Uploaded July 2020 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
Alvin Singleton, Mestizo II (1970)
Recording taken from Singleton's Soundcloud page (soundcloud.com/alvinsingleton). The performance is presumably by the Yale Symphony Orchestra, though no credits or recording details are given and the music has not been released on record. Presented for information purposes; I will remove on request. Please see also Alvin Singletons' website: alvinsingleton.com
George Lewis, from 'Lifting the Cone of Silence', New York Times, June 2020:
"One day in 1970, my freshman-year college roommate, the violist Miles Hoffman, mentioned that he was performing an unusual work with the Yale Symphony that I might like to hear. Indeed, the piece captivated me, and I was astonished to see a young African-American graduate student, Alvin Singleton — now one of America’s most distinguished composers — take the stage to accept the applause. I don’t think I had seen or even heard of a Black composer before. His “Mestizo II” is an ebullient infusion of free improvisation into the classical orchestra."
From interview of Singleton by Ethan Iverson at Do the Math, 2016 (ethaniverson.com/interview-with-alvin-singleton/):
AS: I was interested in Gunther’s Third Stream until I realized that you can’t just put things together. There’s got to be an original something there, too.
EI: You sent me a tape of your jazz-meets-classical Mestizo II, which I thought was more successful than most of Gunther’s Third Stream pieces. I was laughing while listening. It’s kind of a defamation of Third Stream, really. How did that piece come about?
AS: The Yale Symphony Orchestra, an undergraduate orchestra,, asked me for a piece in celebration of 75 years of the Yale School of Music. I wanted a big sound. The piece opens with a big chord that is sustained by the strings through out the entire piece, Each player of the rest of the Orchestra is given the interval of an octave and asked to play all the pitches within as loudly and as fast as possible. Improvise! The piece is one big crescendo to the end, with more and more events added. It gets so loud that the instruments that can’t be heard, like bassoon and harp, these players are instructed to move to the percussion section to pick up something and “bang.”
EI: It seems like the rhythm section plays a jazz part, though.
AS: Right, that is also important. In fact, to make this all work, I needed some kind of swing nucleus. So I asked a jazz bassist and a drummer, (both are scored in the piece) to play a walking jazz line, starting slowly and speeding up gradually independent of the orchestra. The ear hears them as a magic carpet picking up the orchestral sound and carrying it with the walking jazz line: sounds like it is really happening.
EI: Yeah, it is really playful and organic. I don’t like it when Gunther writes out walking bass and a 12/8 ride cymbal with accompanying dense twelve-tone writing in the strings. It’s trying too hard to get an effect that shouldn’t be that difficult. You get the same effect the smooth and easy way in Mestizo II. Or at least, I suspect it was relatively easy. How was the process with the orchestra, did they get it?
AS: Yeah, they got it. The musicians loved doing it! But the conductor complained, “What are you trying to do, blow my brass out before the rest of the concert?” They were doing three generations of Yale composers: following Mestizo II on the program was Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler."
Alvin Singleton, Mestizo II (1970)
Recording taken from Singleton's Soundcloud page (soundcloud.com/alvinsingleton). The performance is presumably by the Yale Symphony Orchestra, though no credits or recording details are given and the music has not been released on record. Presented for information purposes; I will remove on request. Please see also Alvin Singletons' website: alvinsingleton.com
George Lewis, from 'Lifting the Cone of Silence', New York Times, June 2020:
"One day in 1970, my freshman-year college roommate, the violist Miles Hoffman, mentioned that he was performing an unusual work with the Yale Symphony that I might like to hear. Indeed, the piece captivated me, and I was astonished to see a young African-American graduate student, Alvin Singleton — now one of America’s most distinguished composers — take the stage to accept the applause. I don’t think I had seen or even heard of a Black composer before. His “Mestizo II” is an ebullient infusion of free improvisation into the classical orchestra."
From interview of Singleton by Ethan Iverson at Do the Math, 2016 (ethaniverson.com/interview-with-alvin-singleton/):
AS: I was interested in Gunther’s Third Stream until I realized that you can’t just put things together. There’s got to be an original something there, too.
EI: You sent me a tape of your jazz-meets-classical Mestizo II, which I thought was more successful than most of Gunther’s Third Stream pieces. I was laughing while listening. It’s kind of a defamation of Third Stream, really. How did that piece come about?
AS: The Yale Symphony Orchestra, an undergraduate orchestra,, asked me for a piece in celebration of 75 years of the Yale School of Music. I wanted a big sound. The piece opens with a big chord that is sustained by the strings through out the entire piece, Each player of the rest of the Orchestra is given the interval of an octave and asked to play all the pitches within as loudly and as fast as possible. Improvise! The piece is one big crescendo to the end, with more and more events added. It gets so loud that the instruments that can’t be heard, like bassoon and harp, these players are instructed to move to the percussion section to pick up something and “bang.”
EI: It seems like the rhythm section plays a jazz part, though.
AS: Right, that is also important. In fact, to make this all work, I needed some kind of swing nucleus. So I asked a jazz bassist and a drummer, (both are scored in the piece) to play a walking jazz line, starting slowly and speeding up gradually independent of the orchestra. The ear hears them as a magic carpet picking up the orchestral sound and carrying it with the walking jazz line: sounds like it is really happening.
EI: Yeah, it is really playful and organic. I don’t like it when Gunther writes out walking bass and a 12/8 ride cymbal with accompanying dense twelve-tone writing in the strings. It’s trying too hard to get an effect that shouldn’t be that difficult. You get the same effect the smooth and easy way in Mestizo II. Or at least, I suspect it was relatively easy. How was the process with the orchestra, did they get it?
AS: Yeah, they got it. The musicians loved doing it! But the conductor complained, “What are you trying to do, blow my brass out before the rest of the concert?” They were doing three generations of Yale composers: following Mestizo II on the program was Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler."
