to continue on to Europe. However, the death of his father on May 14th forced him to return home, where work on the Cuban Overture gave him an outlet for his grief. Like most musical works, however, this one gives little clue to its creator’s immediate feelings, and there is no touch of sorrow in the finished product. The score was originally named Rumba, but Gershwin changed it after the premiere because, he wrote, “When people read Rumba they expect the Peanut Vendor or a like piece of music. Cuban Overture gives a more just idea of the character and intent of the music.”

The brilliant scoring, rhythmic vitality and melodic abundance of the outer sections of the Cuban Overture are nicely contrasted by the work’s central section, a languid dance based on the Habanera.

— Program note by Dr. Richard E. Rodda.

Mother and Child

William Grant Still (1895–1978)
7 minutes (1943)

William Grant Still and Florence Smith, who would later make her name as Florence Price, grew up only a few city blocks apart in the heart of Little Rock, Arkansas. Theirs was a neighborhood of Black professionals. The Still and Smith families were close. They moved in the same circles and were interested in the same intellectual matters.

Florence and William became lifelong friends. And in the early 1930s, after they had left Little Rock to study music and begin their careers as composers, they each wrote symphonies that are now considered the bedrock of Black orchestral music: William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony in 1930, Florence Price’s First Symphony, in E minor, in 1932.

Still moved to Los Angeles in 1934. But in 1943 he walked away from the most lucrative assignment of his career, working on the soundtrack for Stormy Weather, starring Lena Horne and Cab Calloway, because he could not stand the way Black people were being portrayed in the musical. That same year, he received a commission for a violin and piano piece from Louis Kaufman, who had played on many of Hollywood’s most beloved soundtracks, including Gone with the Wind and Rebecca.

The suite that Still composed has three movements, each of them inspired by the work by one of the Harlem Renaissance artists. The second movement is indebted to a series of pieces on the theme of the mother and child by Sargent Claude Johnson. Still eventually took its soaring violin melody and rich, shifting piano chords and arranged the music for string orchestra. Although Still did not say so, this simple yet emotionally complex music is also a kind of family portrait, reflecting the story of the young Carrie Lena Fambro Still, recently a mother and a widow, who left her Mississippi home with her infant son late in 1895 to make a life for them in Little Rock.

— Program note by Phillip Huscher.

Reprinted with permission © 2025 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association

Piano Concerto in G Major

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
21 minutes (1931)

Ravel wrote home from his first tour of the United States in 1928, “I am seeing magnificent cities, enchanting country, but the triumphs are exhausting. Ravel returned home to France weary and famished—he found American food virtually inedible — but assured that his fame was truly international. Later, in 1928, Oxford University gave him an honorary doctorate, calling him “the glory and delight of his beloved country, a man mighty with talent both lively and tender.” But Ravel would only live to compose three more major works — a ballet, Boléro, which quickly became so popular it embarrassed him; and two piano concertos.

The concertos, one for the left hand, and this one in G major, were written simultaneously. The left-hand concerto was commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during the first weeks of the war in 1914. Ravel originally intended to play the other concerto himself, but by the time he put the final touches on the score, he realized that his health was rapidly declining and he would never perform it. Marguerite Long, who had studied with him (as well as with Debussy), played the first performance in Paris, with the composer conducting. The premiere was a triumph. Ravel subsequently ignored his doctor’s orders and went on a four-month tour with Long to introduce the concerto throughout Europe.

The concerto opens with an allegro that suggests a Spanish fiesta spiked with American jazz. Occasional blue notes and trombone smears confirm how carefully Ravel had listened when he and Gershwin visited Harlem jazz spots together. The velvety slow movement, for all its lush harmonies and French sonorities, is deeply indebted to Mozart; in fact, Ravel told Marguerite Long that he wrote it slowly and painstakingly, “two measures at a time, with frequent reference to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet.” The opening, uninterrupted melody is much longer than any phrase in Mozart — an unadorned piano solo that unfolds slowly, twisting and turning in unexpected ways, all in one huge breath. The third movement was an afterthought—an exhilarating, saucy finale composed shortly before the premiere and designed to leave the audience in high spirits.

— Program note by Phillip Huscher.

Reprinted with permission © 2025 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association

Motor City Dance Mix

Jonathan Bailey Holland (1974–)
8 minutes (2003)

Commissioned by the Detroit Symphony, Motor City Dance Mix was written to celebrate the 2003 opening of the Max M. Fisher Music Center at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall. The work celebrates the multitude of musical influences associated with Detroit — the Motor City —and music that has influenced me. While intended as a festive concert opener, the work takes a different orientation than typical orchestral openers. The work finds inspiration from music that is often part of a festive celebration — dance music! Motor City Dance Mix doesn’t use any specific dance music as influence, but rather captures the essence of various styles of music that inspire motion.

— Program note by Jonathan Bailey Holland.

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun  

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
10 Minutes (1894)

Debussy is arguably the greatest of all French composers, and the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is both the earliest of his masterpieces and one of the most influential works in the history of music. It has been described both as the first work of twentieth century music and as the start of musical Impressionism. The Prelude is based upon a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé about a faun (half man, half goat) daydreaming about possibly non-existent nymphs.

A faun is typically depicted playing a panpipe, so Debussy opens with a long flute melody, one of the most famous solos in the orchestral literature. This theme is without strong tonality and lacks a definitive feeling of an ending. After several minutes, the woodwind section plus horn in unison introduce a contrasting theme in the style of Debussy’s more overtly romantic works, such as Clair de Lune. The climax of the piece is reached with the restatement of this romantic theme by the strings, after which the flute melody is recapitulated leading to an evanescent conclusion.

— Program note by David Ellis.

Billy the Kid Suite

Aaron Copland (1900–1990)
20 minutes (1939)

The Suite is taken from the ballet “Billy the Kid” written for the American Ballet Caravan at the suggestion of its director Lincoln Kirstein and based on a story by Eugene Loring. The following is a quotation from an article by Aaron Copland “Notes on a Cowboy Ballet.” The action begins and closes on the open prairie. The central portion of the ballet concerns itself with significant moments in the life of Billy the Kid. The first scene is a street in a frontier town. Familiar figures amble by. Cowboys saunter into town, some on horseback, others with their lassos. Some Mexican women do a Jarabe which is interrupted by a fight between two drunks. Attracted by the gathering crowd, Billy is seen for the first time as a boy of twelve with his mother. The brawl turns ugly, guns are drawn, and in some unaccountable way, Billy’s mother is killed. Without an instant’s hesitation, in cold fury, Billy draws a knife from a cowhand’s sheath and stabs his mother’s slayers. His short but famous career had begun. In swift succession we see episodes in Billy’s later life. At night, under the stars, in a quiet card game with his outlaw friends. Hunted by a posse led by his former friend Pat Garrett. Billy is pursued. A running gun battle ensues. Billy is captured. A drunken celebration takes place. Billy in prison is, of course, followed by one of Billy’s legendary escapes. Tired and worn in the desert, Billy rests with his girl (Pas de deux). Starting from a deep sleep, he senses movement in the shadows. The posse has finally caught up with him. It is the end.

— Program note from the score.