About this Piece

Born in Rochester, NY, Adolphus Hailstork grew up in Albany, where he fell in love with music as a boy chorister in his Episcopal church. He began composing music seriously as a student at Howard University and later studied under the prominent 20th-century teacher Nadia Boulanger and American composer David Diamond. Despite the Modernist zeitgeist, Hailstork resisted the allure of atonality. In a 2020 interview with San Francisco Classical Voice, he described his path: “I survived the gun-to-the-head modernism, back when I was a student—you know if you weren’t crunching elbows on the keys and counting up to 12 all the time, you weren’t being much of a composer. I decided I didn’t want to go that way. I came up as a singer and singers don’t often sing in 12-tone technique and things like that. I’ve used it, but it wasn’t a natural fit and so I’ve spent most of my career trying to be honest with myself. I call it ‘authenticism’—that’s my ‘ism.’”

Describing the genesis of Symphony No. 1, Hailstork recounted, “In 1987 I was asked to write a piece for a summer music festival in Ocean Grove, NJ. Since the piece was to be 20 minutes long and for a Haydn-sized orchestra, I decided that a simple first symphony would fit the bill. It is written in the standard four movements: Allegro, Adagio, Scherzo and Rondo. The final rondo brings back themes from the previous three movements.”

Composed the following year, Hailstork’s First Symphony shows the composer’s early inclinations toward wide-open Copland-esque melodies, lush soundscapes of Samuel Barber, and Bernstein-like dissonances as well as African-American and African sounds, placing himself in the lineage of fellow African American composers such as William Grant Still and William Dawson. Commenting on the breadth of his influences, Hailstork said: “I’m pretty eclectic; I’m multistylistic; all the names you want to use, they all fit.”

The fanfare-like Allegro paints a lively scene with jaunty rhythms and is followed by a searching second movement where solo clarinet and flute float above swelling strings. A quicksilver Scherzo skitters about in the high strings and winds with periodic brass and timpani bursts. A jazz-infused Rondo weaves together motifs in an uplifting and satisfying finale. —Tess Carges