Suite for Orchesrtra
Duration: 20:00
Date of Composition: 1992
PROGRAM NOTES: Various notations for an “Orchestra Suite” are dated in my sketchbook as early as January, 1990, but extensive composition did not begin until January of 1992. The first two movements were finished in short score by July. After the interruption of nearly a year to compose an opera, the third movement and orchestration were completed, August, 1993.
The Suite for Orchestra is in three movements, the typical slow-fast-slow design. The form of the outer movements is the result of an intuitive combining and crosscutting of material that stems from both memory and new invention. In this process I allow the music to tell me what must come next. The middle movement, Pastorale, is in three-part form, with an extended middle section that includes a Native American song from the Ojibway tribe. The original title, Chekahbay Tebik Ondandayan, has been translated as “My Bark Canoe.”
I composed Suite for Orchestra expressly for the Fort Smith Symphony Orchestra as a tribute to my hometown music teachers, friends, and family, all of whom were important in forming the early musical values which have served me well over the past two decades of my professional career. For this reason, there is a certain nostalgia (for me, at least) written into the Suite. I had especially wished to pay tribute to Esther Graham, my piano teacher for over 12 years until I went away to music school in New York. Her many hours of patience with me at her neighborhood teaching studio – “all the scales and all the arpeggios” – formed the basis early on of my piano technique and knowledge of music theory.
I have dedicated Suite for Orchestra, in memoriam to Willie Molly Dodson Clark, my Aunt “B.” Like most of my Mother’s siblings, she was quite musical, and the songs she sang and the quality of her voice is etched in my musical memory. She would have loved the melody and words to My Bark Canoe.
MY BARK CANOE
In the still night, the long hours through,
I guide my bark canoe,
My bark canoe, my love, to you.
While the stars shine and falls the dew,
I seek my love in bark canoe;
In bark canoe I seek for you.
It is I, love, your lover true,
Who glides the stream in bark canoe;
It glides to you, my love, to you.
-James Sellars / August 1993