Atlanta Music Festival 2011
Songs of Aspiration, Hope and Progress
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Festival Concert
Saturday, September 24, 7:00 PM, 2011
Emerson Hall, The Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts
Emory
University
Admission $25 ($10
students) from the
Emory Box Office -
Directions
The Festival week includes presentations at Woodward Academy, a
gala donor's reception, a vocal masterclass,
presentations on African
American poetry and music, and
Lift Every Voice and Sing
A recreation of the premiere of
James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson's national hymn with 500 Atlanta school
children
Indra Thomas,
Dwight Andrews,
Rudolph Byrd,
Steven Darsey
Friday, September 23, 12:00-1:00 PM, Symphony Hall,
Woodruff Arts Center
Free and open to the public
Click here for Music Festival Schedule
Atlanta Music Festival
In September 2011, First Congregational Church, Meridian
Herald, and Emory University will present the 2011 Atlanta Music Festival:
Songs of Aspiration, Hope, and Progress.
Over three days, this ambitious collaboration will involve the Atlanta
community through dialogue, master classes for young musicians, a dramatic
re-creation of the inaugural performance of James Weldon Johnson¹s "Lift Every
Voice and Sing," and a climatic concert featuring opera star and Atlanta native
Indra Thomas with the Meridian Herald Chorale.
In 1909, members of First Congregational Church were denied
admittance to the Metropolitan Opera Company, which was on tour in Atlanta.
Their response was the creation of the “All Colored Music Festival” that
featured the most prominent African American concert artists of the day:
Roland Hayes, Harry T. Burleigh, and Sisserati Patti were a few of the
celebrated musicians who performed. Organizers, after having been excluded from
opera week, intentionally invited the white community, who came in strong
numbers.
First Congregational Church and Meridian Herald
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Dwight Andrews and Steven Darsey
Through their collaborations over the past ten years,
Meridian Herald – a nonprofit that promotes cultural traditions – and Atlanta’s
First Congregational Church – an historic African American congregation –have
celebrated African American concert music and sought to increase understanding
among races and faiths.
In the wake of Atlanta’s race riots in 1906, First
Congregational Church, led by Pastor Henry Hugh Proctor, the congregation’s
first African American Pastor, instituted programs to improve the prospects of
black communities and to encourage racial harmony. In 1910, they established the
Atlanta Colored Music Festival to celebrate African American music and, though
blacks had been refused admittance to Atlanta’s opera week, to invite the white
community to experience the high cultural attainments of African Americans.
Concert planners brought in performers of international stature, including
singer-composer Harry T. Burleigh, soprano Anita Patti Brown, concert violinist
Joseph Douglas, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Proctor and First Church’s
initiatives, together with those of other black and white leaders, were the
first steps in creating avenues for discourse that five decades later would help
Atlanta shed the legacy of Jim Crow.
Steven Darsey, a white southerner, and
Dwight Andrews, an African American, articulate a convicted vision of justice
and grace. Andrews, Pastor of First Congregational Church, has revived his
congregation’s music festival tradition in their ten year collaboration with
Meridian Herald, and in May 2010 they presented the 100th anniversary Music
Festival Concert at First Church. Darsey, music director, and Andrews, artistic
director, explore their races’ historic relationships via vernacular musical
forms and their evolutions into contemporary classical expressions. This unique
concert tradition has the historical gravity to project a future of shared
promise. Music, with its mysterious power to manifest and transfigure reality,
can inspire us all to advance this future.
For our 2011 concert, now collaborating with Emory
University, we will resume the
national platform of the original Music Festivals with international opera star
and Atlanta native Indra Thomas as the featured performer, supported by The
Chancel Choir of First Congregational Church and the Meridian Chorale. For
future performances, we intend to commission compositions from local and
national musicians that explicate Georgia’s particular racial heritage and help
to realize her promise; to expand the range of art and institutions involved;
and to make the fruits of this work available to an ever-expanding community.
