I/O New Music 2021 - "Wounded Children"

I/O New Music 2021 Virtual Festival at Williams College presents an interview and performance with celebrated composer Dr. Adolphus Hailstork. VIDEOLINK

Wounded Children – Suite for Piano, by Adolphus Hailstork is performed by Doris Stevenson, who also hosts an interview with the composer. Moved by the plight of children all over the world, but especially by the plight of children caged and separated from their families at the border, Adolphus Hailstork composed Wounded Children, a suite of 13 interconnected, untitled short movements that may be heard as one 30-minute fabric, yet the individual movements also stand on their own. In the composer’s own words: “Children starving in Africa. Children bombed and gassed in Syria, and abducted in Nigeria. The direct impetus for writing this piece is the caging of immigrant children in the southwest part of the United States of America. My country. My Homeland. These children were separated from their parents without any tracking system for reuniting parents with their children. The children will bear the scars of their internment for the rest of their lives.”

Adolphus Hailstork received his doctorate in composition from Michigan State University, where he was a student of H. Owen Reed. He had previously studied at the Manhattan School of Music, under Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond, at the American Institute at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, and at Howard University with Mark Fax. He has written numerous works for chorus, solo voice, piano, organ, various chamber ensembles, band, orchestra, and opera. Dr. Hailstork is Professor of Music and Eminent Scholar at Old Dominion University in Norfolk (Virginia, USA.)

Pianist Doris Stevenson is Lyell B. Clay Artist in Residence, Piano.

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