Narrator: On this special edition of "State of the Arts," tales from the classical music world that make strange bedfellows.

Julia Wolfe's epic portrayal of Pennsylvania coal miners performed in an abandoned Roebling Factory in Trenton.

Anthony Sheppard's discovery about one of the world's most famous operas found on a spur of the moment trip to Morris Museum.

Composer George Antheil considered Trenton's bad boy of music and his tribute to George Washington.

And in Princeton, Derek Bermel's "Migration" series jazz concerto inspired by the iconic African-American painter Jacob Lawrence.

"State of the Arts" -- bringing you on location with some of New Jersey's most interesting classical musicians.

The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966 is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and these friends of State of the Arts.

Narrator: In 2017, Julia Wolfe's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Anthracite Fields" was performed at an abandoned Roebling Factory in Trenton, New Jersey.

[ Suspenseful music climbs ] [ Choir singing indistinctly ] Narrator: It was a powerful and moving experience.

The Westminster Choir and New York's legendary Contemporary Music Group, Bang on a Can, performed Julia Wolfe's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Anthracite Fields" at the historic Roebling Factory in Trenton.

Wolfe: There is something special about entering into a factory space, where a different kind of group activity happened, and suddenly we're an ensemble, they were an ensemble.

It's a very interesting and beautiful dynamic connection.

[ Choir continues singing ] Miller: This piece, in this space, is extraordinary.

You're in a space that was completely run by anthracite coal.

It took that kind of power to make the steel for building like things like the Brooklyn Bridge.

Those things combined together in this cathedral to industry.

[ Choir continues singing ] Narrator: The piece explores the history of mining in Pennsylvania's anthracite-coal region.

Wolfe: I just became fascinated.

What was that industry?

And the more I got into it, the more amazed I was at what happened there.

Narrator: The labor movement, economic justice, and our profound dependency on energy are all themes woven throughout the work.

One part of "Anthracite Fields" tells the story of the Breaker Boys, some as young as 8 years old.

Stewart: The Breaker Boys were the boys who sat over the -- you know, as the coal came by in the chutes, it was mixed with lots of other rocks and they had to pick out all the shale and all the stuff that wasn't coal and it was brutal work.

But also part of that is the fact that they were boys and they were playful.

[ Choir singing indistinctly ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Wolfe: I came across this one video of John L. Lewis, who was the head of the United Mine Workers Union.

I was so struck by his being.

He was an amazing, amazing speaker and he used to challenge, you know, congressional committees to take a look at what was going on in this region and how we should be taking care of these men who were working in very dangerous conditions underground.

Lewis: Now, on this particular day of our Lord, Mr. Krug has found 518 mines that he shuts down because they're unsafe.

May God in heaven forgive him for not finding those out before and taking action long delayed before [thump] these men died.

Wolfe: He would hold them to it and just say, you know, "We owe protection to these men."

"If we must grind up human flesh and bones in this industrial machine that we call modern America."

It's poetic.

I don't know -- think people don't talk like that anymore.

Stewart: ♪ If we must grind up ♪ ♪ Human flesh ♪ ♪ And bones ♪ ♪ In this industrial machine ♪ ♪ That we call ♪ Narrator: He trained as a classical cellist and has been Paul Simon's music director and guitarist for the past 19 years.

Guitarist Mark Stewart was a founding member of Bang on a Can.

Stewart: I play the guitar for the entire piece, but in one movement, called "Speech," I stand up and I sing.

And I sing the words of the great leader John L. Lewis.

He was an extraordinary man who helped fight for better wages and safer conditions for the miners.

♪ We owe protection ♪ ♪ To those men ♪ ♪ And we owe ♪ ♪ The security ♪ ♪ To their families ♪ ♪ If!

They!

♪ ♪ Die!

♪ ♪ Those men ♪ ♪ If they die ♪ ♪ Those men ♪ First it was daunting, but now, I am so -- I'm so inspired by his words and by Julia's setting of those words.

