Meet the Composer

Dawson Hull

Dawson Hull is a pianist, composer, and conductor in the Memphis, TN area. As the Pastor of Instrumental Worship Arts at Germantown Baptist Church, he leads the Conservatory of Music, orchestra, jazz band, and student choir, and is the founder of the Masterpiece Concert Series in Germantown, TN, which provides free classical concerts to the community.

Dawson frequently performs solo and chamber recitals in Memphis, and he and his wife (Taneea Hull, clarinet) enjoy performing together as a duo for churches, recitals, events, and masterclasses throughout the country. In 2022, Dawson and Taneea released their first album together entitled “REFLECTIONS”. The album features Dawson’s original arrangements of hymns for clarinet and piano, written in a classical style. Dawson was also recently invited to premiere some of his compositions at the International Clarinet Association 2019 ClarinetFest, and as part of the Jackson Symphony Orchestra’s 2020 Chamber series.

As a pianist, Dawson has appeared as soloist with the Paducah Symphony Orchestra, Delta Symphony Orchestra, The Jackson Symphony Orchestra, Samford University Orchestra, Southeastern Chamber Orchestra, the Omulgee Symphony Orchestra, the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, and the University of Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

Dawson holds a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree in Piano from the University of Memphis, a Master’s Degree in Piano from Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Piano and Theory/Composition from Samford University in Birmingham, AL. His piano teachers include Alice Adams Jackson, Betty Sue Shepherd, Thomas Hecht, Marian Hahn, Eric Zuber, and Cathal Breslin. He studied composition under Ronald Boud, James Jensen, and Bob Burroughs.

Dawson and Taneea (principal clarinet for The Jackson Symphony and soloist for "Northern Lights") have three children, and they love to make music together as a family.

Program Notes

Northern Lights

Dawson Hull (b. 1984)

A severe solar storm in May 2024 caused a unique phenomenon that allowed the aurora borealis to be wondrously visible in the southern part of the United States. Though this has happened before, what surprised curious stargazers was the magnitude of clarity that the pulsation of light provided. What is usually the sole purview of Alaskans and Northern Canadians was suddenly available to Tennesseans, and people laid out blankets, turned off as many lights as they could, and snuggled up for the show.

So, too, did composer Dawson Hull. The Memphis resident looked up at the night sky and what he saw not only filled his vision, but also his hearing. To hear him tell it, the sky lit up the sounds in his head and he put pen to paper to try to capture it. Though not possessing synesthesia (the ability to see literal color in sound), Hull does see general color associations with various sounds, and Northern Lights is the sonorous outcome of his borealis experience.

The work seeks to explore the fluctuations and gyrations of the dancing light that is the primary expression of the aurora borealis. As the lights morph from one shape to another, so does the music, as it ebbs and flows through an untethered harmonic palette. By its conclusion, there is a full measure of silence for the orchestra, a final breath of acceptance that the galaxy needs a little quiet to allow the speres an opportunity to say their peace. In this way, Hull has provided a tangible soundscape, reflecting back to the universe our best guess as to what it’s saying.

Le Boeuf sur le Toit, op. 58

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)

Milhaud had an early start as a musician. To begin with, he was born into an incredibly musical family in Aix-en-Provance, not far from the coastal city of Marseille. From the age of 3 he was already playing duets on violin with his pianist father as well as showing signs of experiments with his own compositions. As a teen he entered the Paris Conservatory to study with titans such as Charles Widor and work alongside classmates like Arthur Honegger. Though possessing great talent for the violin, Milhaud gravitated toward composition at the Conservatory and made that the focus of his education.

While the outbreak of the First World War saw many of Milhaud’s friends heading off to the frontlines, rheumatoid arthritis disqualified him from service. In its place, Milhaud volunteered for the Civil Service office and was assigned as secretary to the French Ambassador to Brazil. In 1916, Milhaud moved for a 3-year stint to Rio de Janeiro, a move that would deeply impact his compositional output for the rest of his life.

Le Boeuf sur le Toit (“The Ox on the Roof”) is the outcome of Milhaud’s profound love of Brazilian street and folk music. When he returned to France in 1919, he couldn’t get the melodies he had encountered there out of his head. As a result, Le Boeuf is a grab bag of Brazilian melodic quotes, tunefully spun together in a Rondo form that has delighted audiences since its premiere. At least 20 different tunes are buried within the score, representing 14 Brazilian composers. Each of the tunes is carefully curated to make them explicit to the listener, partly by giving them each their own key.

