For the past couple of years, The Gilded Age Orchestra of Newport has been exploring the era of The Gilded Age through the musical history of “The City by The Sea.” Along with its mission to improve the cultural lifeblood of the community it calls home, it’s also going beyond to achieve its goal throughout Rhode Island. Hence this concert that’s happening at The Historic Park Theatre, 848 Park Ave., Cranston on Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. titled “To Rhode Island, with Love.” It promises to be an educational experience for anyone who is interested in The Ocean State’s legacy when it comes to music. It’s also an opportunity to check out a unique array of songs that only a full-fledged orchestra can provide. 

I had a talk ahead of the show with conductor Dr. Mark Stickney about how all of this came about, a nonprofit he runs that’s affiliated with the orchestra, and what he’s looking to accomplish with the organization in the future.

Rob Duguay: “To Rhode Island, with Love” is an evening of music composed by J. William Middendorf II, who is a former Ambassador to The Netherlands and also a former Secretary of the Navy. How were you able to make this happen by getting these compositions? Were you presented with these firsthand or is the music part of a Naval archive?

Dr. Mark Stickney: I run a nonprofit called Historic Music of Newport, and the name speaks for itself. We’re preserving and sharing the story of Newport’s musical history and the Naval War College has a march that the ambassador wrote years ago. I’m not even sure when, but I had reached out to him during the middle of last year to talk about his music and talk about his marches while not knowing about the volume of what he had written. I was then invited to meet with him and some of the people who work with him, and they asked if we would be interested in doing a program of his music. I was overwhelmed by the amount of music that he has composed and I jumped on board because as part of Rhode Island’s history, it needs to be performed.

This whole program came about with us doing two symphonies, something from an opera he wrote and also a violin concerto that he wrote. There will be some other marches that he composed for a band to rearrange them as an orchestra, so it all came from a curiosity about his music and about him because there’s not a lot of publicity about it. I was hoping that I could write a story, which I did, to help get his music more recognized today and performed more today. Not just by us, but by other groups as well.

RD: How has it been with getting the whole orchestra together for this event? Is this orchestra already set in stone with the musicians already being part of it or did you do any auditions or any recruiting?

DMS: The orchestra originally came about from the HBO TV show “The Gilded Age.” In season one of their show, they had an orchestra that performed at The Breakers in Newport as part of a ballroom scene that was actually set in New York but was filmed in Newport. One of the musicians is a friend of mine and he’s also on the board of my nonprofit. He, another musician I went to graduate school with, who was in a different season of “The Gilded Age,” and myself decided to turn this into an actual orchestra while making it a performing and living history part of the nonprofit. We came up with a core group of musicians and then we added other musicians that we knew would enhance the group and make the group even better.

As the group does different things, we bring in other musicians. More if we need more and fewer if we need fewer, so it’s a flexible orchestra of regional professionals as far away as Boston and occasionally we’ve had one or two from New York who have performed with us in the past. It is an actual orchestra that exists, but it came from the TV show and the desire for these musicians to create something lasting.

RD: When it comes to Historic Music of Newport, what’s the history behind it and what would you say is the most rewarding thing about the nonprofit? What is the most arduous thing about running the organization?

DMS: The nonprofit started out as a research project. I taught college-level music for about 12 years and I’m from Portsmouth. I worked in Newport for the old Newport Music Festival, which is now called Newport Classical, so I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the music in the mansions. We don’t talk about what the musical life of Newport was like outside of the Folk and Jazz Festivals, which are both awesome, I have to add, but we don’t know a lot about Newport’s musical history beyond that. I started doing research on the side while I was teaching, and the amount of information was overwhelming.

I decided the best thing to do was to create this nonprofit, which I have done with the help of some friends by founding it in 2022. We have a board with members as far away as Portugal right now, and we’ve started collecting more and more music, which has amounted to over 1,000 written pieces about Newport, in Newport and by Newporters. We also have the names of almost 1,000 musicians who lived and performed in Newport going back to the earliest days before Newport was a city up until the early 1900s, we’ve stopped around 1920 for now. It just kind of became more and more information and more and more things that I thought were worth preserving and worth telling stories about. One of the best stories I have about it is the song “Anchors Aweigh,” which is the Navy’s official march song and the guy who composed it was born in Newport.

People know that, but nobody really thinks about how the song came from Newport. Those are the kinds of things we’ve been able to find along with others, and we’ve been able to preserve and tell the stories while doing tours. The most rewarding thing is being able to find something about the stories of the songs and the musicians and sharing it. I love telling the stories of the musicians who’ve lived in Newport, it’s an incredibly diverse group going back before the [American] Revolution when there were enslaved Newporters who were basically given to the Continental Army with the understanding that they would be freed afterwards along with their masters not having to necessarily fight. They became free after the war, including two musicians from Newport who were former slaves.

The hardest part would probably be being a businessman and figuring out how to make the nonprofit happen. I had a lot of help, but it was a lot of work, especially the paperwork, which was rewarding but also demanding. During the first year, finding our way to be a successful nonprofit was difficult because I was learning things on the fly.

RD: For people who are considering coming to this show, what would you say is your biggest selling point? I’m willing to bet that there are people who are interested in Rhode Island’s musical history that are probably going to attend, so what can they expect when they arrive?

DMS: First off, the composer is alive. J. William Middendorf II is 100 years old, he lives in Little Compton, and he’s going to be at the show. He’s going to be there to talk a little bit about the music before we perform it, so it’s always an incredible experience to hear from the composer about their music and then hear the music being composed. It’s really beautiful, the soprano that we’re bringing in for one of the operas is incredibly talented and that’s going to be conducted by our co-conductor who is a professor in upstate New York and also a board member of the nonprofit. If they like to hear live music and if they like to hear about music, then it’s going to be a great experience.

We don’t just perform music, all of our programs are about learning about the musical history as it’s being played. I hate to use the word “educational,” because that might scare some people away and they don’t want to go out and learn on a Saturday night. I’m one of those people, but I think it’s just an experience to hear stuff that isn’t new music. Most of it is 40 or 50 years old, but it’s music that they haven’t heard and it’s done by a composer who will be present to talk about the music, which will give it a whole new meaning.

RD: You’ve mentioned that you’ve amassed a giant archive of music done by Newporters, so what do you plan on doing with it in the future? Do you plan on making some sort of series happen where it’s a quarterly or monthly thing where the orchestra plays a different set of music?

DMS: The eventual goal of the organization is to have a museum in Newport and a space to show off what we have. That’s the long range goal of the nonprofit, we want to be able to share in person everything we have so people can see the physical copies of music plus other artifacts. The orchestra itself does two to three performances a year, we recently performed at Rosecliff in Newport and we’ve done a series with the Preservation Society [of Newport County]. We’re looking to possibly expand the orchestra into schools so we can work with students while talking about musical history and getting them involved in performing. We have a website [at historicmusicofnewport.org] that features a blog talking about the musicians and we also have a summer concert series at Touro Park in Newport where we invite community bands from across the region to perform for free on a Sunday.

People come out to sit and listen to music and we picked Touro Park because there was a bandstand there and there were concerts there going back to the mid-1800s. It was a place for concerts, and now we’ve brought them back. Our goal is always to share and get people involved and this upcoming concert is also a fundraiser for the organization so the people can go to our website to find information about tickets and how they can donate to the nonprofit with their name being in the program for the concert. For us, this concert is about sharing music and also a way for us to push forward and get more programming for the future.