Music Notes – Sunday, June 29th:
This Sunday’s musician is Bill McNally
About Sunday’s guest musician:
The New York Times calls him “a hot item” and “powerful,” and the Santa Barbara Independent called him a pianist, “…with great sympathy and insight.” William McNally is a two–time winner of the World Championship Old–Time Piano Playing Contest, and three–time winner of their New Rag Contest. He now serves as their Contest Coordinator, and he has since taken on the role of the Scott Joplin Foundation’s Ragtime Kid Program Director. His performance of George Perle’s Concertino for Piano, Winds and Timpani at Tanglewood, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru, was hailed for its “nimble,” “miraculous,” “sharp soloing.” As a collaborative pianist, McNally has performed with a wide range of musicians, including the Verona String Quartet, mezzo–soprano Davida Karanas, the Mark Morris Dance Company, and many others.
His album Dream Shadows was released to high acclaim: reviews in Fanfare Magazine—two of them—called the recording “highly natural and persuasive…his prismatic range of touch and tone allows him to trace out the shifting moods of the music—from the sentimental to the nonchalant to the smashing—with unusual sensitivity…the disc is so good, from beginning to end, that it’s hard to know what to highlight…a treasure!” McNally’s “serious classical” CD with works by Brahms, Reger and Busoni was lauded by the New York Times as “effortless…fascinating…mercurial… and intelligently curious.” This June, Rivermont Records will release Piano Puzzles & Magic Trix, McNally’s recording of the complete solo piano works of Arthur Schutt, packaged with the first serious biography of Schutt. It is paired with novelty works by Vincent Matthew Johnson, and it also includes the premiere recording of four works by Art Tatum.
He completed his doctorate at CUNY’s Graduate Center, where he studied with Ursula Oppens and wrote a ragtime–focused dissertation. He has served on the faculties of Texas State University, CUNY Queens College, and Temple University. He currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife Daria and nine–year–old son Nick, where he spends most of his “free” time cooking, biking, hiking, and cleaning up loose chess pieces. Check out his two upcoming outdoor performances for Piano Cleveland this July! For more information, visit http://www.williammcnally.com.
Prelude: Intermezzo (1909, Manuel M. Ponce)
Originally written for guitar, Manuel Ponce’s associations with the great guitarist Andres Segovia and composer-pianist Isaac Albeniz prompted him to transcribe Intermezzo (and a good many other works) for solo piano. The tune is simple but haunting, and evocative of Spanish ballades written around that time. (Many of those were written by Ponce, of course.)
Song: Woyaya – Amarfio, Amoa, Bailey, Bedeau, Osei, Richardson, & Tontoh
Primarily written by Ghanaian drummer Sol Amarifio (1938-2022), “Woyaya” (also known as “We Are Going” or “Heaven Knows”) is the title song of a 1971 album by Oisibisa, a group of Ghanaian and Caribbean musicians. The song was frequently heard in work camps throughout central West Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The word “Woyaya” has no literal English translation but can have multiple meanings, as is the case with many scat syllables (a common feature in West African music). The arrangement of “Woyaya” used in our service (and appearing as #1020 in our Singing the Journey hymnbook) comes from Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Centering Music: Novelette #1 in C Major (1927, Francis Poulenc)
Poulenc’s three Novelettes were written almost thirty years apart, but gathered and published together as a set. The first of these has a main theme that seems almost too serious for Poulenc, but with two lighter intervening episodes and some gentle surprises in the main theme, he keeps the music from ever becoming decadent or heavy.
Offertory Music: Mississippi Shivers (1924, Zez Confrey)
Following the success of such early works as “Kitten on the Keys” and “Dizzy Fingers,” Zez Confrey (1895-1971) found himself in demand among publishers, promoters, and the public at large. 1924 proved to be an especially good year for Confrey: he published his African Suite and Paul Whiteman invited him to participate in the spectacular historic concert at the Aeolian Hall in New York City. (Advertisements proclaimed, “Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra Will Offer an Experiment in Modern Music, Assisted by Zez Confrey and George Gershwin.”) There, on 12 February 1924, Gershwin premiered his Rhapsody in Blue, and Confrey performed an orchestrated “Kitten.”
But the African Suite was something else entirely: simpler, not at all flashy, just a series of glimpses into a variety of moods and scenes. In “Mississippi Shivers” (mistitled as “Kinda Careless”), Confrey provides us with a performance that merrily buzzes along; but for me this is a moment caught in time, where one relaxes in the thick and humid air of summer against a riverbank.
Song: Touch the Earth, Reach the Sky – Lewis-McLaren
Classically trained at the renowned Eastman Conservatory of Music, Maine native Grace Lewis-McLaren (b. 1939) is a Unitarian Universalist musician who has served our faith in many different roles for numerous congregations. McLaren wrote “Touch the Earth, Reach the Sky” (Singing the Living Tradition #301) to support the theme of the 1988 UU General Assembly in Palm Springs, California, where it was first sung as part of the opening ceremony.
Postlude: Sapphire (1938, Art Tatum)
A tune Art Tatum recorded multiple times across the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s was Eubie Blake’s 1930 masterpiece “Memories of You.” A comparative listening to these various performances demonstrates the flexibility of Tatum’s improvisatory skill. Yet there are enough scraps to be gleaned from the various performances to suggest that Tatum’s notated “Sapphire” was none other than “Memories of You” in disguise, just one of his many interpretations of the tune. (His 1945 recording seems to come closest.)
-Notes by Bill McNally and Mike Carney