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.”