Soprano Marti Newland performs Exhortation, A Negro Sermon from 1912 by the African-American composer, Will Marion Cook (1869-1944). She is accompanied by pianist Artis Wodehouse, who precedes the selection with a brief piano solo taken from Cook’s musical, In Dahomey (“My Ethiopian Queen”). The video is taken from a live performance of the chamber group Melodeon, and was sponsored by the Richmond Public Library, Richmond VT on 7/8/12. The group was founded by Wodehouse, to perform American music from the 19th and early 20th century.Whitney Slaten is sound recordist.videographer.
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Pianist and harmoniumist ARTIS WODEHOUSE has devoted her careeer to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old and neglected”, she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Her best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums, toy pianos and an 1823 English square piano and an 1860 Steinway square piano that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little known but valuable music from 19th and early 20th Century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford.
