David Amram – American Dance Suite (1/3)

David Amram (*1930)
American Dance Suite for orchestra (1986)

I. Cheyenne 0:00
II. Blues 5:49
III. Cajun

The Manhattan Chamber Orchestra/Richard Auldon Clark

‘I decided to make a dance suite as a result of working with Jacques d’Ambroise, the dancer, choreographer and founder of the National Dance Institute in New York. Mr. d’Amboise wanted some of my music for a dance he was to create. After watching the excitement of seeing my composition choreographed (Mary Tyler Moore tap-danced in one section!), I decided I would write a piece celebrating American dance forms, as a concert piece, that could create a ballet in the listener’s mind, and perhaps someday be danced to. The first movement, Cheyenne, uses some traditional melodies of the Cheyenne people (a traditional Cheyenne melody, a traditional Cheyenne hand-game song “NU-USM NO-NOTZ” and a setting of a Cheyenne war dance, TN). The second movement, Blues, is a tribute to the contribution of jazz to the enrichment of our century, as music to dance to and music of great emotional depth [..] Rather than a rendering of traditional blues, it is a tribute to some of the masters like Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Mingus and Oscar Pettiford – all whom I have known and performed with earlier in my life. The final movement, Cajun, celebrates another indigenous form of American music that came to us via the Celtic people who lived in Brittany, came to Canada three hundred years ago as French-speaking Acadians, left Canada and arrived in the U.S., settling in Louisiana. There their Celtic-French Canadian music was influenced by the music of Native American and Afro-American cultures into the unique Cajun culture of today.’ ~ David Amram

Duration : 0:9:38