This year’s Fall Festival Sunday features the music of living African-American composer, Adolphus Hailstork. Our congregation will experience choral and orchestral settings of spirituals) including Great Day!, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, and Kum Bah Yah), an energetic interpretation of traditional hymns in his "Fanfare on Amazing Grace," and the second movement from his "Symphony No. 1."

Hailstork was born in 1941 in Rochester, New York. He grew up in Albany, New York, where he studied violin, piano, organ, and voice. He studied composition at Howard University (1963). In the summer of that year, he attended the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, France, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger. He then entered the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Music. He completed his formal studies at Michigan State University, where he earned a Ph.D. in composition in 1971. He served most of his career as a professor of music and Composer-in-Residence at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. 

Hailstork has written prolifically in nearly every musical genre with works for chorus, solo voice, piano, organ, various chamber ensembles, band, orchestra, and opera. His compositional style embodies an innovative synthesis of his African heritage, his European classical training, the rich choral heritage as a chorister in the Episcopal Church, and his experience as an American. He shares:

“I like to tell people that I’m a cultural hybrid and sometimes it’s agonizing. Sometimes I feel like I was hanging by my thumbs between two cultures. And then I just said to myself — after years of this, I said, “Look, I accept myself as a cultural hybrid, and I know I have trained in Euro-classical skills and I also am very interested — and since I went to school in an African American college — I am aware of that culture too. And I use them both.”

He has received numerous awards and commissions, and works have been performed by prestigious ensembles, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. 

We are excited about this opportunity to learn and introduce the music of Dr. Hailstork!