Otto Cesana
Otto Cesana was born in Brescia, Italy, on July 7, 1899. He came to the United States in boyhood and studied music with private teachers. After working in Hollywood, where he wrote a considerable amount of music for motion pictures, he came to New York to become arranger for Radio City Music Hall, and for several important radio programs. In his own music he has been particularly successful in using within large forms popular American elements, at times folk idioms. In a more serious attitude he has produced half a dozen symphonies and various concertos for solo instruments and orchestra.
Negro Heaven for orchestra is one of his more popular attempts to use an American folk idiom within a symphonic mold. He explains: “Here follows a musical interpretation of the fluctuating moods that seize the colored man—now gay, now sad, always, however migrating towards carefreeness and abandon, as exemplified in the return of the first subject, which is soon followed by one of those superlative moods, a Negro in the throes of nostalgia.”
Swing Septet (1942), for string orchestra, guitar and percussion is in three short movements, the first in sonata form, and the last two in three-part song form. “The chief purpose,” says the composer, “is to give the string players an opportunity to compete with the ad lib boys who, while they improvise the wildest phrases imaginable, are ’floored’ whenever an approximation of that material is set down on paper.”