Diehn Composers Room – ODU Special Collections Blog

Celebrating Black Composers in the ODU Music Special Collections: Harvey J. Stokes

by Lara Canner, Allan Blank Curator of Music Special Collections

To celebrate the accomplishments and contributions made by Black composers to classical music, we are focusing on the artists that fill our collections. Today’s focus is on Dr. Harvey J. Stokes: Composer, musician, professor, and author.

As a composer, Dr. Stokes is classified as neoclassical or polyphony (from Greek, meaning “many sounds”). His compositions are layered, lines of different melodies played concurrently creating a musical storytelling affect. To date, Dr. Stokes has written roughly seventy pieces including symphonies, ensemble works, and piano sonatas. Which have played nationally and internationally, most recently at the Virginia Beach Museum of Contemporary Art performed by Symphonicity Orchestra.

Stokes himself notes that composers need to understand how all the pieces of the orchestra work together and sound individually. He is a talented oboist, having played with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Norfolk Chamber Consort, the Tidewater Winds, and the Symphonicity Orchestra.

Dr. Stokes has been a faculty member at Hampton University since 1990, he is the founder of their Computer Music Laboratory and has received the Edward L. Hamm Sr. Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017. His lessons and musical influence is felt throughout the Hampton Roads music scene.

Building on his teaching calling, Dr. Stokes has written A Selected Annotated Bibliography on Italian Serial Composers and Compositional Language in the Oratorio the Second Act: The Composer as Analyst. He also a member of the Educational Policy Improvement Center for Hampton University’s Music program and is on the National Council of the Society of Composers. Dr. Stokes former appointments as President of the Southeastern Composers League and consulted for the North Carolina Arts Council.

Interested in learning more about Dr. Harvey J. Stokes? Watch this episode (hyperlink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbIIr5jkhQE) of WHRO’s Curate 757. His work can be purchased through Ars Nova Music Press, Centaur Records, Albany Records, and Harkie Music.

Poems From the Holocaust Revisited: Performance and Panel October 20 7:00pm

by Lara Canner, Allan Blank Curator of Music Special Collections

Composer Allan Blank wrote the moving work entitled “Poems From the Holocaust” based upon children’s poetry found at the concentration camp of Terezin after itshttps://flic.kr/p/2mAdcdz liberation in 1945. The composition for mezzo-soprano, double bass, and piano features five pieces that were written to evoke an emotional response from the audience.

During World War II, the Third Reich turned the Terezin fortress located in the modern Czech Republic, into a concentration camp for Jewish writers, artists, and scholars. More comparable to a prison than an extermination camp, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Nazis falsely presented the camp to the rest of the world as a “spa town” when pressed for details by the Red Cross. The reality was that Terezin acted as a collection point for transferring people to ghettos or death camps. Art classes were forbidden, but artist and educator Friedl Dicker-Brandeis brought the children together in secret, where they could create, learn, express their emotions, and hopefully regain a bit of their lost childhood. After the war, many of the writings, artwork and poems were collected by Hana Volavková, who was an art historian and Holocaust survivor.

Allan Blank included the first lines of one of the poems in his composition At Terezin, which reads: “When a new child comes everything seems strange to him. What on this ground I have to lie? Eat black potatoes? No! Not I! I’ve got to stay?” The last lines of At Terezin read: “Here in Terezin, life is hell. And when I’ll go home again I can’t yet tell.” Sadly it is possible that the young writer of this poem most likely never made it back home, of the 15,000 children imprisoned at Terezin, only 150 survived.

terezinphoto — Poem from the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 by Hana Volavková From ODU Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives Rare Book Collection

On October 20^th at 7pm Old Dominion Libraries will host a performance of Allan Blank’s work “Poems From the Holocaust” followed by a panel discussion. The event support’s ODU’s Fall 2021 Themester’s Art and Social Justice theme by prompting listeners to never forget the tragedy of the Holocaust’s youngest victims through music.

