Yann Kebbi
By George E. Lewis
July 3, 2020
A cone of
silence hangs over the work of Black composers from Africa and its
diaspora. It is not that Black men and women have not written music, but
too often it has been ignored — and thus assumed not to exist at all.
The
work of Black composers is more often heard if they are working in
forms thought to exemplify “the Black experience”: jazz, blues, rap.
However, as the composer and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams
once said, “We know that there are different types of Black life, and
therefore we know that there are different kinds of Black music. Because
Black music comes forth from Black life.”
In
the late 1980s, the Caribbean writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau
and Raphael Confiant proclaimed themselves “Creoles”: “torn between
several languages, several histories, caught in the torrential ambiguity
of a mosaic identity.” In that light, as we contemplate an Independence
Day unlike any in my memory, I want to highlight some of the ways
African-American composers have explored what it means — and could mean —
to be American, helping to foster a creolized, cosmopolitan new music
for the 21st century.
If Black lives matter now more than ever, hearing Black liveness
in classical music also matters. The alternative is an addiction to
exclusion that ends, as addictions often do, in impoverishment.
The first movement of William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1, “The
Afro-American” (1930), develops a 12-bar blues using classical sonata
form. This served Still’s avowed purpose — consistent with 1920s New Negro discourses
of racial uplift — of demonstrating how the blues “could be elevated to
the highest musical level.” Today, I also hear a foreshadowing of two
musical cultures collaborating as equals.
***
One day in 1970, my freshman-year college roommate, the violist Miles Hoffman, mentioned that he was performing an unusual work with the Yale Symphony
that I might like to hear. Indeed, the piece captivated me, and I was
astonished to see a young African-American graduate student, Alvin Singleton
— now one of America’s most distinguished composers — take the stage to
accept the applause. I don’t think I had seen or even heard of a Black
composer before. His “Mestizo II” is an ebullient infusion of free
improvisation into the classical orchestra.
***
In 1999, Tania Léon created “Horizons” for orchestra, a work that is
well described by the musicologist Jason Stanyek as a kind of sonic
creolization: “All at once, this is music of the Americas, of the
trans-Atlantic world, of the Cuban diaspora, of the European
avant-garde. It is pan-Latin, local, intercultural, cosmopolitan,
indigenous, global, transcendent, grounded.”
***
The Haitian-American composer, flutist, vocalist, and electronic artist
Nathalie Joachim’s “Fanm d’Ayiti” (“Women of Haiti”) is perhaps the
quintessential example of the situation of the Creole. Ms. Joachim
combines traditional and modern text and song in the kreyòl language
with extended string techniques and electronics that bring musical
Minimalism home to the African diaspora from which it has drawn so much.
Black liveness, Black women and Black spirituality arrive at the center
of the classical music table.
***
***
Ms. Joachim’s project is close in spirit to “Coin Coin,” the
saxophonist, composer and visual artist Matana Roberts’s series of
extended works, now in its fourth volume of a projected 12. Ms. Roberts
uses texts, field recordings, voice, instruments and visual elements to
explore history, memory, legacy, family, sexuality and myth in the
American Afrodiaspora, exemplifying the power of the creative artist to
infuse history with the spiritual.
***
Before George Floyd, there was Sandra Bland — and far too many others.
In July 2015, Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old Chicago native, was found hanged
in a Texas jail cell, three days after her arrest during a traffic stop.
In a Facebook video
posted two months before her death, she said, “In the news that we’veseen as of late, you could stand there, surrender to the cops, and still
be killed.”
By that point, the African American Policy Forum
had already coined the Twitter hashtag #SayHerName to call attention to
police violence targeting Black women. Courtney Bryan’s “Yet Unheard”
(2016), for soprano, chorus and orchestra, which premiered on the first
anniversary of Ms. Bland’s death, was a musical response to that call.
As Sharan Strange’s libretto demands: “My people, won’t you sing her
name?”
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