Lachrymosa: 1919

Adolphus Cunningham Hailstork III was born April 17, 1941, and lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He composed his Lachrymosa: 1919 for the Virginia Symphony, completing it in Virginia Beach in March 1995. JoAnn Falletta led the Virginia Symphony in its world premiere on May 12, 1995. These are the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of the piece.

The score of Lachrymosa: 1919 calls for string orchestra (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses) with, playing offstage for a few measures toward the end of the piece, 2 clarinets and 2 bassoons.

Like Bohuslav Martinů’s Memorial to Lidice, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and William Grant Still’s In Memoriam: the Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy, Adolphus Hailstork’s Lachrymosa: 1919 is a memorial work of a special kind that gained currency in the 20th century, a lament for a group or population who fell victim to their fellow humans’ tendency to violence and destruction. Unlike a Requiem, whose religious and traditional contexts place it in the realm of the abstract (even when dedicated, like Verdi’s, to an individual); unlike many a work honoring a specific person (e.g., Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten), these works are in essence protest pieces: music that rails (even if softly) against systems that perpetuate societal violence.

Hailstork wrote Lachrymosa: 1919 for the Norfolk, Virginia-based Virginia Symphony, an ensemble with whom he has worked on many occasions, and fittingly so, given his long residence in the Virginia Beach-Norfolk region. He was a longtime faculty member of both Old Dominion University and the Norfolk State University, an HBCU. He grew up in Albany, New York, and after scoring well on a music aptitude test in school began violin lessons. He later switched to piano and organ, sang in a church choir, and began conducting a chorus himself. Hailstork started composing in earnest in high school and was able to hear some of the fruits of his labors when the school’s orchestra director read through his music with the ensemble. Hailstork attended Howard University (another HBCU) in Washington, DC, graduated in 1963, and went on to work with the Nadia Boulanger — teacher of such composers as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Astor Piazzolla — at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. He then earned a second bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music. After serving two years in the Army, ascending to the rank of captain, he earned his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. A respected educator for much of his life, Hailstork has taught at Michigan State and Ohio’s Youngstown State University in addition to Norfolk State and Old Dominion.

While an undergrad at Howard, Hailstork wrote two musicals, an indication of the openness of his musical interests. Concurrent patriotic and critical perspectives on American history, the idea of American-ness generally, and the Black American experience inform his large catalog of works. An early success was his orchestral work Celebration, which was commissioned by the JCPenney Foundation to mark the U.S. Bicentennial, and which was recorded by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1976. That orchestra also performed his Symphony No. 1 under Leslie Dunner’s direction, after which the conductor encouraged the orchestra’s commission of Hailstork’s Symphony No. 2 (1998). On a trip to Ghana on a Fulbright fellowship in 1987, Hailstork witnessed firsthand the cells in which were imprisoned slaves bound for North America. He translated this experience into the narrative of his Symphony No. 2, which engages explicitly with the history of slavery in Africa and the U.S. Hailstork’s An American Guernica is another work on a dark subject, commemorating the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church during one of the country’s worst periods of racial tension. (The title references the Spanish town destroyed by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War, an event commemorated in Pablo Picasso’s famous painting.) A further work steeped in American history and the Black experience is his substantial Crispus Attucks, a 45-minute cantata for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra on the subject of the Black man who was the first casualty of the American Revolution in the Boston.

Balancing Hailstork’s works of protest and lament are many pieces demonstrating optimism and hope, such as his orchestral tribute to Norfolk, An American Port of Call and his Three Spirituals for Orchestra. The composer’s use of traditional spirituals and the language of gospel music in his work acknowledges the long legacy of Black music in the U.S. Hailstork’s work has been performed by many of the major ensembles of the country; the BSO performed his An American Port of Call in 2019, and his music has been performed by the Boston Pops on many occasions. In fall 2024 the BSO performed his Fanfare on Amazing Grace during our Concert for the City.