The performance and panel discussion will be available to watch live via Zoom. Registration is open now: https://oduonline.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R9fiZvIUTJC3-LAF1VTXrQ

New Online Exhibition! Russell Stanger: Portrait of an American Conductor

by Madeline Dietrich, Music Special Collections and Research Specialist

I am pleased to announce the publication of a new digital exhibition, Russell Stanger: Portrait of an American Conductor, and I’d like to take a moment to offer some background on the project. It began in 2018 with the charge to identify correspondence and photographs from the Russell Stanger Papers documenting Maestro Stanger’s friendship with Leonard Bernstein in celebration of the latter’s 100th birthday. It turns out the collection contains only a few items directly relating to Stanger and Bernstein’s relationship, however, as I pored through the collection it became clear that there was more than enough material to create an exhibition focused solely on Russell Stanger.

The Russell Stanger Papersis a large collection, consisting of over 75 linear feet of materials including manuscripts, conducting scores, original works, photographs, correspondence, sound recordings, and ephemera from Stanger’s long career as an internationally known conductor and composer. Due to the constraints of the physical space designated for the exhibition I selected only visual materials (photographs, newspaper clippings, program covers) and omitted any multi-media objects (sound recordings, video footage). Further, I wished to target a general audience and thus I avoided inclusion of esoteric materials (for example, items consisting of notated music).

The physical exhibition was installed in the Diehn Building at ODU during the fall of 2018 and remained in place for 18 months. It was arranged chronologically and covered Stanger’s young adulthood through the time he was hired by the Norfolk Symphony Group in 1966 and was intended to showcase Stanger’s credentials as a conductor and why he was hired to lead the Norfolk Symphony as music director. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic it was decided to digitize the exhibition and expand it to include Stanger’s entire career through his retirement in the late 2000s, and this online exhibition is the result.

In keeping with the original intent, the exhibition focuses solely on Stanger’s professional life, omitting materials relating to Stanger’s personal life and focusing on visual materials. Additionally, there is little attention in the exhibition relating to Stanger’s significant contributions as a composer. Despite these omissions it is my sincere hope that the items displayed here are sufficient to give at least a basic account of Russell Stanger’s career as conductor, orchestra-builder, and Maestro.

What in the World is a Trinome?

by Maddie Dietrich, Music Special Collections and Research Specialist

F. Ludwig Diehn, composer, benefactor, and the man whose name is born by ODU’s Diehn School of Music, donated his personal collection of letters, scores and artifacts to ODU Special Collections and University Archives in the late 1990s. Among the items contained in the collection is a remarkable piece of apparatus known as the Billotti Trinome. It is a metronome, but it’s much more.

A simple metronome produces a click sound at regular intervals at a rate set by the user who can then self-monitor their own sense of pulse against that of the machine. The rate of speed the clicks occur is measured in beats per minute, so a metronome can be set to, say, 72 bpm, or 120 bpm, and so on. Nowadays metronomes, like clocks, are partially or fully electronic, often relying on quartz movement for establishing regularity, but older metronomes were mechanical and operated via a simple clockwork mechanism and, like mechanical clocks, were driven by a rewindable mainspring. Later metronomes would feature a small electric motor to drive the mechanism. A slightly more complex version of the mechanical metronome included a small internal bell which could be set to ring once every two, three or four clicks as desired, on the downbeat of each grouping of beats. The Billotti Trinome took this concept a step further by adding a second, independent click pitched slightly lower than the first. Combined with the bell sound the Trinome is capable of playing three separate beats simultaneously at one tempo, effectively producing what musicians call polyrhythms.

Patented by Paul Billotti in the early 1960s, a product review appearing in a 1963 issue of Music Educators Journal offers the following description. “THE BILLOTTI TRINOME, a new device billed as “the rhythm metronome,” produces beats with three different sounds—a bell, a tick, and a tock—each sound beating a different rate of speed and combining in various ways to form rhythmical patterns which can be varied by adjusting the rate of speed of each beat sound to the desired proportion relative to the speed rate of the other two beat sounds.” As a composer of 20^th century music Diehn undoubtedly found the device useful when conceiving of multiple complex melodies and rhythms played against one another.

