Meet the Artist

Artina McCain

Hailed by the New York Times as a "virtuoso pianist" Artina McCain, has built a formidable career as a performer, educator and speaker. As a recitalist, her credits include performances at Wigmore Hall and Barbican Centre in London, Weill Hall at Carnegie and Merkin Hall in New York City and more. Other highlights include guest appearances with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Memphis Symphony Orchestra and Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra. In 2022, she was the mistress of ceremony for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

Dedicated to promoting the works of Black and other underrepresented composers, McCain curates Underrepresented Composers Concerts for multiple arts organizations. She is an American Prize winner for her solo piano recordings of these works and won a Gold Global Music Award for her recent album project Heritage. In 2021, Hal Leonard published her transcriptions of Twenty-Four Traditional African American Folk Songs.

McCain was a featured inspirational leader in the award-winning PBS documentary series Roadtrip Nation: Degree of Impact in an episode exploring the real-world impact of professionals with doctoral degrees in and outside of academia.

McCain's performances have been heard on the Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), Germany’s WDR and television appearances including features on CSPAN for the MLK 50 Commemoration. McCain is a three-time Global Music Awards winner including collaborative projects I, Too (Naxos), with soprano Icy Monroe, focused on African American Spirituals and Art Songs and Shades, a collaboration with her husband and duo partner Martin McCain.

After not performing for six years while battling a performance injury, she now enjoys a prolific concert career with more than 10 years of full injury recovery. She uses her recovery to serve as an advocate of musicians’ wellness–curating articles, lectures, and forums to educate teachers and students. Most recently the BBC featured her on the podcast Sideways telling her miraculous story of injury to recovery

Currently, McCain is Associate Professor of Piano and Coordinator of the Keyboard Area at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis and Co-Founder/Director of the Memphis International Piano Festival and Competition.

Program Notes

Dance Tribute for Orchestra and Piano Obligato

Fred Onovwerosuoke (b. 1960)

Fred Onovwerosuoke, or “FredO” to his friends, has spent a lifetime spreading awareness and teaching audiences about the sheer magnitude of African music. There’s so much material on the continent that it’s impossible to mine it all, but FredO has spent the bulk of his career sharing it. Born in Ghana and raised in Nigeria, he was immersed in the musical experience of African musical traditions from the earliest of ages. As an adult, he as traveled to over 30 countries across the continent to research and explore as much of its aural traditional as he can. It’s this immersive understanding of the genre that Onovwerosuoke brings to his orchestral writing, and it’s what makes his performances so unique.

In 1990, FredO came to the United States to attend college. While an engineering student at Principia College in Illinois, he explored studies in music and found a home studying music theory and composition there. As he explains it, it produced a determined sense of individualistic composing that sought to bridge the divide between Western European and African music. As he further developed his research, FredO branched out to study music of the Caribbean and the Deep South of the US, all of which finds its way intermingled within his compositions.

FredO has found success throughout this life sharing his unique style, even drawing the attention of Hollywood. When Robert DeNiro needed a fresh score for his film The Good Sheperd, he reached out to Onovwerosuoke who was happy to provide vocal support from his newly formed St. Louis African Chorus. This attention attracted offers from music publishers, and FredO then produced the publication of Songs of Africa: 22 songs for mixed voices on Oxford University Press.

Ultimately, the music of Onovwerosuoke has reached countless audiences through his deep and reverent commitment to producing compositions that work to blend disparate music from multiple indigenous traditions. Hearing it is an experience that is genuinely unlike any other, and it brings people back for more again and again.

Pacific 231

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)

The industrial revolution changed everything within western civilization, and its artists were swept up in the action just like everyone else. Musicians grappled with various ways to interconnect the very real “music” of machinery with that of traditional musical instruments. They often did this lovingly and with a genuine fondness for the almost inhumane churning of pistons, steam, and grinding gears – it isn’t until later that society and its artists start to question the wisdom of the dawn of the industrial era.

Arthur Honegger, a Swiss composer living mostly in Paris, spent years travelling France on trains and loved the experience to the extent that he described it as: “…they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses.” With this kind of devotion, it should surprise no one that Honegger sought a way to bring the locomotive somehow into his musical world and give it the homage it was due. Pacific 231 is that work. 

Audiences often – logically – think of the title of this piece as the name of a train route, like the “Coast Starlight” or “Rocky Mountaineer”. But the title is more technical than that, a little more “in the weeds”, if you will, and that provides insight into how detailed Honegger’s intent for this work truly was. The title refers to an American model locomotive that has 2 sets of running wheels in the front, 3 sets of driving wheels in the middle, and 1 set of balance wheels in the back of the engine (hence, 2-3-1). This is a work, in Honegger’s mind, about precision. It’s about the totality of the machine’s existence – the source of the train’s power and the expression of its purpose.