I'm ready for it every night and I am honored to be in the position to sing those words.

♪ Protection ♪ ♪ Those men ♪ Wolfe: The last movement, basically I just wrote out a list of things you do every day that use energy.

And since we are partially coal-powered at this point, we are also using coal -- bake a cake, drill a hole, call your girlfriend on the phone.

The list goes on.

It's a very long list.

Choir: ♪ Bake a ♪ ♪ Cake ♪ ♪ Drill ♪ ♪ A ♪ ♪ Hole ♪ ♪ Go to ♪ ♪ The gym ♪ ♪ Heat your house ♪ [ Continuing indistinctly ] Narrator: In 2012, Williams College musicologist Anthony Sheppard, made an accidental discovery at the Morris Museum about one of the world's most famous operas.

Narrator: On a Sunday visit to the Morris Museum with his kids, professor Tony Sheppard made a completely unexpected discovery about one of the world's most famous operas.

[ Singing continues ] Sheppard: I discovered two main melodies that are connected with Butterfly herself in the opera and that they're Chinese, not Japanese, and that at least one of them has a very strong connection to the plot of the opera because it's pornographic.

[ Singing continues ] My wife and I were on leave from Williams College last year, and we were living in Princeton.

And we promised the kids we would go back home every once in a while to Vermont.

And on the way back, we wanted to stop somewhere because it's a 4 1/2-hour drive, and basically the only place open was the Morris Museum.

And we knew that it had this Guinness collection of automata and mechanical musical instruments.

And so that's why we came on that particular day.

[ Calliope plays ] Narrator: Murtogh D. Guinness, from the Guinness beer family, spent a lifetime collecting mechanical musical instruments and mechanical dolls.

After he died in 2002, the Morris Museum received his entire collection.

Sheppard: I knew that this collection was here, and being a musicologist, I was interested in it.

But I had no idea it would have anything to do with my research whatsoever.

[ Organ plays ] So, we entered the collection.

In the first room, there are lots of little, really cool objects that make music from the 18th and 19th centuries.

[ Organ and violin play ] We went to the next room, and there's a bunch of brown boxes basically.

And, so, my kids, they ran off.

I, quite by accident, saw this tune sheet with Chinese writing on it.

Well, the Chinese writing immediately actually made me think of what I knew about Puccini and the opera "Turandot" because we've known since 1920 that he had heard a "Chinese music box" and had used tunes from it.

But what was really shocking was when I heard the tune from "Madama Butterfly."

And I didn't know what to make of that.

It didn't make any sense.

What was a tune from the Japanese-set opera of "Butterfly" doing on a music box with these Chinese tunes that he used in "Turandot"?

[ Music box plays ] So, we know when he was composing "Madama Butterfly," he did want to use Japanese tunes.

At some point, it was pretty clear he didn't have quite enough tunes to use.

He does use Japanese tunes in the opera, and it just so happens the two main themes associated with Butterfly herself -- He did not use a Japanese source.

For 100 years, we've been looking for the Japanese source for these tunes.

There is no Japanese source because they're actually Chinese, and they came from a music box.

Alkhazova: [ Singing "lo seguo il mio destino" ] Sheppard: If you take the music box apart and look inside, underneath the reed-organ section, the bellows that are hidden otherwise, you find some strange writing on the bottom of the board.

It looks like fake Chinese writing, some kind of fake Asian writing, and there's a picture of a woman very clearly drawn above this writing.

And when I first saw this many months ago, I thought, "This can't have anything to do with the story, nothing to do with Puccini at all."

But I've changed my mind because we know that Puccini liked to draw sketches and caricatures, and this summer I was looking at some of his manuscripts, some of his sketches of other works, and I started to notice that the markings on his score, the way he would draw quarter rests or accent marks or cross out a measure -- Suddenly, it hit me that those markings in his scores look a lot like the markings in this fake Asian writing on the box.

