"Composing While Black, Volume One" Sees Where We've Been and Where We're Going
Two world premieres by Courtney Bryan and Adegoke Steve Colson vexed, entertained, and moved, but didn't pack a punch.
Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today, edited by jazz scholar Harald Kisiedu and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) Artistic Director George E. Lewis, is a collection of essays on post-war Black composers. Published earlier this year by the German publisher Wolke Verlag, the bilingual German English compendium includes, among other enticements, an essay on Tania León’s place in the canon and an interview with Alvin Singleton about his time in Darmstadt. All but one (on Fluxus co-founder Ben Patterson) of the nine essays focus on living composers (León, at 80, is still going to concerts). On the cover, Julius Eastman, the late maverick of downtown experimental music, looks the reader dead in the eye.
“Do something,” his gaze seems to say.
“Buy the book,” it sounded like to me, before I realized the man in front of me was purchasing the last copy from the promotional table in the lobby of the Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Hall. There, last Wednesday evening, in an eponymous concert with the added wink, “Volume One,” members of ICE answered the call of Eastman’s eyes. In a program that included Wendell Logan’s chilling Runagate, Runagate (1989), Brittany J. Green’s cryptic Thread and Pull (2022), and two world premieres, the musicians played with vigor and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants jouissance (and just a tad of fumbling).
The first world premiere, MIRRORS by Adegoke Steve Colson, was a tenor rhapsody of sorts sung by Damian Norfleet, who gave it an earthy, operatic depth. In a pre-performance Q&A, Colson, who wrote the text, told George Lewis that he wanted to write a piece that asked: When you look in the mirror, are you being fooled by what you see?
Taking inspiration, it seems, from W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “double consciousness” — the idea that every Black American constantly sees themselves through their own eyes, as an American, and through the eyes of white people, as a Black person — Colson’s text depicts someone who, looking in the mirror, asks, “Do I see myself as I am?” before discovering that “a wretched soul” is staring back at them. But fearful queries like this are common to anyone who has deigned to inspect themselves in a mirror: “Are mine eyes false to me?”; “Can every person look into my very soul?” Like Camus, who defined the feeling of absurdity precisely as “[t]his divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting,” Colson, too, locates the universal in the individual.
Norfleet gave voice — colorful, rich, and pained — to Colson’s words. But first, a long instrumental introduction set the mood with an eclectic mix of timbres: piano, violin, extended double bass, percussion, bass clarinet, oboe, and trumpet. A tonal sea of stepwise motion, up and down, in alternating instruments was followed by some beautiful melodic work in the violin before harmonies that reminded me of Milhaud, or perhaps the neoclassical Stravinsky of Pulcinella, began to flutter throughout the ensemble.
But this was no classical lightness, as Norfleet soon showed. His entrance was deep, from the low end of his range, and he proceeded with gusto until the protagonist sees “my demons dwelling” in the mirror. From there, the players churned out a plodding pulse that was reminiscent of a different “era” of Stravinsky — his Rite of Spring era, especially the “Spring Rounds” (which sounds like a T-Rex dragging its feet). The extended double bass, played by Randall Zigler, was capable of reaching much lower notes than normal, and lent the band a sound almost like the bellows of a huge accordion, or an organ. That was in response to a loaded breath that Norfleet took before singing what his conscience says to him: "betray my soul, my spirit, no more!”
By the end of the piece, which concluded with a scratchy decaying sound like a freight ship sinking, I was disappointed that, although the texture was multilayered, the sonic fabric — its thickness, or density — didn’t seem to change much throughout. It left one with the feeling of monotony, despite its soupy, variegated complexity.
The second world premiere, which ended the concert, made up for some of the failings of its predecessor. The composer, Courtney Bryan, is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow — the recipient of a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000 that many refer to as the “Genius Grant” — and a former student of George Lewis when she was at Columbia. Her composition, DREAMING (Freedom Sounds) (2023) was partly inspired by Lewis’s perennial question, What is the sound of freedom?
At the height of the pandemic, she discussed freedom, love, home, spirit, sanctuary, and transformation with members of ICE and decided to write a “meditation on themes of freedom — freedom within a system, and freedom beyond a system.” Incorporating writings by, among others, DuBois, George Lewis himself, and, most prominently, the dissent of Ketanyi Brown Jackson, the intertextual libretto is a web of pleas for justice.