Lachrymosa: 1919, as mentioned above, is a lament: although the work was conceived as a response to historic events, its goal is not to depict those events, as might a tone poem, but is rather a vehicle to help process their emotional aftermath. The events of 1919 to which the composer refers took place during what came to be called the “Red Summer” of anti-Black race riots, killings of Black Americans, and displacement of Black families from their homes across the country from spring to autumn 1919. Although mostly concentrated in the South, these events ranged from New London, CT, to San Francisco and Bisbee, AZ, with some of the worst confrontations taking place in Chicago and Washington, DC. Relevant to Lachrymosa: 1919’s commissioning origins, in Norfolk, VA, in the year before the Virginia Symphony’s founding, Red Summer violence claimed two lives during an attack on a celebration for Black soldiers returned from service in the World War.

Caused in part by postwar economic and social factors, the Red Summer was a spike in cycles of violence that extended back to the Civil War and beyond, and forward through devastating tragedies including the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, OK, in spring 1921 and of the town of Rosewood, FL, in January 1923.

While the historical subject of Hailstork’s Lachrymosa: 1919 is distinctly American, its broader message resonates with the persistence and recurrence of such events both before and after Red Summer and throughout the world. Hailstork’s musical choices emphasize both the work’s connections to centuries-old church music and to the melodic contours of Black spirituals, heard most clearly in the passages for solo strings.

Hailstork’s music spans musical eras and seamlessly blends styles — or rather, illuminates commonalities between styles of apparently different origins. One might hear in those commonalities a seed of hope.

The composer’s comments on his piece, written for its premiere in 1995, follow. 

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.

Adolphus Hailstork on his Lachrymosa: 1919

While I was writing this piece, my goal was to create an austere, contemplative atmosphere, generally devoid of urgency or stridency. The coloring is medium to dark, the rhythms are gentle, and melodic lines are simple. Lachrymosa opens with a chord progression played by all the strings. Then they divide into two choirs exchanging modal harmonies over a deep pedal point. Pentatonic melodic lines in solo strings bring the first main section to a close. A short transition marked “più agitato” leads to the B section which is a lament in solo strings over dark chords in the basses. A contrapuntal section leads to a return of the modal double choir material heard at the beginning. This is followed by the original solo string writing, in a different harmonic setting. To some extent this piece is modeled on textures and techniques of choral music. The final two “Amen” chords (also heard earlier) are a principal unifying device.

In approaching this piece, my first and only concern, initially, was writing a work which contrasted with the other works on the program. They were the Poulenc Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, and the Mahler Symphony No. 5. I already had in my portfolio many fluffy “openers” including An American Port of Call, written especially for the Virginia Symphony ten years earlier. Also, I wanted to write a work which made few demands technically, so the players could put their time, attention, and energies on the Mahler.

Therefore, I aimed for a quiet, meditative composition, limited in coloring, and subdued in emotion. Some of my musical ideas evoked within me a sense of ancient religious ritual, and other ideas reflected the style of African American spirituals. Both, tinged with sadness, led to my decision to use the title “Lachrymosa” (a part of the Roman Catholic mass for the dead).

It was a simple matter, then, to focus on 1919, 75 years ago (as of 1994). In 1919 the Virginia Symphony was on the threshold of being founded. Unfortunately, that year was also a tragic one in American history. During World War I, there had occurred a great migration of Blacks from farms in the south to factories in the north. The return of the soldiers who originally had those jobs, provided the spark for an inevitable clash. There were riots in 26 cities, and the summer of 1919 is known, in Black history, as the “Red Summer.” Black troops, who had fought valiantly for democracy in Europe, returned to the United States, believing they would share in a new spirit of freedom at home. After all, they had risked their lives for it.

They even dared to hope that they would experience the same respect and freedom from prejudice they had enjoyed in France. That was not to be. During 1919, 77 African Americans “were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive” (Dusk of Dawn, W.E.B. Dubois). Some of the soldiers were hanged in their uniforms. I join with the Virginia Symphony in their joy of having been founded in 1920. Had I focused on that year, I, perhaps, could have squeezed a flippant fanfare of some sort out of myself. In Black history, however, 1919 conjures up darker and weightier matters.