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To date, 19 of Simon’s compositions have been programmed across the genres performed at the Kennedy Center (symphonic, operatic, and chamber), including no fewer than nine commissions—with more commissions to be announced. Noseda and the NSO just released a collection of his works on its in-house label, titled Four Symphonic Works, each of which was recorded live in concert (Tales—A Folklore Symphony, The Block, Songs of Separation, and Wake Up! Concerto for Orchestra). 

This season, Simon also embarks on his first year as inaugural Composer Chair with the Boston Symphony, a three-season appointment that promises close collaboration with BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons. “An artist whose windows are thrown wide open to the world, and whose musical scope of late lands like a grand panorama of American life,” wrote the Washington Post’s critic Michael Brodeur in a 2022 spotlight.

Being raised in a family that made music together as an expression of worship has left an enduring mark on Simon. His father founded an African American Pentecostal church in Atlanta, where the composer grew up, and he regularly enlisted the talents of family members to sing and play. Simon likes to compare his goal as a composer to what his father, part of a multigenerational line of preachers, has been able to accomplish through his career as a preacher. As Simon puts it, “Music is my pulpit. That’s where I preach.”

In a profile that appeared in The New York Times, NSO Music Director Gianandrea Noseda remarked that what he especially admires in Simon’s music is, “...the fact that he wants really to communicate. There is nothing purely intellectual. There is always an emotional element behind it.”

Simon’s success in shedding needed new light on classical tradition from perspectives that have been marginalized by that very tradition is reflected in Four Black American Dances, a dance suite commissioned by the Boston Symphony and premiered by the BSO last year; Nelsons and the orchestra took it along with them as part their 2023 summer tour across Europe. Four Black American Dances combines the vitality of Black musical traditions with a kaleidoscopic variety of stylistic references and orchestral timbres.

Simon describes Four Black American Dances as “an orchestral study” of four dance types whose respective idioms he explores in each movement: Ring Shout, Waltz, Tap Dance, and Holy Dance. “All of these dances are but a mere representation of the wide range of cultural and social differences within the Black American communities,” he explains. “Particularly in Black American communities, dance is and has been the fabric of social gatherings. There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of dances created over the span of American history that have originated from the social climate of American slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.”

“A ring shout is an ecstatic, transcendent religious ritual, first practiced by enslaved Africans in the West Indies and the United States, in which worshipers move in a circle while shuffling and stomping their feet and clapping their hands,” according to the composer. On the other hand, as Simon observes, the waltz became the preferred dance at the debutante balls held among Black social circles during the 1930s. Such balls made a relatively belated appearance as a result of the forces of segregation that excluded them from participating in similar social events held by prosperous white families.

The percussive production of sounds made by special tap shoes gives “tap dancing” its recognizably animated character. Simon evokes this in “Tap!” through imitative gestures on the snare drum, which he combines with jazz harmonies in the brass. The closing “Holy Dance,” writes the composer, “mimics the sound of a congregation ‘speaking in tongues’ (murmuring in a unknown spiritual language) by asking the orchestra to play in a semi-improvised manner.”

Instrumentation: two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, vibraphone, marimba, tubular bells, piatti, suspended cymbal, splash cymbal, tambourine (headed), tam tam, triangle, wood blocks, shaker, 2 whip, wood drumsticks on hard surface (large wooden stick on wooden floor board), tom toms, two snare drums, bass drum, claps, xylophone, strings.

Bonis’ family begrudgingly allowed the obviously gifted teenager to attend the Paris Conservatoire, where she was a classmate of Claude Debussy and studied under César Franck. Yet in order to break up her relationship with another student, Bonis’ parents made her enter an arranged marriage with Albert Domange, a much older businessman who, like her family, discouraged her desire to pursue a musical career—especially her interest in composition.

About a decade later, Bonis reconnected with her beau from the Conservatoire (Amédée-Louis Hettich), a singer, poet, and journalist who had become a voice teacher and could provide access to important music publishers. He persuaded Bonis to again take up her dream of composing, which she did with a vengeance: her output over the ensuing decades was prolific. Bonis eventually produced about 300 compositions, ranging from pieces for piano, organ, voice, and chorus to chamber music and 11 orchestral works. As a member of the Société des compositeurs de musique (which was active in France until 1923), Bonis associated regularly with the highest echelons of Parisian musical society and was able to have her music performed by leading virtuosos. She remains little-known in the US, but the website mel-bonis.com (which is maintained by her great-granddaughter, the pianist and music professor Christine Géliot), is a helpful source of information about her life and work.

Pavane, Sarabande, and Bourrée refer to old dance forms that reached their glory in the French Baroque but then experienced a revival in the 20th century as part of the neoclassical aesthetic, which itself took many different guises. Debussy and Ravel both incorporated neoclassical aspects into their composition. The effects of the First World War in particular prompted a desire to find consolation in the treasures of France’s musical past.

