*Sacred music expert Mark Miller is in the center of what he calls a very special symphony. The celebrated organist is a soloist on The Discovery Orchestra’s sixth special, Discover Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony, an exploration of the Finale of French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ soaring masterwork Symphony No. 3 in C Minor.
“There’s none really like it in the repertoire of Western classical music. The pipe organ has an outside role in the symphony so they feature the organ and myself playing it. It kind of gives an inside look into the music and how Saint-Saëns’ composed it,” Miller explained about the special, available on The WNET Group’s AllArts.org; the free ALL ARTS app on all major streaming platforms, as well as all social media sites, among other places.
Classical music inspires him, and his performances, he says, “is a wonderful opportunity as an organist to perform that piece.”
The 91-member Emmy-nominated symphony orchestra consists of virtuoso musicians known for teaching concerts designed to help people connect emotionally with classical music and impart listening skills.
“George Marriner Maull, the conductor, does a really wonderful job of kind of looking behind the curtain on the musical compositions. It’s all done so a listener can really appreciate it, and you don’t have to be a trained musician,” Miller observed.
African Americans have long appreciated classical music, defined as serious or conventional. Numerous stories have been written about Harry T. Burleigh, a prolific Black classical composer and singer from the late 1890s through the 1930s. His spirituals, including “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” were adapted into popular classical arrangements.
Slain civil rights icon Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his book “Stride Toward Freedom,” wrote about his fondness for an Italian opera about a young woman who devoted her life to God to heal her ailing mother: “On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. The Metropolitan Opera was on the radio with a performance of one of my favorite operas—Donizetti’s ‘Lucia di Lammermoor.”
In 1954 King was a young Baptist minister, not yet known around the world as a fiery civil rights figure, leaving Atlanta to become pastor of a Montgomery church. A year later, he would be the spokesperson for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), an organization responsible for many significant civil rights changes for African Americans, particularly the desegregation of buses in Alabama’s capitol city in 1956.
Miller’s work is at the nexus of music, social justice, and community. His music has propelled and emboldened marchers for social justice.
A song he composed played as then-President Barack Obama spoke at the funeral on July 12, 2016, of five police officers who were ambushed in Dallas. After the Charleston shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church, Miller said he wrote the song “I Choose Love.”
“Part of me wishes I didn’t have to write these songs that come on the heels of something so so awful. In the complete moment of hopelessness and despair, that’s when music can console us and offer us some healing,” he said with a shudder about that tragic incident in North Carolina.
Growing up for him was what he described as an interesting journey.
“I’m bi-racial but was adopted as a baby. My parents, who are White, adopted me when I was seven days old in 1967, when adoptions were closed. My parents, who raised me, were Methodists. My father was a Methodist pastor. I grew up in the church,” he said.
There was little diversity in the pulpits where he worshipped, but his father ensured he learned about civil rights.
“Even in the church where I was just one of just a few people of color in this church growing up, my father was always very attuned to social justice issues and lifting up the history and culture of African Americans. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I went to work at a Black church, a Baptist Church in Harlem. I was able to get immersed in the music of people which I felt a very much a part of but had never been able to express to them musically,” Miller, on the faculty of Yale and Drew Universities, maintained.
He’s still focusing his music on human rights, saying, “These days I focus in with my music on the rights of immigrants at the border, LGBTQ communities, and of course the rights within racial justice.”
When he’s not working, Miller is home in Plainfield, NJ, with his husband and their son.
source: Tené Croom – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tenecroom
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