A Black Harpists Story
Transcriber: Amanda Zhu
Reviewer: Hiroko Kawano
(Solo harp music)
My name is Ann Hobson Pilot.
(Music ends)
I was fortunate to have enjoyed
a successful and rewarding career
as a classical harpist,
first with the Washington
National Symphony for three years,
and then 40 years
with the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
29 of them as principle.
This is a time
when some of our nation
has come to grips with its racist past.
You may wonder what my life was like
as the first African American
in these two orchestras
in the mid-1960s.
I remember my first day on the job
with the Boston Symphony.
It was my first rehearsal.
I arrived early
to tune my harp and to warm up.
An older member of the orchestra
came charging up to me.
I expected him to say,
“Welcome to the orchestra,”
or some other polite words.
Instead, he looked me right in the eyes
and said,
“You must fry some mean chicken.”
For those of you
who don’t understand what that means,
fried chicken is a mainstay
in racist depictions of Blacks.
I thought I had arrived
when I won the audition
for the Boston Symphony,
but with those few words,
that man had tried to put me in my place.
Fortunately, I have a good sense of humor,
which I have used then
and many other times.
With Washington, there were
more traditional problems with race,
mainly because our tours
were mostly down South.
It was pretty common
not to be able to eat
in certain restaurants back then,
but I was able to stay
in the orchestra hotels.
I won’t say that it was easy
navigating the pretty much exclusively
white world of classical music back then,
and I’m very glad
to see that world changing,
if ever so slowly.
Seeing the protesting in the streets
for racial justice
gives me some hope for the future
of a better racial climate.
I will be playing a beautiful piece
by the Argentinean composer
Astor Piazzolla
called “Chiquilin de Bachin.”
I first fell in love with this work
and other works by Piazzolla
after I retired from the Boston Symphony
about 10 years ago.
When I first heard it,
it was with a singer,
as it was intended.
I couldn’t understand
the words in Spanish,
but I was able to find
an English translation.
It is a very sad and dark story
about a young boy who is so poor
that he eats from trash cans
and has no shoes.
He gets spare change
by selling roses
at a cafe in Buenos Aires,
the Cafe Bachin.
There was no arrangement for solo harp,
so I asked Michael Maganuco
to write one for me.
Michael is a harpist
as well as a composer,
and he wrote this beautiful
arrangement for solo harp.
I think this work suits the harp very well
with its warm and haunting tone.
I will be using different techniques
to vary the tone color,
playing in the middle of the strings,
as usual,
or lower on the strings -
bell-like sounds called harmonics -
and open-handed low notes
on the wire strings.
This is a sorrowful and meditative piece,
which will hopefully provide some calm
in this stressful and challenging time
of the pandemic and social unrest.
[CHIQUILIN DE BACHIN
Astor Piazzolla (1968)
Arranged for Solo Harp
by Michael Maganuco
Dedicated to Mrs. Ann Hobson Pilot]
(Solo harp music)
(Music ends)