A Musical “Montage” Of New Haven History

Emiliano Cáceres Manzano Photo.

On a temporary stage on the New Haven Green, Maestro Perry So conjured up a piece of New Haven history. A swooning string section echoed and amplified Samantha Ege’s chords at the grand piano. Strings and woodwinds wove in and out of the keys in a moody tapestry, evoking a dream ballet in an old Hollywood movie. At one point, a motorcycle roared by, completing the sounds of New Haven. It was Helen Hagan’s Piano Concerto in C Minor, played in and to the heart of the city.

So is the music director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO), which has spent the past five years digging ever deeper into the music history of the Elm City.  Saturday, he was onstage for “City of Floating Sounds,” a collaboration between the NHSO, composer Huang Ruo, the Yale Schwarzman Center, and the International Festival Of Arts & Ideas, now in its 30th year. Throughout the evening, the concert was a testament to the necessity of art as a way of putting communities in touch with their shared cultural history.

“This is my most fervent hope—that we’re all connected and unified by our love for music,” So said in an interview before the concert, remembering last year’s procession from the James Hillhouse Marching Band onto the New Haven Green. “And that through music we can tell these stories that perhaps in other languages, in other genres, may be more difficult to tell.”

“I see it as a way to use music to knit together different communities,” he added in a phone call Monday.

Saturday night, that was clear even before the NHSO took the stage. At the beginning of the concert, Rev. Kevin Ewing, the festival’s interim director, took to the stage to explain the significance of this year’s milestone. He drew parallels between the festival’s “pearl anniversary” and the ever-increasing importance of maintaining the arts as a medium for communal engagement. He shouted out the National Endowment for the Arts, which partially funded the festival and is under threat of being dismantled.

He also called for the audience to advocate for the Endowment’s existence; a pearl, he reminded the crowd, is formed under resistance. In her own remarks, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro agreed: “Art need public support,” she reminded the crowd, which cheered loudly in response.

So introduced each piece by explaining its connection to New Haven. For example, the evening began with a bit of Americana: booming percussion and brass brought to life Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, a fitting start to this free, open-to-the-public event. Then came the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra, an homage to New Haven’s Italian community and to the Symphony’s roots in German and Italian immigrants.

After the overture, So moved on to the titular piece of the evening, which he first saw in New York City at Lincoln Center. Inspired by Ruo’s own experience of watching people on their phones (Ruo lives in the Bronx, and spends a lot of time on the New York City subway), the composition uses technology as a form of connection.

“Having a phone is great, but it isolates you,” he said in an interview on WNHH Community Radio last week. “How could I turn that into a real communication tool, for people to share? City of Floating Sounds, which is what I call a citywide, immersive, interactive symphony, was born out of that.” 

Saturday, the piece began an hour before the concert with a walking tour, with six routes that attendees could take through New Haven to explore the city’s musical heritage. When he says City of Floating Sounds is a testament to “how music moves through a community,” So means this literally: as attendees walked, their app played one of the piece’s 11 tracks.

Each attendee was encouraged to bring a speaker, or to play their track out loud, so that they could experience the piece coming together within the collective of their walking group. Long, meditative strings and the occasional mournful trumpet blended around each walking group as they stopped at locations like Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ or Yale University’s Woolsey Hall. Back on the New Haven Green, the audience got to hear Ruo’s piece in its entirety, but now uniquely intertwined with New Haven’s musical heritage.

One of the stops of the walking tour anticipated the musical centerpiece of the evening. The “Musical Heritage” route included the former home of Helen Hagan on Whalley Avenue, now a Wendy’s. Hagan was the first Black woman to earn a degree from Yale, which she did at the School of Music. To honor her, So followed City of Floating Sounds with the first movement of Hagan’s Piano Concerto in C Minor, which she composed as a student. As strings swelled, Ege plucked a single chord on the piano before plunging into the concerto.

Saturday evening was only the fourth known time that Hagan’s concerto has ever been publicly performed. To pull it off, So collaborated with Yale graduate student Soomin Kim to arrange Hagan’s music. After the show, Kim was approached by visitors from Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, who are now working with her to publish Hagan’s concerto to make it widely available.

So is certainly deeply conscious of the symphony’s broader history, he said in a phone call after the concert. For him, performing Hagan’s piece is especially representative of the work the NHSO has been working toward for the past five years under his leadership, as well as that of his predecessor, Maestro Alasdair Neale.

“We are New Haven’s orchestra,” he emphasized in an interview Monday.

Under this charge, So has devoted his tenure to reconnecting the orchestra to the community it inhabits, primarily through historical work and public engagement. His first concert a year ago focused on danceable music New Haveners would recognize. This year, in a similar spirit, So programmed Danzón no. 2 by Mexican composer Arturo Marquéz, for which he was accompanied by six students from the Yale Music in Schools Initiative. He also included two songs by George Gerswhin as an homage to the Shubert Theatre’s place in Broadway history, using the songs’ original arrangements by Johnny Green.

When programming, So said, he strives to make each piece a concrete act of connection to New Haven, whether unearthing archival history or engaging with young people. He sees concerts like City of Floating Sounds as a way to foster dialogue, a way to “put pieces of music onstage that prefigure the conversations you want to see in real life.” 

The Hagan piece, too, represents So’s commitment to using the orchestra as an essential way of giving New Haven access to the city’s rich cultural history. This coming year, he hopes to continue these efforts with a soon-to-be-announced season that continues to focus on telling the stories of more of the city’s communities.

On Saturday evening, the city’s cultural history was tangible on the New Haven Green. The sounds of Hagan’s concerto melded with children cooing and car bass on Elm Street, folding together New Haven in 1912 into conversation New Haven today. Eventually, the concerto came to a graceful close with Dr. Ege and the orchestra playing a final few chords. In response, the audience burst into a standing ovation: for So, for Ege, for the orchestra and for Hagan.

Listen to the full interview with Perry So, composer Huang Ruo, and the Yale Schwarzman Center's Jennifer Newmman above.