Ulysses Kay’s “Chariots”: Orchestral Rhapsody
Notes by TŌN violinist Mingyue Xia
Composer Ulysses Kay has an extraordinary talent for portraying nonmusical ideas through a unique musical language. He was born in 1917 into a musical family. His father loved to sing, his mother and sister played piano, and his uncle was the famous jazz bandleader Joe “King” Oliver. From a young age, he heard work songs, hymns, Chopin, and jazz. He started playing violin and piano, then later saxophone in high school. In 1938, he began studying composition at the University of Arizona, where he got encouragement from William Grant Still. Over the next few decades he continued his studies in various schools, including Eastman, Yale, and Columbia. He also enriched his career as a musician in the U.S. Navy Band, as a teacher, and of course by composing.
The orchestral rhapsody Chariots was written in 1979. By then, Kay had already become one of the most notable African American composers trained in European styles. Most of his works were created for the traditional concert program. Unlike a classical symphony, a rhapsody has only a single movement, with free and contrasting materials full of twists and turns. In this rhapsody, Kay explores the symbol of the chariot as written about by various authors. In an interview before its world premiere, he mentioned how he got the inspiration from the work Milton by his favorite author, William Blake.
The first thing Kay shows us in the rhapsody is Queen Mab driving her tiny chariot to get into people’s dreams (as referenced in Romeo and Juliet). This is represented by a jazzy trumpet melody accompanied by dancing rhythms which later appears two more times. The second theme is more serious and heavy, with a Bartókian tune played by the lower strings, portraying the chariot that represented the spiritual tools to liberate humanity in Blake’s Milton. The idea of the third chariot derived from Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody, in which brass play a fanfare that represents justice, and the harmonic color turns brighter. The idea for the fourth and final theme came from Andrew Marvel’s “To his coy mistress”, where the chariot is illustrated as time rushing forward.