Kickstarter

We will honor the pledges of our Kickstarter supporters who contribute to our Documentary Fund through our Longfellow Chorus web site donation page:

http://www.longfellowchorus.com/support.html

The Longfellow Chorus is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. As such, your donation is IRS tax-deductible (minus the value of any incentives received, like DVD or Blu Ray).

As a Kickstarter supporter, please note the Kickstarter incentive level you have pledged in your PayPal transaction or as a memo on your mailed-in check. You may elect to forego an incentive if you wish to deduct the entire amount on your 2013 IRS tax return.

If sending a check by regular mail, please make it payable to "The Longfellow Chorus Documentary Fund" and mail it to:

The Longfellow Chorus

C/O Charles Kaufmann

PO Box 5133

Portland, ME 04101

(USA)

This 3-minute promo combines our Norfolk and Washington, D. C., promos into one concise trailer. Additionally, it provides information about how to donate to our Documentary Fund once the Kickstarter campaign is over:

Laverne Goldman is a living link to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor through her grandfather, who witnessed Coleridge-Taylor's visits to Metropolitan AME Church and Washington, DC, in 1904 and 1906. I interviewed her on August 6, 2012, during filming for our documentary "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and His Music in America, 1900-1912." The background music is Rodrick Dixon singing and Lester Green playing "Onaway! Awake, beloved!" recorded the same day. "Onaway!" is Coleridge-Taylor's popular tenor aria from Hiawatha's Wedding Feast:

The filming for "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his music in America" is now about two-thirds complete, but there are four more exciting filming sessions planned for August, September and October. Your support for our project will help ensure that our completed film will cause quite a stir next March! — Charles Kaufmann

• In late August, in Boston, we film violinist Mariana Green-Hill performing Coleridge-Taylor's "Hiawathan Sketches," Opus 16, for violin and piano, the young composer's first attempt at creating music from Longfellow's epic poem -- a charming collection of three pieces.
• In late September, tenor Rodrick Dixon returns to Portland, Maine, along with Melanie Edwards, granddaughter of jazz great J. Rosamond Johnson, to film "Under the Bamboo Tree," Johnson's most popular single ragtime hit, 1901, and to explore the cross influence between Johnson's and Coleridge-Taylor's music and personalities. His Majesty's Theater meets Broadway ca. 1905/06 in this fascinating sequence.
• In late October, two young Juilliard graduates, choreographer Darrell Grand Moultrie and dancer Allison Mixon, come to Portland to film Darrell's choreography to the Coleridge-Taylor song, "Thou Art Risen, My Beloved," as sung last week in Washington by Rodrick Dixon. The New York Times writes, "Moultrie moves his dancers around stage with remarkable authority... [and] is obviously someone to watch."
• On October 16, four historians participate in a filmed roundtable discussion about Coleridge-Taylor at the Maine Historical Society in Portland. Participants: Jeffrey Green, author of "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life (2011);" Dr. William Tortolano, author of numerous Coleridge-Taylor studies; Karen A. Schaffer, author of "Maud Powell Favorites," and President of the Maud Powell Society; and Ann Havemeyer, PhD, historian of the Norfolk Historical Society.

[Photo: J. Rosamond Johnson, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and James Weldon Johnson outside Coleridge-Taylor's home in Croydon, 1905. Image used by permission of Melanie Edwards.]

[Image, above, from right to left: Charles Kaufmann, producer/director, Pete Nenortas, sound technician, and Richard Kane, cinematographer, filming on the Ellipse, Washington, DC, August 8, 2012, until we were told by a security person on a bicycle to "move on."]

Did you know that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall attended the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary School in Baltimore as a child? Such was the hugely inspiring influence in America of British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor one hundred years ago. They even named public schools after him.

We've completed the Washington, DC, segment of our film, "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and His Music in America." I could list all the outstanding scenes, but I don't want to give anything away until our film's premiere in March 2013:

• The eloquence of Reverend Ronald E. Braxton, depicting the history of the Metropolitan AME Church and its relation to Coleridge-Taylor and African-American music.
• The solo performance by Angela Brown, Rodrick Dixon, Karla Scott and Robert Honeysucker, turning Coleridge-Taylor's setting of Longfellow's Poem on Slavery, "She Dwells by Great Kenhawa's Side," into a kind of Beethoven's Ninth.
• Rodrick Dixon's performance of Coleridge-Taylor's student setting of the Longfellow poem, "The Arrow and the Song," and my comment that Rod can turn any student work into a masterpiece.
• Angela Brown's rather impudent imitation of Snow White singing Coleridge-Taylor's soprano aria "Spring Had Come."
• Our interview with Thelma, an 80-year-old Metropolitan Church member, who remembers her grandfather's stories about witnessing Coleridge-Taylor in Metropolitan in 1904.
• The fabulous performances of various Coleridge-Taylor choral works by our Washington-based chorus, directed by the very talented young music director of Metropolitan, Lester Green, DMA.
• The "command performance" for our cameras by the Marine Band of John Phillip Sousa's "Free Lance" March, (also called On to Victory), and the audacity of our cinematographer, Richard Kane, in asking Marine Band Director Col. Michael Colburn to please repeat the piccolo section solo for our camera (which he did). Free Lance was a Sousa comic opera, 1905-1906, in which an army of "beautiful Amazons" and an army of "handsome young giants" face each other in a battle that concludes when "everyone falls into couples," to quote the April 16, 1906, New York Times review. Another article directly under the Times review of Free Lance reports a sold out performance of The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, and this highlights the underlying atmosphere of racism of the period that the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington and its star British composer were peacefully confronting.
• After Samuel Coleridge-Taylor conducted the Orchestra of the Marine Band in November 1904, says Marine Band historian Mike Ressler in our filmed interview, it would be another 96 years before another civilian would be allowed to guest conduct the Marine Band.

These and more you will have to wait to see when we release our final product in March 2013. Your support will help us complete a film like no other, and help revive interest in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a celebrity in America 100 years ago, but now a forgotten name.

Did I mention my one-person campaign to nominate Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for a Presidential Medal of Freedom? Stay tuned.

Charles Kaufmann, Producer/Director