Hayes School of Music

Adams is a composer with a pronounced lyric and tonal sensibility, as is evident not only in his works for voice, but also in his compositions for solo piano and larger ensembles. Although known mostly for vocal works, Adams has had his instrumental compositions performed by major orchestras in the US and abroad. He recently received the Albert Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award by the Marquis, Who’s Who (2021).

Edward Bland had a varied professional life as a composer. His works span traditional classical genres (piano pieces and a concerto for electric violin and orchestra) to compositions written for television and film. Bland’s background in jazz plays a decisive role in his musical language, which is freely atonal and full of rhythmic intricacy. In addition to his musical compositions, he also wrote, directed and produced a film, The Cry of Jazz, which was adopted by the National Film Archive in the 1990s, 40 years after it was made.

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson lived a remarkable and varied life as a composing and performing musician. Like many black musicians coming of age in the 1940s and 50s, his family divided their time between the south (North Carolina) and larger cities in the north. Perkinson’s musical life began as a boy soprano in New York City, a member of Robert Craft’s choir dedicated to the performance and recording of the music of Igor Stravinsky. This very challenging start to his musical life conditioned the composer for a life of struggle and accomplishment. Both a jazz musician and a serious classical composer, Perkinson studied conducting at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, returning to New York to compose and conduct as well as sit in at the piano in some of Greenwich Village’s most lively jazz clubs. Years in California followed, where he scored for both movies and television. Throughout a busy life, the composer produced a robust catalog of disciplined and powerfully-felt instrumental and vocal compositions. Here, the struggle and dynamism of the 1960s racial justice movement comes through in the music, which by turns can both thunder and lament, using the Negro Spiritual as source material.

An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She was also an educator and served as the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. By 1975, wrote Carol E. Neubauer in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, Angelou was recognized “as a spokesperson for… all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.” She served on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., by President Barack Obama. Angelou was awarded over 50 honorary degrees before her death. (Source: Poetry Foundation)

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of one of the first Black chemists in the tire industry. Dove was encouraged to read widely by her parents, and she excelled in school. She was named a Presidential Scholar, one of the top 100 high school graduates in the country, and attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio as a National Merit Scholar. After graduating, Dove received a Fulbright to study at the University of Tübingen in West Germany, and later earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she met her husband, the German writer Fred Viebahn. Dove made her formal literary debut in 1980 with the poetry collection The Yellow House on the Corner, which received praise for its sense of history combined with individual detail. The book heralded the start of a long and productive career, and it also announced the distinctive style that Dove continues to develop. In works like the verse-novel Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Sonata Mulattica (2009), Dove treats historical events with a personal touch, addressing her grandparents’ life and marriage in early 20th-century Ohio, the battles and triumphs of the Civil Rights era, and the forgotten career of Black violinist and friend to Beethoven, George Polgreen Bridgetower. (Source: Poets.org)