Palm Beach Symphony to present 'Shoe Bird' at children's concerts

The Palm Beach Symphony has a lineup of heavy-hitter soloists on the way for its new season beginning Nov. 7, including pianists Hélène Grimaud, Yefim Bronfman and Maria João Pires, plus violinist Midori. 

But before embarking on its Masterworks series, the orchestra will turn its attention to children. In two performances next week, the ensemble will join forces with the Young Singers of the Palm Beaches and narrator Charlie Adler to perform "Eudora’s Fable: The Shoe Bird," a work based on "The Shoe Bird," the only children’s book of the celebrated American writer Eudora Welty. 

Composed by Samuel Jones, who like the late Welty is a native of Mississippi, the piece was commissioned in 2000 by the Mississippi Boychoir and recorded in 2008 by the Seattle Symphony under its then-conductor, Gerard Schwarz, who is now the director of the Palm Beach Symphony. That recording was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Album for Children category.  

Jones, 86, was the founding dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and worked at the Houston school for nearly a quarter-century before taking early retirement in 1997 and serving as composer-in-residence for Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony. 

“I had the best job in not just the country but the world for 14 years as his composer-in-residence,” Jones said. Every year, Jones would suggest that perhaps it was time for him to step aside and have someone else do the job. 

“And his answer was invariably, ‘Are you kidding?’” Jones said. 

Welty is now considered one of the country’s finest short-story writers. Her first published story was “Death of a Traveling Salesman” in 1936, and she followed that with more than 40 others. One of her five novels, "The Optimist’s Daughter," won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973. 

"The Shoe Bird," published in 1964, takes place in a shoe store where the resident parrot, Arturo, has heard a boy disdainful of being fitted with dress shoes exclaim, “Shoes are for the birds!” Taking it literally, Arturo calls for a great meeting of the birds of the world to assemble at the store after closing time to be fitted with shoes. 

Obviously, complications ensue, not least of which is finding the right footwear for a bunch of birds who don’t need them.  

“I’ve seen it a number of times now, and people do get caught up in the story,” Jones said. 

The orchestra, led by Schwarz, will perform the piece in a Sunday afternoon concert  Sunday at the Eissey Campus Theatre on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Scored for narrator, children’s chorus and orchestra, the piece will feature narration by Charlie Adler, a voice-over actor whose credits include the voice of Decepticon Starscream in the "Transformers" series, and roles in such shows as "Cow and Chicken" and "Tiny Toon Adventures." 

Twenty-two girls from the Young Singers of the Palm Beaches will be the chorus, which sings when all the birds have something to say at once. Also part of this performance will be projections by Ed McGowin, an artist whose works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim, Whitney and Corcoran art museums. The concert is part of a series named in honor of Dale McNulty, who was president of the symphony's board until his death in April. 

A second concert will be presented Oct. 26 for Palm Beach County students at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.  

"The Shoe Bird" is not just a setting of Welty’s story, it also offers a sonic demonstration of the sounds and capabilities of orchestral instruments. In doing so, Jones’ work joins a select company of compositions that demonstrate instruments of the orchestra to children, including Prokofiev’s "Peter and the Wolf" and Britten’s "A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra." 

“I did have the Prokofiev as a kind of model in the sense of a tale that introduces the instruments of the orchestra,” Jones said last week from his home near Auburn, Washington. But while the Russian composer gives the characters in that story to standard woodwind voices such as the clarinet and the oboe, Jones had a different strategy. 

“I felt that the auxiliary instruments of the orchestra needed to be brought to the fore. And so it’s the English horn and the contrabassoon, the bass clarinet and the piccolo rather than their big brothers and sisters, or little brothers and sisters, in the orchestra such as the case may be,” he said, noting that the commission did not require him to do that. “So that was a deliberate choice on my part, coming along in the wake of, and cognizant of, and respectful of, the path that had been trod before in terms of Prokofiev.” 