The mark right there, the way that he crosses out a measure to say that this measure -- you know, "ignore this..." Ryder: As the months passed and the additional research goes on, it's looking more and more and more as though this particular music box had the signature of Puccini all over it.

And that is really exciting to me.

Narrator: Sheppard documented the music box's travels -- From Switzerland to Shanghai and then to a family in Rome, the Fassinis, who were friends of Puccini.

Sheppard: And so, my current theory is that Puccini knew Alberto Fassini, went to his house around 1902 or so, and said, "I'm writing this opera about Japan.

I can't find enough tunes to use -- Japanese tunes."

And Alberto said, "Well, you know, my brother just gave me this music box from China."

And there's a letter Puccini wrote where he says, "I now have enough material from the yellow race for my opera."

I believe "the yellow race" actually refers to Asia more generally, and at that point, he had heard these tunes on the music box and felt satisfied that he had enough to use.

[ Woman singing operatically ] The thing that's most exciting, not only for me, but for people who I was telling bits of the story to as I was discovering it, was just how connected everything was, how this one music box not only connects to probably the most beloved opera or one of the most famous operas of all time, but it also connects back in history to earlier European encounters with China.

One of these tunes became even more famous in China itself because Puccini used it in "Turandot," and so it becomes the theme for China, to the extent that it's used at the Beijing Olympics during the medal ceremonies to represent China.

And you can trace that back to Puccini, and now we can trace this back even further to one particular Swiss watchmaker, Fritz Bovet, who, in 1845, went to China, collected these tunes, and got them onto music boxes that Puccini heard.

[ Music box plays ] Narrator: The Guinness collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata is housed in a specially constructed wing of the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey.

Narrator: In 2014, the NJSO opened its season with an overture about Washington crossing the Delaware.

Narrator: American composer George Antheil was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900 and is buried in Trenton's historic Riverside cemetery.

His father owned a local shoe store, and his grandparents had a farm in Titusville.

He became an international celebrity in the first half of the 20th century, living in Paris and then Hollywood.

Roe: George Antheil, his place in the history of music is very interesting.

He was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and by the 1920s, we find him in Paris causing a big ruckus.

He was known as the bad boy of music, and he was friends with Picasso and Stravinsky and Erik Satie and Ezra Pound and James Joyce and was writing music of a very explosive and confrontational style.

Narrator: His most famous piece of the period is "Ballet Mécanique," composed as a soundtrack to a film by Fernand Léger.

Antheil used synchronized player pianos, sirens, whistles, anvils, and airplane propellers to evoke the cacophony of the modern industrialized world.

The music provoked a riot at the first performance in Paris.

Roe: Like a lot of people who were wild in their youth, when he got older, he realized that maybe it was better to make an honest living.

And so he came back to New York in 1933 and eventually found himself in Hollywood, where he applied his musical talents to creating scores for films and for television.

Narrator: While in Hollywood, Antheil developed a close relationship with actress Hedy Lamarr.

The pair invented a patented torpedo guidance system which many believe became a crucial technology used in cellphones.

Antheil drew on his knowledge of player piano rolls to come up with the discovery.

Roe: He also wrote a number of concert works, pieces for orchestra, based on historical themes, on American themes, and one of those pieces is the piece that we're going to open our season with, "McKonkey's Ferry."

Narrator: As a boy, Antheil spent summers at his grandparents' farm in Titusville along the Delaware River, right where George Washington and his troops crossed in 1776.

He no doubt had childhood memories of the place in mind when he wrote "McKonkey's ferry," but he was also inspired by one of America's most famous paintings.

Roe: It's iconic, it's immense, it's huge.

It was recently reframed at great expense to the museum and then unveiled as a part of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[ Soft music plays ] What I love about this connection with "McKonkey's Ferry" in this piece that we're playing is though he is in Hollywood and though he's writing film music for an international audience, he's thinking back to this important event that happened in his, not only his home state, but the very city where he was born, Trenton, because, of course, when George Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas Eve in 1776, he crossed the Delaware into Trenton and had a decisive victory that turned the tide of the Revolutionary War.

