Arts Listings

Berkeley composer and retired UC Berkeley professor Olly Wilson’s Symphony No. 3, Hold On, which sets and responds to the old African-American spiritual of that name, celebrating its sense of spiritual tenacity and persistence, will be featured as George Thomson returns to the podium of the Berkeley Symphony, 8 p.m. this Sat. at Zellerbach Auditorium, with an eclectic program including Stravinsky’s Concertino for Twelve Instruments, Sibelius’ Violin Concerto and Matthew Locke’s Restoration era theater music for The Tempest.  

Wilson described his symphony shortly after a talk to fourth graders at Rosa Parks Elementary School on African American music and spiritual traditions, part of Berkeley Symphony’s educational program that culminates in the spring with a concert where, as the Symphony’s Kevin Shuck put it, “the Symphony plays as back-up” to student participants.  

Wilson’s Hold On Symphony’s three movements go from an initial address, not of the spiritual itself, but of “capturing that notion, that ability to maintain focus against incredible odds, which goes back to slave culture, but becomes universal.” 

The second movement frames the spiritual itself, introduced in the middle—(“Nora said, You’ve lost your track/Can’t plow straight while looking back/Keep-a your hand on-a the plow/Hold on, hold on ...”)—with more ethereal music, “a dynamic between two ways of thinking--one more direct, precise, straight forward; the other, vague, imprecise ... the emergence of a more spiritual provenance, the more reflective Sorrow Song type of spiritual.” 

Orchestrally, Wilson “attempts to imitate vocal gestures in the context of a 20th century orchestra, evoking the commonality of the singing, the collective moans and grunts, sometimes a combination of different languages from Africa, that were unintelligible to the slaveholders, according to early chroniclers.”  

The third movement moves from the practical and determined, then inward and sorrowful phases of the second, into the celebratory Jubilee Song, “music you have to move to, driving, upbeat; riffs against changing harmonics with strong rhythmic impetus; flashbacks to the first two movements, and finally four or five riffs building polyphonically to a big climax.” 

“It’s a phenomenon you find all over the African diaspora, the same way of doing things, varying in the way things get done, and by what’s there” Wilson said of the tradition he’s drawing from. “Music’s the causal agent, essential, obligatory. Before Christianity, in African pantheism, you call forth the deity only by music. I’ve reinterpreted all this, living in Berkeley and writing music for a 20th century orchestra, through my own personal prism, which includes African American culture.” 

Wilson, who retired from the UC Berkeley Music Department (which he has chaired, also serving as assistant chancellor) in 2002 after 32 years, still lives in Berkeley. A native of St. Louis, he came from a musical family with four siblings, his father “an excellent amateur singer, who wanted all of us to study music when young, as he did later. There were piano lessons; he could always use an accompanist!” 

Wilson and his sister were the ones who went on studying and playing, “in pop music when I was a teenager, then jazz.” After receiving a scholarship for his clarinet playing, Wilson thought of becoming a band leader, but “I had pretty broad taste even as a youngster, and by the end of my sophomore year, after all I’d been exposed to in music—and all I transcribed, before there were so many fake books!—I understood” what his career was to be. After studying at Oberlin and the University of Illinois, he took his PhD. at Iowa. 

Of his long academic career, Wilson comments, “The musician’s patron in the 20th century has been the university.” 

Of the other diverse pieces on the program at Zellerbach, the selection from Matthew Locke’s 1674 score for a Restoration “modernization” of The Tempest features an oboeist, and is a short musical description of the storm itself. 

“The Locke piece is a curtain-raiser for Olly’s Symphony,” commented George Thomson. “It’s a little wild, unusual for a 17th century piece, and very brief, ending quietly, so it adumbrates the beginning of Olly’s stormy piece. It’s scene-setting; we’ll allow just enough time between for the sound to clear.” 

Indeed, the eclecticism of the program wasn’t “schematically-oriented,” according to Thomson, but constructed around the sound of Wilson’s Symphony. “The Stravinsky has a strong rhythmic, almost jazzy, element that ties it to Hold On; it’s a miniature concerto followed by a proper one. With a big, big contemporary piece, programming a concerto is typical, and with the other pieces, there’s a balance that’s good for both audience and orchestra. From our position today, we can make connections between pieces calling to each other over centuries.”  

The Berkeley Symphony presents George Thomson conducting Stravinsky, Sibelius and Olly Wilson’s Hold On at 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 13 at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. 841-2800, www.berkeleysymphony.org.