The twenty-minute piece is split into six movements, even though it wasn’t clear where most began and ended. Maybe, like Colson’s piece, this was also a rhapsody. But instead of one singer, there were two: soprano Alice Teyssier and mezzo-soprano Fay Victor, backed by an eleven-piece ensemble of strings, woodwinds (including a bassoon with tin foil on the top of the bell), and percussion. From the moment Faye Victor intoned the first words, from Frederick Douglass’s The Color Line, I pigeonholed this piece as a modern Lincoln Portrait (1942), which Aaron Copland scored for orchestra and narrator, who reads from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
But the attitude of Bryan’s piece was more anguished than triumphant, defiant in the face of current injustices, rather than celebratory of rights won in the past. Plus, it was sung, not just spoken. Amidst repeated utterances of “We dissent!”, referencing opinions of U.S. Supreme Court Justices against affirmative action, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ decisions, Teyssier and Victor cut an uneven pairing, their voices somehow just not achieving the sort of communion that makes a performance magical. Victor, as always, was incomparable in terms of her span of vocal inflections and her seemingly superhuman ability to find groovy, infectious rhythms in phrases which, on their face, have no rhythm at all.
Teyssier’s iPad died midway through, prompting a full-stop of the performance. She looked on with Victor as the conductor, Vimbayi Kaziboni, backtracked to the closest rehearsal number and went from there. This was the second time I had witnessed this in October. The first was at an October 5 performance of the Momenta Quartet, which I didn’t write about. I hate to spend time complaining about technological failings, but this is getting crazy. A production assistant, I guess, sprinted down the aisle, squatted with the paper score, waited a few minutes, and finally handed Teyssier the score while she was on stage. Honestly, it was a disappointing travesty that put a wrench in the rest of the performance. But it wasn’t Teyssier’s fault. This is the way things are going. All I have to say is, someone needs to find a way to make these digital scores foolproof; there’s no risk of paper sheet music suddenly disappearing from one’s music stand.
Bryan’s composition itself was remarkable and enjoyable, but failed to pack the punch one so desires when one sees the words “world premiere.” It’s a lot of pressure, for a composition that doesn’t necessarily have to change the course of music to be good. But that’s what we inherently expect.
Bryan seems to have a mystical ability to weave together spoken word and instrumental music in a way that makes them ebb and flow in tandem with each other in a way that really grabs you. The way she wove the two together made me groove in my seat, nodding to hidden syncopations and tapping my foot to a fleeting “cha-cha” section. Beginning and ending with bird sounds flitting throughout the ensemble, the texture was varied and kept my attention, especially during one memorable, high-pitched, ensemble-wide crescendo and the amplified sound of the percussionist grinding rocks (?) into a microphone.
In the first half of the program, tenor Tariq Al-Sabir presented a colloquial, fireside-tale rendition of Runagate, Runagate, whose highlight was the singer’s repeated and wildly varied cries of “Mean to be free,” which he syncopated in an astounding way, like the sprechstimme (sing-speaking) of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire if Schoenberg wrote the blues. Al-Sabir had a hard time getting into character, though, which made his performance less immediate and absorbing than Norfleet’s, who acted and reacted to every subtlety played by the instrumentalists.
Brittany J. Green’s Thread and Pull (2022) begins with an ominous chant by all members of the ensemble — bassoon, piano, violin, viola, cello — of “When I am, I am not. But, when I am not, then, I am.” The text is Rumi (“Ghazal 1419”), the music is oceanic, with a wide pulse and moments of phase music, delicately scored and punctuated by unpredictable accents that reminded of Stravinsky yet again — this time, the “Augurs of Spring” from the Rite. The ensemble gave a solid but unremarkable performance.
“Composing While Black, Volume One” is an alluring title, and one that beckons me to scour the web for when volume two will happen. I can’t find anything yet, but I’ll be there when it happens. And if it doesn’t happen, then Wednesday evening’s concert will have been a satisfying, though not groundbreaking, testament to the avenues that Black American composers have opened up, and often pried open, for today’s artists.