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Douglas J. Cuomo’s Black Diamond Express Train to Hell In UK Premiere

May. 04, 2011

The Orchestra of the Swan debuts Douglas J. Cuomo’s Black Diamond Express Train to Hell in the UK at the orchestra’s Spring Sounds Festival on May 27. The festival, established in 2008, is held annually each May and is dedicated to showcasing contemporary composers alongside masterworks of the classical cannon. The Orchestra of the Swan’s pre-concert talk, “What’s the Score?”, will give the audience an illustrated introduction to Douglas J. Cuomo’s work, which is conducted by David Curtis.

Black Diamond Express Train to Hell, composed in 2010, is a double concerto for cello and keyboardist controlling an electronically manipulated recording of a 1927 sermon by the African-American Reverend A.W. Nix of Chicago.  Edited and reordered by the composer, the recording of Nix’s sermon forms a new vocal part, with each key on the keyboard triggering a different phrase of the sermon.

Cuomo describes the work:

Black Diamond Express Train to Hell is based on folk sources, à la Bartók or Kodály, but from an American perspective. In this case the source material is a fiery sermon by the Reverend A. W. Nix that was released as a 78 rpm record in 1927. Exhorting with an unrelenting intensity, Nix’s performance calls to mind both spirituals and rural blues shouting. The sound and content of the recording vividly evoke American life during prohibition and the great depression, the history of commercial recordings, and the place of music and religion in the African American experience.

Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times following the world premiere of the piece with the American Composers Orchestra and cellist Maya Beiser in New York:

With its richly metaphorical language (warning of a hellbound train making stops at Deceiversville and Drunkardsville), the sermon is a musical mix of speech and song. Mr. Cuomo chops up and repeats words and phrases to create a vocal part around which the orchestra plays fractured marches, bursting chords and spans of astringent harmonies.

Learn more on the music of Douglas J. Cuomo at www.schott-music.com and www.douglasjcuomo.com.

Find out more about the Orchestra of the Swan and its Spring Sounds Festival at www.orchestraoftheswan.org.

Douglas J. Cuomo
Black Diamond Express Train to Hell (2010)
concerto for cello and sampled sermon
1(pic)1.1.1-1.1.1.0-timp.2perc-hp-sampler-str
18’

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