From the audience standpoint, some of that minutia might get lost in the sheer momentum of what they are hearing. When this work was premiered in 1924, all audiences could (and still do) hear is the hurtling of a locomotive moving inexorably forward, charging toward its final stop. The piece is so incredibly powerful that one would be forgiven for holding onto one’s seat during the performance.

Honegger expressed frustration during his life that the listening public didn’t fully grasp the largeness of his artistic intent, the complexity of his powerful statement. But in our defense, the music tells a pretty powerful story all its own – a musical expression of sheer industrial vigor that the orchestra brings to life. The clarity of that experience is memorable long after the performance and triggers a quiet desire to take a train ride.

An American in Paris

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

The 1924 success of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue catapulted an already well-respected songwriter into the stratosphere of international composition. Everyone knew him and he was suddenly spending time with the greatest living composers on Earth. During a brief visit to Paris in 1926, the trip that would inspire An American in Paris, Gershwin spent time with Maurice Ravel, enjoying being viewed as shoulder to shoulder with the titan. Two years later, Gershwin would host Ravel in New York City and ask for lessons with the Frenchman; Ravel famously turned Gershwin down, encouraging him to simply focus on being the greatest version of himself.

Later that year, in December 1928, An American in Paris was premiered by the New York Philharmonic, marking a huge milestone for the composer. While Gershwin composed all the music of his famed Rhapsody in Blue, he felt at the time out of his depth to notate the piano score for orchestra, and therefore leaned on friends to accomplish that task. By Paris’ premiere, that confidence deficit was behind him. Gershwin produced the entirety of the orchestral score on his own – an accomplishment he was quick to share with his musical peers.

The work itself is considered a “Tone Poem”, meaning that it is a single-movement work that seeks to tell a story through music. The success of An American in Paris can be found in the ease with which audiences understand the story being told. An American is meandering the streets of Paris, taking in the sights and sounds of a fast-moving metropolitan city. One can hear the obvious presence of traffic, as well as the bustling movement of people on the sidewalks hurrying along. It’s lush, engaging, and replete with sweeping Gershwin melodies that are the cornerstone of the songwriter’s background.

Gershwin stood as an example to his European counterparts of how jazz could seamlessly make its way into classical music. With the wild success of both of his tone poems, he seemingly carved out a new genre of concert music that would deeply influence the music produced for decades to come.   

Boléro

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Maurice Ravel is known in the musical community as one of the greatest orchestrators in history. What’s meant by this is that he had an uncanny knack for knowing precisely which instruments within an orchestra should play which notes at which time. Deciding that a flute should play a given passage rather than a cello, for instance, can have a remarkable influence over how an orchestral work might sound. Ravel was a genius at making the right decisions.

Boléro is probably the greatest example of this concept, mainly because it utilizes the same repetitive melody and rhythmic pulse over the course of 15 minutes, but the listener never tires of the repetition. Why? Because the orchestration makes the work feel utterly new and refreshing all along the journey. It’s quite a feat to pull off, and no one in history has ever succeeded like Ravel.

The work might never have come into being if Ida Rubenstein had gotten her way. Rubenstein, a famous ballerina who worked extensively with the Russian master Diaghilev, asked Ravel for some orchestral arrangements of Spanish music that she could choreograph. The specific music she wanted was under strict copyright, however, so Ravel convinced her that he could simply write his own music with a Spanish “feel” to get the job done.

What developed in Ravel’s mind was a musical experiment that he frankly had little confidence would work. His plan was to employ as limited a melodic palette as possible, draw it out as far as he could, essentially making one long crescendo that would last a quarter of an hour. In the hands of literally any other composer of the time, this outrageous idea would have bellyflopped from the start. But with Ravel’s orchestration prowess, he was able to tinker, develop, and layer the work in such a way as to make the building pressure of the piece turn into a powder keg of musical satisfaction.

The premiere of the ballet in 1928 was a profound success, both for Rubenstein and Ravel. But truth be told, it was the music that audiences were coming for. When the score was published the following year, every orchestra in Europe wanted to play it, much to Ravel’s surprise. In fact, the work was so successful as a concert piece that Ravel was almost annoyed by its success. What was for him an academic exercise in compositional discipline and orchestration had become a prairie fire of audience approval and love. A century later, we’re still caught up in the fire.