On January 28-29, music director Stéphane Denève will lead the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of “Visions of Cahokia,” a new symphony by African-American composer James Lee III commissioned by SLSO.
“I had been researching interesting historical connections between Black Americans and American Indians,” Lee described the origin of the piece to The St. Louis American. “In the process of my research, I discovered the history of Cahokia and I approached the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra about composing a new work on the subject. I believed that the orchestra would be the best medium to evoke images and certain sounds of ancient Cahokia. Various aspects in the orchestration that I used to correlate to Cahokia include the prominent use of flutes and percussion to convey the ideas of singing, ritual, recreation, and celebration.”
This will be Lee’s fourth composition that Denève has conducted. The composer’s relationship with SLSO started with Erik Finley, the vice president of the orchestra, who was familiar with Lee and his work from the time Finley used to work at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Lee is a professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore and has had his music performed by the orchestra there on numerous occasions.
“I start to see what is his voice, his very distinctive voice,” Denève told The St. Louis American about working with Lee. “It’s very virtuosic. Sometimes it’s very fast, very dense, and you have to know what exactly you want to hear, how to make the layers of the music heard in the most moving way.”
Typical of a Lee symphony, “Visions of Cahokia” calls for a big band: four horns; three trumpets; three percussionists playing a total of 13 instruments; two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and trombones; one each of bass trombone, tuba, timpani and harp; and strings.
“He’s a grand symphonist,” Denève said. “He really uses a big orchestra with a lot of percussion. He has a very distinctive orchestration, very powerful – his pieces go from very, very soft to very, very, very loud. I’m always impressed by how he builds the climaxes.”
The symphony’s first movement builds to the first of these climaxes as Lee tries to evoke the settling of the native metropolis in the Metro East, which flourished from 700 to 1400 AD. Lee notes that he employs the harp and clarinet as singers among the tribes. This movement, he notes, “reaches a climatic arrival point in which the orchestral texture is decidedly denser, which depicts the growing and bustling population. Various vocal expressions of joy are depicted in the woodwind instruments, which is a counterpoint to the sheer force of the brass instruments’ presence as the violin melodies continue to ascend to the heights of the mounds at the site.”
The second and third movements are titled with Choctaw Indian words: “Na Yimmi” means “faith,” whereas “Chukoshkomo” means “play, game, or frolic.” “Na Yimmi” is more quiet and meditative, suggesting, as Lee notes, “an attitude of humility, sincerity, and prayer among the worshippers.” “Chukoshkomo” is more playful and raucous, featuring more of Lee’s distinctively dense orchestration and penchant for dramatic climaxes.
“The beginning of the last movement seeks to depict various instances of a Pow-Wow ceremony involving feasting, singing, and dancing,” Lee notes. “The excitement and density of the piece continues to the very last bar of the music, which celebrates this Mississippian cultural community at the height of its existence before the mysterious decline and abandonment of the city.”
At least that is how it sounds on the page and in the composer’s head. It’s now up to Denève and SLSO to make these visions of Cahokia manifest in sound inside a concert hall. When Denève spoke to The St. Louis American, he flourished his marked-up copy of the score, full of questions that he still needed to ask the composer.
“In a world premiere, the main challenge is to care for the baby, to be prepared to really imagine all the adjustments that could happen,” Denève said. “There are always surprises when you hear a piece played for the first time by an orchestra. Even if you dream and study in great detail – which, I must say, is my case – you have things you discover and balance, virtuosic aspects of phrasing, the way you organize a piece, the tempo, the speed.”
Lee visited Cahokia during a previous visit to St. Louis to work with SLSO. While Denève did not join Lee on that visit, he is pleased to have the composer’s vision in his head before he sees the site.
“I can’t wait to go there with his music in mind,” Denève said. “I have in my mind now a fantasy of what it could have been like, this big metropolis, and I am happy his music will make my experience different. And I hope this can happen for the audience – that they can hear this and then go (or go back) to Cahokia and be inspired by the music, to imagine the life there, because the music gives it a lot of life.”
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will perform the world premiere of “Visions of Cahokia” 8 p.m. Saturday, January 28 and 3 p.m. Sunday, January 29 at Powell Hall. Also on the program: “Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium)” by Leonard Bernstein and Jean Sibelius’ “Symphony No. 2.” See slso.org for tickets.
