Associate Professor of Music Todd Coleman received a request from the Office of Cultural & Special Programs to commission a musical piece commemorating the 1923 fire and the 100th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone for Whitley Auditorium. The debut performance of the piece will be held on Sunday, Oct. 8 at 3 p.m. in Whitley.
More than a year ago, Associate Professor of Music Todd Coleman received a request from the Office of Cultural & Special Programs to commission a musical piece. Coleman is used to being tasked with creating new and creative musical works, but this request was a special one.
The request came as the university commemorates the 100th anniversary of the 1923 fire that razed the Main Administration building on Elon’s campus and transformed the college’s trajectory. That path forward for Elon included the construction of five buildings to replace the one destroyed by fire, with one, Whitley Auditorium, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the start of its construction following the fire.
“Can we … do a piece that both celebrates the making of Whitley Auditorium and also commemorates the fire and the rebirth of the university?” Coleman said.
After months of writing, Coleman found that, yes, a piece can be made both celebrating the university’s premier music hall and the touchstone moment in the institution’s history. The result was “The Phoenix Rising,” a single-movement piece of music just over 15 minutes in duration with a series of interconnected sections that trace a parallel symbolic path to the historical events connected with the 1923 fire, its immediate aftermath and the “ensuring vision of rebirth and growth that followed, leading the century of transformation that has Brough Elon University to its current, and ever-evolving, state, as embodied by the myth of the legendary phoenix,” Coleman said.
A Centennial Celebration of Whitley Auditorium on Sunday, Oct. 8, at 3 p.m. will include the debut performance of “The Phoenix Rising.” Driven by Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Charles Hogan on the Casavant pipe organ, which was installed in Whitley in 2001, along with four French horn players, the experience will be both “abstract and symbolic,” Coleman said.
Coleman was heavily inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” when creating this piece. As a child, Coleman’s father would play Bach’s “exquisite … and thunderous” sounds on weekend mornings and since those formative experiences, Coleman said he’s been captivated by the “synthesis of expressive power, sonic beauty, timbral nuance, intellectual ingenuity, creative spirit and often stunning virtuosity exhibited in the music written for organ.”
“The Phoenix Rising” is broken into six sections. The first section of the piece — “Consumed in Fire” — opens as the phoenix bursts into flames, consumed in fire and smoke of the destruction that just occurred. The second, “Embers and Ashes,” represents the flames being extinguished, followed by “Lament,” a reflection and remembrance of what was lost.
“Reborn” is one of the longest sections in the work, following the process of rebirth as a long and multi-dimensional process. “Wings Unfurled” creates a steady build-up of anticipation as the creature slowly opens and extends its great wings to discover what might be.
The final section, “Beyond the Horizon,” is described in the program notes as such — “As it rises ever higher, it finds a powerful cadence propelling it inexorably towards what lies just beyond our sight, just ‘Beyond the Horizon.'”
Whitley opened in 1924, and was one of the five new buildings included in Elon’s building plan “for the next hundred years.” Named for Rev. Leonard Hume Whitley by his son-in-law and former trustee, Col. J.M. Darden, Whitley serves has a venue for lectures, concerts, performances and weekly chapel services.
“Most universities or organizations with a concert hall, the concert hall is the most beautiful place on campus. It’s almost like being in a cathedral. It’s meant to be a special, I’ll call it spiritual, experience in its own right without the music,” Coleman said. “For me, Whitley is the closest thing we have to a space where you can experience music, where the environment you’re in matches the magic or mystical quality of the art of sound.”
Coleman said he doesn’t have an agenda for the performance but hopes that those who attend are moved by it.
“The music takes you on a journey. The music leads you through an experience aurally … where you just let the music transport you to something,” he said. “And I hope the overall arc of the piece does that.”
A demo of “The Phoenix Rising” can be found on YouTube. The performance is free and open to all in the Elon community.