The jocularity of the music conjures all sorts of festive images, and one of Milhaud’s friends in Paris, Jean Cocteau, encouraged him to allow a ballet company to choreograph the work with circus characters to enhance the impression on the audience. As it turns out, Cocteau had a point, and the premiere in 1920 in a club on the Champs-Élysées had people standing shoulder to shoulder to get a glimpse of the glorious spectacle before them. A series of performances in London were so successful that the work became a touring piece for ballet companies around the world. Even a bar in New York City was named after it. Ultimately, the sheer lifeforce of the music has made Le Boeuf sur le Toit Milhaud’s most performed work and a joy to experience live.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915, op 24

Samual Barber (1910-1981)

Samual Barber was the only composer on Eleanor Steber’s mind when looking for a new work to premiere with the Boston Symphony. A soprano with a powerhouse career in the middle of the 20th century, Steber sought out Barber in 1947 to provide a new work – something lyrical, lilting, and even a little nostalgic. Barber immediately turned to a small, loosely poetic and quasi-autobiographical piece by James Agee to set, and thus Knoxville: Summer of 1915 came into being.

What makes this work so memorable and popular involves the deep intermingling of the music and the text. It’s almost as if one cannot exist without the other. Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, some 600 miles from Knoxville, but he understood exactly what the prose was describing. He, too, sat on his lawn in the twilight with his family, lazily whiling the summer days away. He, too, knew the sounds of streetcars, and he knew the tension as well as ease of family grownup conversations overheard by a young boy. Born the same year as Agee, it was as if the poet was describing Barber’s own life, and he wasn’t alone. Once Steber, herself born and raised in West Virginia, knew what text the composer intended to set, she proclaimed “That was exactly my childhood!”

To a certain extent, everyone can probably imagine the scene set by Agee. In 1915 even radios were relatively rare, so we’re left with the notion that folks truly did sit and talk with one another as a pastime. The idea of blankets on the lawn, a gentle warm humidity in the air, and neighbors walking by in the early evening is easily conjured in the mind, even if modern life often looks very different. Agee’s poem, and by brilliant extension, Barber’s setting of it, reinforces that heartfelt yearning for life stripped of distraction and focused on our loved ones. The music transports us to that moment and allows a brief stay – a suspended moment in time filled with longing, love, and the simple pleasure of being with one another. The premiere of the work in 1948 was such a success that Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was considered a standard overnight. And so it has been ever since.

Appalachian Spring (1945 Orchestral Suite)

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

It’s often said it takes a village to raise a child, and the same is frequently true for bringing a piece of music to life. For dancer Martha Graham and composer Aaron Copland, a passing conversation in the early 1940s eventually resulted in a union of artistic geniuses premiering Appalachian Spring on October 30th, 1944, at the Library of Congress. Graham both choreographed and danced the lead in the ballet set to Copland’s score that night, but in truth, dozens of artisans – from set designers to costumers to lighting designers – merged to produce one of the most profound premieres in American musical and theatrical history. The premiere made such an impression that it bonded the two artists together in the minds of the public for the rest of their lives. That the work would receive the Pulitzer Prize the following year was almost a foregone conclusion.

Copland was already deeply respected in the ballet community, having produced the scores for Billy the Kid in 1938 and Rodeo in 1942. These scores defined his “Americana” compositional period that found its roots in US folk and hymn songs, exploring the mythology of pastoral American life in the 19th century. His music was sincere and earnest, much like the spirited stories that these two ballets told, and Martha Graham (herself a country girl from Allegheny, PA) was intent on telling this type of story, too. Graham solicited philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge to commission the new work from Copland. Coolidge, with deep pockets and a desire to support new music, was only tangentially interested in ballet. What concerned her more was the creation of new chamber music. Therefore, the ballet from Copland would need to conform to the size and structure of a chamber music ensemble.

The ensemble size suited Copland just fine. In 1943, with only a loose storyline plotted, he began writing the score for a small band of 13 instruments. For the next year he continued to compose, using only a “placeholder” title for the work, Ballet for Martha. By the middle of October 1944 – only two weeks before the premiere – there still was no proper title. Graham happened upon a poem by Hart Crane that utilized the phrase “Appalachian Spring”, and the dancer knew she’d found it. Years later, Copland would openly talk about how the “spring” in the poem refers to a body of water, where most audiences think of the piece referencing the season of “spring”. But that detail notwithstanding, the title does serve to put one’s mind in the right setting for this rural and placid work. It should be noted that the subtitle for this work, at Copland’s direction, remained Ballet for Martha.

The ballet essentially follows four characters – a newlywed couple, a country minister, and a pioneer woman. They weave through an introduction, a revivalist gathering with square dancing, exploration of daily farm life of the young couple, and a gently optimistic conclusion looking heroically to the future. The revival scene includes the famous Shaker melody, “Simple Gifts” that is so cherished. Though not an Appalachian folk melody, it is arguably among the most sublime inclusions of a folk tune in modern music. Once the ballet was premiered, conductors clamored to include the work on the concert stage. The following year, Copland arranged the 13-instrument original score for full orchestra and the New York Philharmonic premiered it in 1945. The ballet lives and breathes, literally pulsing with humanity and restrained pride. Copland knew his country, and his love for its people is obvious in his soaring and optimistic score.