Each of the principal birds in the story is represented by an instrument. Arturo is an English horn, Gloria the goose is an alto saxophone, Minerva the owl is an alto flute. There also is a part for the spirit of the extinct dodo, which returns from the land of Nowhere in the guise of a contrabassoon. 

“The Shoe Bird’ is a marvelous piece for children for the delightful way it introduces the instruments of the orchestra and lends itself to additional educational opportunities that reinforce the classroom curriculum,” Schwarz said in a prepared statement. 

H. Shawn Berry, artistic director of the Young Singers of the Palm Beaches, said "The Shoe Bird" is "a great fairy tale." 

And it differs from "Peter and the Wolf" in an important way, Berry said. "If you don't have the chorus, you don't have a piece of music," he said, unlike with the Prokofiev work, which is for narrator and orchestra. "You have to have this storytelling element." 

That element also is affected by the COVID-9 pandemic. Berry said the girls will be singing with masks, following Palm Beach County and the Centers for Disease Control guidelines. The Young Singers plan to do the same thing in their Dec. 11 holiday concert at the Kravis, when no fewer than 185 children will be masked as they sing, he said.

Jones was a friend of Welty’s, having met the writer when he composed an orchestral piece in 1985 called "The Trumpet of the Swan," which was based on two stories from Welty’s collection "The Golden Apples." But she was not able to attend the first performance of "The Shoe Bird." 

“I was disappointed, and it was a deep disappointment, that her health had failed when this piece, ‘The Shoe Bird,’ came along and she was not able to travel,” Jones said.  “I wasn’t able to share it with her like I did the earlier piece. I know she would have loved to hear my version of her wonderful story.”  

Welty died in July 2001 at age 92. 

Jones’ music for "The Shoe Bird" is very accessible but never panders to the audience. Its opening motif is echoed throughout the work and serves to link its sections together as an organic whole. At the same time, each of the solo instruments is given plenty of room to be heard, allowing listeners to easily understand when each of Welty’s avian characters steps in. 

And the music for children’s chorus is dramatic and effective, while still being lighthearted and energetic. One of the repeat motifs of the score includes a leap down a minor ninth at a fast speed, but Jones says it’s easily dispatched by child singers. 

“It’s amazing. Kids don’t have any trouble finding that note at all,” he said. 

Berry said that's proving true with his group, which is being prepared by Jorge Valls, choral director at the Bak Middle School of the Arts.

"That is something they do remember. But there are other intervallic sections that are a little challenging, but yet written very well," Berry said. "He catches us off guard with some really cool, unexpected landing places. And sometimes there are phrases that repeat, but each time it's a little bit different. That's what makes it such an interesting piece of music."

Berry said the presentation of "The Shoe Bird" will be aided by McGowin's projections, which will draw the audiences' eyes as chorus, narrator and orchestra tell the story. 

Jones, who was conductor of the Rochester (N.Y.) Philharmonic in the early 1970s, has just finished the largest work he’s ever written, an oratorio called "The Transformation of Jesus," a 100-minute work for soloists, chorus and orchestra that tells the story of the 40-day period between the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. It was written on commission, and Jones is busily negotiating for a performance.  

A composer who studied with Howard Hanson, one of the leading classical composers of the mid-20th century, Jones said his view of writing music is that it is part of what he calls “the great conversation” with composers of the past. 

“You listen to their music and it speaks to you, and then you have something to say. And it’s part of the great conversation,” he said. “I’m aware of the fact that music has something to say beyond words, and it has to be structured in a way that communicates the joy and huge variety of life itself.”

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Tickets for the Oct. 24 concert are $20 with $10 student tickets. Seating at the Eissey Campus Theatre is general admission. Tickets are available online at PalmBeachSymphony.org; by phone at 561-281-0145; or by visiting the Palm Beach Symphony box office at 400 Hibiscus St. in West Palm Beach from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.