Ensemble Pi Black Lives Matter–Photo by Michael Yu
Damian Norfleet and Brandon Snook–Photo by Michael Yu
I Care If You Listen
“We
never in our wildest dreams imagined that this concert would happen two
days after the election of Donald Trump,” explained pianist Idith Meshulam prior to Ensemble Pi‘s
thirteenth annual Concert for Peace on November 10, 2016. She described
the first Concert for Peace, which had taken place right after the U.S.
invasion of Iraq in 2003, and went on to discuss the present concert,
dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement in solidarity with those
who experience systemic racism, violence, and police brutality. The mood
in the room was solemn, with many people (myself included) still
stunned by the election results. Meshulam offered a glimmer of hope as
she assured us that “no matter what will happen, we will keep doing
activism and music.” The concert, which featured seven compositions by
people of color, was interspersed with a series of “letters from Black
America” read aloud by moderator Terrance McKnight. As the spoken word
flowed into wordless sound and then back again, the evening swept us
along in a exquisite multi-temporality, allowing for events and figures
of the past to mingle with glances to the future and the unbearable
melancholy of our present.
The concert began by two arrangements
of African American spirituals performed by the full ensemble and
conducted by Marlon Daniel. Baritone Damian Norfleet’s voice was firm
yet fervent as he sang the words–“I want to go home”, “Where is
home?”–of Jessie Montgomery‘s 2016 arrangement of the Southeastern U.S. spiritual I Want to Go Home. During the arrangement of There Is a Balm by Trevor Weston
(also of 2016), sustained tones and an air of tonality were sprinkled
with meandering piano lines, lumbering horn lines, and a pinging
vibraphone. Another Trevor Weston piece, Shape Shifter (The Angry Bluesman)
(2011) for solo cello, was expertly executed by Alexis Gerlach. Furious
dives into low range, followed by repeated notes in the upper register,
were followed by a wide array of textures: pizzicato passages, low
rumbles, hands slapped on the side of her instrument, a foot stomped
against the floor, and shrill, stratospheric ascents into the highest
registers of sound. According to Weston, the piece is meant to “create a
piece in what I imagined to be an inherent musical language created by
machines,” with inflections of blues–like “the solitary itinerant
Bluesman” who remains a stalwart (yet seemingly forgotten) contributor
to American popular music.
Alvin Singleton‘s Jasper Drag
(2000) is similarly meant “to be a marker on the collective memory.”
The title refers to an incident in Jasper, Texas, in which three white
men chained a Black man to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to
his death. Mehsulam’s repeated piano lines were paired with Airi
Yoshioka’s sawing violin and Moran Katz’s breathy clarinet lines,
coalescing into an airy, almost pointillistic cloud of sound. Valerie Coleman‘s Wish
(2015) for flute and piano began with fluttery, soulful sounds that
quickly derailed, becoming more and more frantic until Meshulam was
banging on the piano and Barry Crawford was stabbing out piercingly high
notes on the flute. Continuing in this frenetic vein was Meshulam’s
impassioned if not polished interpretation of a series of Courtney Bryan‘s piano works (Piano Etudes; Secondline for Black Love; Carnival for Unity,
all of 2003). Meshulam had her hands full with the complex sequence of
works, her hands leap frogging across the keyboard and both harmonic and
rhythmic dissonance spilling from her fingertips.
The final work on the program was an excerpt from Sidney Marquez Boquiren‘s chamber opera Independence Eve
(2016), with text by Daniel Neer. The 20-minute scene, titled “Stop and
Frisk,” was sung fluidly and movingly by Damian Norfleet and tenor
Brandon Snook, and accompanied by the skillful musicianship of the full
Ensemble Pi.
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