By Michael Reckord, ContributorMUSIC LOVERS are in for a treat on Sunday when the Kingston Restoration Company (KRC), the British High Commission and RCM Music Foundation present a milestone-making concert at the Kingston Parish Church, downtown, Kingston.
Always passionate when talking about music, concert organiser Rosina Christiana Moder declared herself 'extra-excited' about the event as she spoke about it early this week. She sees it as her 'mission' and 'duty' to promote her specialty, 18th century music, in Jamaica, hence the inclusion of composers like Handel, Bach and Mozart on the programme.
However, the focus of Moder's excitement is really the music of two Caribbean contemporaries of those European composers, Jamaican Samuel Felsted and Cuban Esteban Salas, the earliest regional composers on record.
Moder says Salas' music will be performed in Jamaica for the first time on Sunday, at the second of what she intends to be annual concerts at the church. Last year, Felsted was the featured composer.
Other Jamaican composers to be heard are Paulette Bellamy, Clyde Hoyte and Peter Ashbourne. The last named will also perform at the concert as one of many Jamaican and Cuban singers or instrumentalists on the programme.
Felsted (1743 -1802) was born in Jamaica of British parents and served for more than eight years as organist at the St Andrew Parish Church. There, in 1775, he wrote the oratorio Jonah, the very first one written in the Americas.
FIRST DOCUMENTED
PERFORMANCE
Its first documented performance in Jamaica was in 1779. It was performed in New York and Boston for the inauguration tour of America's first president, George Washington. Felsted, who was also a poet, painter and inventor, wrote Six Voluntarys for Organ and Harpsichord which, together with Jonah, is archived at the British Library, London.
Salas (1725-1803) was born in Havana, Cuba, and started to sing in a choir at eight. He received lessons in violin, organ and composition and at 15 enrolled at the Theological Seminary San Carlos, where he studied philosophy, theology
and law.
He went to Santiago de Cuba, Cuba in 1764 and became organist and musical director of the cathedral there. A renowned poet, he composed music for his orchestra and for many of the churches in and around Santiago. More than 100 of his compositions, including passions, psalms, masses and Christmas music, are in the archives of Santiago's Cathedral and the National Museum, Havana, Cuba.
Paulette Bellamy, LRSM, ATCL, LTCL, FTCL, a composer, arranger and performer on violin and piano/keyboard, is a co-founder and co-artistic director of ASHE Caribbean Performing Arts Ensemble. Her JAMI (Jamaica Music Industry)-award winning ensemble, Touch of Elegance, has entertained audiences for two decades.
Her compositions and arrangements for the group have helped ASHE win numerous Actor Boy and JAMI awards and gain critical and audience acclaim on their extensive tours of the Caribbean, Central and North America, the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa.
Clyde Hoyte, the composer of numerous well-loved patriotic, Christmas and spiritual songs, spent most of his youth in Guyana, but came to Jamaica in 1939 to continue work as a journalist. Moder has called him 'a walking dictionary of Jamaica's recent history'.
BEST-KNOWN SONGS
His best-known songs include No Snow on Our Carib Island, Daphne Walking, Sweet As a Dream, O'er Our Blue Mountain and Let All Be One.
Peter Ashbourne, LRSM, is a leading composer, arranger, songwriter, live performer, recording artiste and producer. He works in the classical, jazz pop and reggae genres.
A graduate of, among other institutions, Berklee College of Music, Boston, he initially studied classical music from the age of eight. He has since composed music for choir, soloists, chamber music groups, string quartets, wind symphony orchestras and big bands, as well as for musicals and films.
There is no charge for admission to Sunday's concert, but donations will go toward the church's Organ Fund and scholarships from the RCM Music Foundation.
