Page 16 - Phil Great Collaborations March 2024 digital program book

PROGRAM NOTES

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR
Rhapsodic Dance: The Bamboula, Op. 43

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London on 15 August 1872 and died in London in
1912. His Bamboula is a “rhapsodic dance” for full orchestra, developed from the eighth
of his Twenty-four Negro Melodies, op. 59 for solo piano (1905, preface by Booker
T. Washington). The composer conducted the work’s premiere at the 1910 Litchfield
Festival in Connecticut, where he was dubbed “the Black Mahler.”
Named for the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this London-born composer
grew up in his mother’s musical family in Croydon and attended the Royal
College of Music, where he studied composition with Charles Villiers
Stanford. His family called him “Coleridge” and he was known professionally
as both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Coleridge-Taylor (the hyphen added after a
printer’s error). He never met his father, a London-trained doctor practicing
in Sierra Leone and Gambia but rose to prominence through successful
violin and piano performances and timely compositions, including three
popular cantatas based on Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, many suites
for orchestra and chamber groups, and a commission for the Three Choirs
Festival (on the recommendation of Edward Elgar). His Wagnerian opera
Thelma was completed posthumously and premiered by Surrey Opera in
London in 2012.
In February 1886, George Washington Cable wrote an essay in Century
magazine, peppered with extracts of music heard in New Orleans’ Congo
Square. Cable (1844-1925) was a noted author of the once best-selling stories
Old Creole Days (1879) and of the novel The Grandissimus (1880), from which
composer Delius drew the libretto for his opera Koanga. The illustrations,
especially of the bamboula dance, together with the article’s April 1886
supplement “Creole Slave Songs,” brought to life the Sunday afternoon revels
of off-duty New Orleans slaves in a “no ‘count open space [Congo Square] at
the fag-end of Orleans Street.” This same bamboula was quoted in music by
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (in France in 1848); by Henry Gilbert (The Dance
in Place Congo, composed in Boston in 1908), and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s
showpiece for the Litchfield Festival in 1910.
According to the Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago, the term
“bamboula” refers to a “vigorous dance with singing and drumming”, found in
colonial New Orleans, the West Indes, and Africa. In the Southern Kikongo
language, it is a synonym for “ignite” in the sense of transferring the force of
external things into oneself, and in the Jola dialect of Senegal and Gambia,
it refers to a war dance. This setting features punchy wind and brass choirs
in several sparklingly rhythmic variations on the main tune, often featured

14 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra
14 Plymouth Philharmonic Or c hestr a