A Stillness that Better Suits this Machine by Casey Cangelosi, 2003

Of course the advent of electronic and computer-based metronomes and drum machines rendered a device like the Billotti Trinome obsolete, though surviving specimens occasionally surface on sites like eBay and Reverb.com and when they do they command a hefty price tag. The machine even has a cult following, so much so that the company Grover Pro Percussion commissioned a work for solo percussion which calls for the Trinome along with a set of woodblocks, bell, and triangles. A performance of the work, entitled A Stillness that Better Suits this Machine by Casey Cangelosi (2013), can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY-b188mihM (above). The video offers a fine view of the Trinome’s internal workings. A more basic demonstration of the Trinome may be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1XnnzCX5XA.

And the beat goes on.

The Story Behind One of Our Most Popular Artifacts: John Duffy’s Emmy

by Maddie Dietrich, Music Special Collections & Research Specialist

ODU_Emmy_Award — One of two Emmy’s awarded to composer John Duffy

One of the more widely-seen items in our holdings is an Emmy award belonging to the late composer John Duffy (June 23, 1926, New York City—December 22, 2015, Norfolk, Virginia). Oftentimes when a class visits Special Collections the Emmy is brought out along with a dozen or so other objects, oddities and memorabilia intended to demonstrate to students that Special Collections isn’t just about old papers and manuscripts but in fact consists of all kinds of artifacts, including old papers and manuscripts, which tell the stories firsthand of the persons to whom they once belonged. These introductory class sessions are intended to teach students how to use the collections and include brief hands-on exercises on how to examine items—papers, photographs, maps, calendars, and so on—and offers suggestions on the kinds of information a person might glean from viewing these items firsthand, free from the editorial framework imposed by some intermediary scholar for their own agenda.

So what about this Emmy award? What makes it so popular, so impressive? Well, it’s big and heavy, and it’s shiny and gold. And it’s easily recognized though relatively few people have ever seen one in person. And of course it represents a pinnacle of human achievement in television broadcasting–somebody, somewhere, sometime, did something so outstanding in their field that their peers deemed the accomplishment worthy of their highest award, to be remembered for all time. To see this Emmy, then, is to experience a brush with greatness. And so who was John Duffy and what did he do to win an Emmy, and how did it end up in Special Collections?

MonaEmmy — Retired Reading Room Supervisor Mona Farrow with the Duffy Emmy

Born and raised in the Bronx, John Duffy was a veteran of U.S. Navy and fought in the Battle of Okinawa during WWII. After the war he studied composition with such musical giants as Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland and went on to become music director at the Guthrie Theater and the American Shakespeare Festival. He wrote scores for the Broadway productions of J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man and Barbara Garson’s MacBird! In 1974 he founded the organization Meet The Composer in association with the New York State Council on the Arts and the American Music Center. He was in fact a two-time Emmy winner, receiving his first for writing the score of the NBC documentary A Talent for Life: Jews of the Italian Renaissance (1979) and his second for the score of the PBS production Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (1984). In 2005 he worked with the Virginia Arts Festival to found The John Duffy Composers Institute, a workshop for young composers which for ten years was held in the Diehn Composers Room on the campus of Old Dominion University (the workshop later became the John Duffy Institute for New Opera). In 2011 Duffy donated his collection of scores, manuscripts and memorabilia to ODU Libraries Special Collections and University Archives (The John Duffy Papers, 1944-2012). Though he composed more than 300 works for symphony orchestra, theater, television and film, Duffy felt strongly that “classical” music was no more worthy an art form than any other type of music, popular or otherwise, and fought to expose the ingrained privilege and prejudice that often hides behind such hierarchies.

That’s who John Duffy was, and that’s why we have his Emmy. When the pandemic is over, make a plan to visit our collections and ask to see it!