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Coleridge-Taylor was the product of a Creole Sierra Leonean doctor and a white English woman. The child was named after the influential poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and raised by his mother and her musical family, after the elder Taylor returned to Africa.

A musical childhood became a musical career, and the commission from the Three Choirs festival elevated the Coleridge-Taylor star. The completed work was Ballade in A minor, opus 33. Ballades are literary in nature; the music employs lyricism and drama that builds out a self-contained narrative. Apropos that a man with a romantic literary name begat this music teeming with literary imagery.

Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade opens with a flourish, and wastes no time establishing a mischievous theme—a figure that will come to infect, distract, and influence different sections of the orchestra at different times. Its song is whimsy. Coleridge-Taylor welcomes us into a world apart from our own. You can’t help the feeling that you’ve gotten separated from the guide in the funhouse and you’re falling deeper into the bizarre halls. There’s a brass repeat of the theme and a crash of cymbals, before individual sections take their own turn with the phrase.

The composer’s musical language is clear, but this music is addictive and never tiresome or repetitive. There is a separation though, and as it gives way to horn calls and oboe echoes, the orchestra slips into a zone of lyric tranquility; the formerly rambunctious ballade becomes an idyll. Listen to the birdsong of the flutes, and the heart-swell of unmistakable romance—the low brass putting the orchestra on its back, as the strings wheeze with desire. But lest things get too quaint, that theme reemerges again, vivacious as ever. The tug of war between peaceful and playful repeats itself, culminating in a steep climb and build in intensity, thanks to blows from energized percussion. The humorous poltergeist of a figure demands from each section to be taken seriously, before getting the nod to reveal its final form in all its terrible drama.

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, suspended cymbal, strings

For Childs and collaborator Stephen Banks (saxophone), the concerto is a musical narrative of the Black African diaspora. Finding inspiration in the poetic influences of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit and the structure of Samuel Barber’s first symphony, Childs and Banks themselves found inspiration in three poems: Africa’s Lament by Nayyirah Waheed, If We Must Die by Claude McCay, and And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou.

A soprano saxophone introduces the first movement, “Motherland,” with a melody (indicated in the score to be played “like a folk song”) that invokes a bucolic portrait of an (presumably West or Central) African community, though Childs takes care to note that this image is not a utopic one. Instead, the image is of a land and people that have yet to be exploited by Old World European and New World American greed. Together with the soprano saxophone (one of the higher-voiced members of the instrument’s family) flutes contribute to the atmosphere a sense of flighty weightlessness, and a marimba further evokes images of the continent. However, that musical flight comes crashing to the ground, as the saxophone and orchestra engage in a musical struggle. The saxophone is eventually swallowed by peril and addresses the listener with an anxious cadenza. The solo voice is skittish and anxious, ultimately mourning all alone as it—like the other bodies—are herded towards a slave ship bound for America. In the grief and angst, the saxophone loses its lightness when the soloist switches to the alto saxophone, with its shrieks and howls of a conspicuously darker and heavier sound.

“If we must die/O let us nobly die//So that our precious blood may not be shed/In vain.” These words loom large over and well illustrate the second movement, “If We Must Die,” inspired by the Claude McKay poem of the same name. The saxophone seems lost, running this way and that, hemmed in on all sides by vicious strikes of the orchestra, be it brass, strings, or the thundering chords of piano. But the sax isn’t extinguished, in fact, it closes out the section with another cadenza before eliding that passage into a hopeful final movement, “And Still I Rise.” This nod to the oft-quoted poem by Maya Angelou, evokes the sounds and reverence of the Black Church. The saxophone sings its song with solemn accompaniment from the piano, itself reminiscent of gospel tradition. And at their urging, the rest of the orchestra arises to join in this expression of optimistic communion.

Instrumentation: Saxophone (soprano and alto) soloist, two flutes (second doubles piccolo), oboe, English horn, two clarinets, bassoon, contrabassoon, three horns, two trumpets, trombone, bass trombone, timpani, harp, celesta, piano, bass drum, marimba, xylophone, vibraphone, tubular bells, piatti, brake drum, cowbell, suspended cymbal, tambourine, wood blocks, tam tam, triangle, snare drum, strings

The symphony was written here and premiered here. And honestly, if you were to create a quilt that illustrated what was going on in the country at that time, it would be just as American as the rest of those scenes. “From the New World” was premiered in December 1893—the heart of the gilded age, when presidents were forgettable and Robber Barons reigned supreme. The year saw the advent of the gas-powered car and the first college basketball game. It was the year Frederick Jackson Turner introduced the Frontier Thesis that shaped popular understanding of American culture for decades. Katharine Lee Bates wrote down an early version of “America the Beautiful.” And the night before the symphony’s premiere in New York, further down the mid-Atlantic coast in Princess Anne, Maryland, two black men were hung—after escaping a lynch mob several months earlier.

Still, easy as it is to hold “From the New World” as quintessentially American, it’s just as easy to forget that some people were unsure of what “American” sounded like in the first place. A contemporary New York Times review of the symphony was built entirely around that question. Running against a prevailing belief that there could be no uniquely American school of composition because there was no American folk music, DvoÅ™ák turned heads when he argued that there was a rich folk tradition. It just didn’t necessarily originate or live in the urban communities of recent European imports. For DvoÅ™ák, the essences of Black and Indigenous American music were the origins of an American school of composition. You can hear this influence as early as the first movement, as the flute introduces a figure reminiscent of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot;” and in the third movement, inspired by Longfellow’s Tale of Hiawatha. DvoÅ™ák, in fact, wanted to compose an opera from the poem, but never got to it. (Incidentally, it was a Black composer—albeit a Brit, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who would take on the Longfellow verses later in the decade.)

The second movement is the most famous, though, thanks to that ubiquitous theme voiced by the English horn. But the collective memory of that melody has thoroughly obscured its origins. We Mandela effected DvoÅ™ák. The lyrics “Goin’ home, goin’ home/I am goin’ home” have been so tied to that melody for so long that it’s easy to forget that DvoÅ™ák was not referencing that song in this symphony. Rather, "Goin’ Home" is the creation of one of his students, composing an imagined spiritual based on this melody (completed with an imagined Black dialect), almost 30 years after the premiere of Symphony No. 9.

The finale of the piece echoes the first movement, with powerful brass making a call to adventure. For the modern listener, the themes evoke romantic images of an untamed American West, a certain derring-do that gives the symphony a triumphant exit. It’s easy—fun even—to lose yourself in this symphonic narrative—and in the current that pushes the peculiar idea that classical orchestration elevates and legitimizes vernacular music. But think of it in reverse—that this symphony couldn’t exist in the first place without those very traditions to draw upon.

Instrumentation: Two flutes (second doubles piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle, strings