Bonis explored the neoclassical impulse early on, publishing these pieces initially as works for solo piano (Pavane and Bourrée in 1904 and Sarabande in 1909). Each was dedicated, respectively, to her three children with Domange. (She also had an illegitimate daughter with her lover, Hettich, whose identity had to be hidden for a long time, causing Bonis much pain.) In 1909, she orchestrated the three pieces. These were posthumously published, more than a century later, as Three Dances for Orchestra.

Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, triangle, strings.

He dedicated the work to the pioneering hypnotherapist Nikolai Vladimirovich Dahl, who also happened to be an accomplished musician and with whom Rachmaninoff underwent several months of daily therapeutic visits at the turn of the century. Some commentators have suggested that a creative impetus for Rachmaninoff may also have been his attraction to the good doctor’s daughter.

“New musical ideas began to stir within me,” he later recalled, “far more than I needed for my concerto.” Rachmaninoff went through another crisis of confidence shortly before the premiere of the Second Piano Concerto, when a friend complained that the first movement was poorly designed. But the piece scored a huge success from the start and quickly established itself in the repertory.

Few openings are as famous and effective as the eight chords that toll like bells from the solo keyboard at the very start. The mysterious harmonies gravitate to the home key of C minor, ending with a four-note motto that will serve as a unifying device. The orchestra enters with the first of the opening movement’s two main themes—a grandly sweeping idea that seems capable of flowing on without measure. Following an agitated transition passage, the soloist introduces the lyrically radiant second theme. Rachmaninoff combines virtuosity with incisive orchestral detail to paint his canvas.

The Adagio sostenuto glows with one of Rachmaninoff’s most indelible melodies, intertwining the piano’s figurations with contributions from the woodwinds. Tchaikovsky had been an early supporter, and his own First Piano Concerto serves as a model here for the swift turn toward fast-paced, scherzo-like music at the center that contrasts with the lyrical framework surrounding it. A brief solo for the pianist leads back to the nostalgic principal melody. Nostalgia would become a way of life for Rachmaninoff in his later exile from his native Russia (he fled during the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution, never to return). This is nostalgia not in the reactionary sense, but a poetic nostalgia that heightened the composer’s sensitivity to what he had lost and made the longing for home all the more poignant.

A short prelude launches the finale but gives way to a mini cadenza before the main theme is announced. Unlike the first movement, Rachmaninoff establishes a striking contrast between this theme—tightly confined, yet volatile—and the familiar second one, which is initially played by the violas. It is this melody that encapsulates the Second Concerto’s melancholy, elegiac lyricism. It as if Rachmaninoff wants to smuggle the emotional directness and truth of his beloved Tchaikovsky into the new century, with its revolutionary doubting of the benefits of beauty.

The ensuing episodes include a transformation of the moody second theme into a grand version for the entire orchestra, spiced with assertive piano chords. A fleet-fingered coda in the major closes the Second Piano Concerto, with a long—short-short—long rhythm—Rachmaninoff’s musical signature—to draw the curtain.

Instrumentation: piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals (pair), strings.

Ravel introduced his score to Diaghilev by playing a duo-piano transcription with a colleague (ironically, in Vienna). But the legendary impresario humiliated the composer by rejecting his work, reportedly declaring, “Ravel, this is a masterwork…but it is not a ballet…It is the portrait of a ballet…a painting of a ballet.” Thus La Valse went full circle and first become known as a tone poem in the concert hall, though there have been various choreographic treatments as well. Along with the two-piano arrangement, Ravel transcribed La Valse for solo piano (in a version avoided by many pianists because of its extreme technical demands). 

Ravel had envisioned the following scenario: “Swirling clouds afford glimpses, through rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds scatter little by little; one can distinguish an immense hall with a whirling crowd. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855.” He also described La Valse as “a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, mingled with … the impression of a fantastic, fatal whirling….”

For La Valse, Ravel exploits the most refined technical means in his treatment of harmony, rhythmic ideas, dynamics, timbres, and even allusions to the musical past. He weaves all of this together to fashion what he described as a poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (“a choreographic poem for orchestra”). Opening with the mysterious, indeterminate sound of muted double basses, La Valse also calls to mind the suddenly varying perspectives of cinema.

Strains of various waltzes shift in and out of focus. Midway through, the rhythmic motto of the Scherzo from Beethoven’s Ninth emerges from the shadows, superimposing a hint of elemental force on the elegant waltz pattern. What we might have expected as a reprise filters all that has gone before through a strange new lens, until the circling momentum of the waltz collapses in on itself and ecstasy morphs into violent chaos.

Instrumentation: three flutes (third doubles piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, one bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, castanets, crotale, cymbals (pair), glockenspiel, snare drum, tam tam, tambourine, triangle, two harps, strings.