Classical Music About (or from) Florida

Art Music about my home, the Sunshine State

The “classical” music world is a small place, and there are not many famous pieces of music dedicated to specific places. Some like Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” are not marked as such but the product of circumstances (he was in New York at the time and wrote it while lived there.) Even fewer have been specifically dedicated to my home state—that of Florida.

There are two major exceptions to this dearth of “Florida Classical Music.” The first is well know, but controversial.

“Old Folks at Home” (or “Suwannee River”) is a song by the original American Troubadour, Stephen Foster. Foster famously never actually visited the South but penned many, many famous songs for minstrel shows which made his reputation (but not his fortune—he died in poverty in 1864), and “Old Folks at Home” is one of the most famous. It is also become controversial, for obvious reasons; the lyrics are done in the voice of a black slave in the antebellum South longing to be with his family back on the plantation. Foster composed the song in 1851, and he had written most of the lyrics but could not come up with a name for the river that fit (he needed one with two syllables). His brother Morrison took down an atlas of the United States and picked out the Swannee River. Thus a classic was born.

In 1935, the state of Florida made “Old Folks at Home” the official state song but its lyrics have been rewritten to avoid giving offence, and in 2008 the state sponsored a competition to replace it but wound up keeping both, so that Florida has two state songs now. For the sake of fairness, below is a version by the one of the great bass voices ever recorded, that of Paul Robeson.

The other major piece about Florida titled as such is by the English composer Frederick Delius. Delius came from a successful commercial family in the North of England, but resisted his father’s attempts to enlist him in that profession. His father disdained the idea of him becoming a musician and sent him to work on plantation in Jacksonville, Florida, on the banks of the St. John’s River, 1884. There, Delius took in the African American spirituals of the blacks living there as well as the shanties of the sailors who came into port. In Jacksonville, Delius received his first formal education in music from a local organist named Thomas Ward. He also entertained guests in his cottage while doing very little actual work. Eventually, he left for Virginia and started teaching music on his own. In 1886 he returned to England and his father relented in his opposition to this choice of career.

Delius is probably the most famous composer associated with Florida. The home that he lived in was donated to Jacksonville University in 1943 and moved it there in 1961, where it was refurbished and still remains. The university hosted an annual Delius Festival (1961-2004) but sadly it is no more. But the old cottage he lived in still remains.

Delius never forgot his brief stay in Jacksonville, and left us a lovely piece of music, his Florida Suite (1887). The piece is written in four movements: 1) Daybreak, 2) By the River, 3) Sunset, and 4) At Night. Delius was a lover of nature and inspired by late Romantic composers such as Wagner and Edvard Grieg. But Delius later claimed that it was the singing of black spirituals he heard while living in Solano Grove on the St. John’s River that first inspired him to write, and one writer has called the Florida Suite “an expertly crafted synthesis of Grieg and Negroid Americana.”

This is about it for pieces composed about Florida, though there have been some composers who lived here. The composer Sidney Homer never wrote a song about Florida that I am aware of, but live in Winter Park, Florida (in the Orlando area) for the last fourteen years of his life. Homer is mostly known for his songs and was once one of the most popular composers in the United States, but his works fell out of fashion after his death. One of his most well-known compositions is a setting of a poem on the death of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, from 1912.

Probably the most prominent living composer from the state of Florida is Ellen Taafe Zwillich, who taught for many years at Florida State University in Tallahassee. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a honorary doctorate from Julliard, her music is “modern” but listenable, which is probably the best way I can put it. (I understand this will not be to the tastes of many, but I find I at least can enjoy some of her music). I am no expert on her work but it appears she has an eclectic discography (she has composed a work on the characters from the Peanuts comic strip, for example). This piece from her work titled Rituals is dark and interesting to me, but as I said, listenable.

Anyway, that’s about all I have for classical music for my state. What about yours? Are there any nice pieces of music that concern your home state I should know about? Please leave a note and makes some recs if you are incline.

Cheers!