Category: Daily Dispatch

I’ve been a fan of Adolphus Hailstork since the 1980s. That’s when I first heard “Done Made My Vow,” as part of a concert broadcast over the radio.

“Done Made My Vow” (1985) is often described as a gospel oratorio, inspired in part by speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. So uplifting is the marriage of words and music, I hoped for years that it would be recorded. Then one day I stumbled across a copy in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra gift shop.

Hailstork has been part of the fabric of American music since at least the 1970s. Born in Rochester, New York, in 1941, he earned his BA from Howard University, his MA from the Manhattan School of Music – where his teachers included Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond – and his doctorate from Michigan State, where his studied with H. Owen Reed. Then he was off, like so many of his great American forebears, to study at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger.

For many years, Hailstork was composer-in-residence at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he taught. He is perhaps best known for his choral music, though it was the wistful slow movement of his Symphony No. 1, composed for a summer music festival in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, that next caught my ear.

I was elated to finally hear “Done Made My Vow” live with the New York Philharmonic last season, with the composer in attendance. A week later, I actually got to meet him at the premiere of his Symphony No. 4 at Alice Tully Hall. As succinctly as I could, I tried to express how much I admired his music and for how long. He listened graciously and as he signed a few of my CD booklets admitted that it’s good to be appreciated. It seems his music has always been performed, but in recent years, with arts organizations increasing their efforts to be more inclusive in their programming, Hailstork, now 82, is finally receiving some much-deserved high-profile recognition.

The text for “Done Made My Vow” was tweaked for the New York Philharmonic performance, but to my knowledge that version has yet to be recorded. Enjoy the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra recording at the link. The music is hale, but the sentiments are King.

A Hailstork miscellany:

Symphony No. 1 (1988): Mov’t II, Lento ma non troppo

“Sonata da Chiesa” (1992), inspired by the composer’s love of cathedrals (especially the one he sang in as a boy in Albany, New York)

“Motherless Child” (2002)

“Celebration!” (1974)

“Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed: In Memoriam Martin Luther King, Jr.” (1979)