|| Double album ||

|| Burn-on-demand CDs of this CRi reissue are available at our website: www.newworldrecords.org/products/piano-music-by-african-american-composers ||

Not long before the U.S. bicentennial, American musicians without foreign names were suspect, evidencing a national cultural insecurity. When Natalie Leota Henderson was a piano student of Olga Samaroff, she was advised to assume a more exotic name for her impending career. The one selected for her was Natalie Hinderas. Mms. Samaroff, who had been
married to Leopold Stokowski [sic, not Stokes], understood this well. She had been born in Texas as Olga Hickenlooper. Today, the value of an American identity in one’s person and one’s art is no longer questionable. But as the lives and careers of Natalie Hinderas and the nine composers in this collections demonstrate, the struggle for mainstream recognition of African-American musicians and composers, based on the merits of their work, is an on-going effort nearly a century old.

Natalie Hinderas was born in 1927 in Oberlin, Ohio. Though her great-grandparents were slaves, her grandparents were successful entrepreneurs, in the hotel and restaurant business. Their daughter Leota Palmer, Natalie’s mother, received the finest education a middle-class Black woman could at the time and went on to serve on the piano faculties of the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory. Musicians who came to Oberlin were frequent guests in the family home. It was there that Natalie began piano studies at age six with her mother and also first met composer R. Nathaniel Dett. At age eight, she entered Oberlin as a special student and that same year appeared in her first solo piano recital. She made her debut with orchestra, at age twelve, with the Cleveland Women’s Symphony in the Grieg Piano Concerto. Composer George Walker, whose music Natalie would later champion, was a teenage member of that audience. Following her graduation at Oberlin in 1945, she continued her studies at the Juilliard School of Music with Olga Samaroff and at the Philadelphia Conservatory with Edward Steuermann. Also while at Juilliard, she studied composition with Vincent Perschetti.

It was through concerts at American colleges and universities beginning in 1968 that Hinderas became widely associated with music of African-American composers. Artist manager Joanne Rile, a long-time friend of the late pianist, states that Hinderas gave these types of programs: all traditional repertoire; a combination of traditional repertoire in the first half with music by Americans including works by Black composers after intermission; and all music by Black composers. Hinderas, with her mother, who also advised her on programming, and Rile gave considerable attention to what terminology should be used in billing the concerts. They settled finally on using the term “Black,” though as Rile recalls, “Black was beautiful but it was still revolutionary to say so.”

As we approach the centennial of Dvořák’s admonishment of 1893 for Americans to write American music, his advice seems prophetic, for American music has been able to achieve its own identity principally by responding toe the stimulus of indigenous Black music. As these performances by Natalie Hinderas display, the contributions of African-American composers are primary evidence of our strides toward that
goal.

— Dominique-Rene de Lerma, Director - Center for Black Music Research Columbia College Chicago (excerpted from the liner notes)