We've played "McKonkey's Ferry" two other times in our history.

In the 1950-51 season, which was 100 years after the painting was made, and then we played it again in the 1963-64 season to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the state of New Jersey.

And we haven't played it for 50 years.

So, we still have the parts.

We still have the parts in the library, you can see.

We're sitting in the music library.

The librarian has gone through them already.

We found them.

But it's thrilling to take up a work like this that's so important in the history of classical music and in American music and to revisit it after 50 years.

Narrator: In 2013, the Princeton Symphony and the Juilliard Jazz Ensemble performed Derek Bermel's "Migration Series Concerto" in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Abraham Lincoln's executive order three years into the Civil War declared that all persons held as slaves are and henceforth shall be free.

The Princeton Symphony Orchestra recently joined the celebration with performances of "The Migration Series" jazz concerto, music inspired by the iconic paintings of African-American artist Jacob Lawrence.

It was composed by Derek Bermel in 2006.

Bermel: I first encountered Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series" back when I was a teenager.

I actually went into New York to see an exhibition with my mom, and it really changed my life.

Narrator: Jacob Lawrence became famous in the early 1940s for his "Migration Series."

The paintings tell the story of African-Americans leaving the rural South for the promise of the industrialized North during the early 20th century.

Bermel: There's a set of 60 paintings, which are connected, and they're meant to be seen as a whole.

And then he had these lines of text, and they just said, "the migrants worked hard," or something like that.

They were very distant, in a way.

They were distant kind of references.

[ Discordant music plays ] There were pictures of riots.

There were pictures of many, many people arriving, constantly coming and going, and that was the theme, was this constant motion of people from South to North, and there was this kind of rhythm underlying everything.

[ Up-tempo jazz music plays ] It's a history of jazz, of music, and of a lot of art, and as well as just simply the history of our country.

Years later, when I had this commission from Wynton Marsalis, the Lincoln Center jazz orchestra, and the American composers orchestra, I decided to write a concerto for jazz band, where the jazz band was kind of functioning like this solo instrument within the kind of warmth and colors of the orchestra.

And as I started to work, I thought about "The Migration Series," and I think it was because I was working in a way that was kind of mosaic-like, which I think was the way that Lawrence worked on his piece.

He had several themes that kind of came into different paintings at different times, and the themes overlapped.

And so I just started to work like that musically, and as it came together, I realized that this was "The Migration Series."

[ Mid-tempo jazz music plays ] Narrator: The Princeton Symphony's performances of "The Migration Series" concerto featured the Juilliard jazz orchestra, led by James Burton.

Burton: He manages to capture so many of the conflicted feelings about the folks that were doing the migration, and the piece is very cinematic.

[ Music continues ] Bermel: At the beginning, for example, there's this four-note theme, and it goes like this.

[ Descending notes play ] It's just very simple.

But that comes back in several of the other movements -- in the third movement, in the fifth movement -- and other little kind of thematic elements come in.

There's this theme that starts off the first movement, as well.

[ Mid-tempo jazz music plays ] Just small themes like that, but then they reappear in different places, transposed, made longer and shorter in all different ways.

[ Mid-tempo jazz music plays ] He doesn't place much emphasis on the face.

He places the emphasis on posture.

And you can tell so much about sadness, about joy, about furtive kind of motion.

Burton: In the second movement, which is called "After a Lynching," something that's very violent and striking, actually, it's not about the act itself but the somber mood afterwards.

So that movement has the feeling of gospel music and the black American church.

[ Mid-tempo jazz music plays ] Clarke: Can't imagine a more complete fit of what could a classical music organization and orchestra do that commemorated and celebrated the lives of African-Americans in this country after the Emancipation Proclamation.

[ Music continues ] Narrator: Thanks for watching a special all-classical edition of "State of the Arts."

For more about the show or to share a story with a friend.

visit StateoftheArtsNJ.com.

[ Singing indistinctly ] The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966 is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and these friends of State of the Arts.