SevenDaysVT.com: Vermont Symphony Orchestra Addresses Racial Reckoning in a Multi-Genre Performance Streaming 7:30 PM ET March 27, 2021

Ray Vega (center) and members of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra

(Luke Awtry)

Seven Days

By Amy Lilly

March 24, 2021

In the classical music world, it has been all too customary to characterize phenomenally talented mixed-race composers as lesser versions of white composers. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) became known as the "Black Mozart"; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was dubbed "the African Mahler." Amazingly, these demeaning monikers live on today.

Clearly, a reckoning is needed, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra is doing its part with a BIPOC-focused program for its final streamed concert of the season, on March 27. The event features compositions by Bologne, Coleridge-Taylor and seven other composers of color. One is Florence Price (1887-1953), whose compositions have seen renewed play since the discovery of a trove of them in an Illinois attic in 2009.

Four of the seven composers are living: Dorothy Rudd Moore cofounded the Society of Black Composers in 1968 and lives in New York City; Carlos Simon is an assistant professor at Georgetown University; Ray Vega is a senior lecturer at the University of Vermont; and Matthew Evan Taylor is an assistant professor at Middlebury College.

Simon's and Vega's pieces are both VSO commissions that will be receiving premieres. Simon used his commission to add a second and third movement to his 2020 work for string quartet about the Great Migration: "Warmth From Other Suns." Vega, a trumpet player, composed "Buscando Doña Juana Figueroa" for trumpet and string quartet in honor of his Puerto Rican grandmother.

There's much more than music in this final installment of "Music for Days Like This," the orchestra's pandemic series. Indeed, the VSO's official description of the prerecorded and edited video event suggests something of a sprawling beast, combining music, verse and visual art. Former Vermonter Reuben Jackson, who anchored Vermont Public Radio's "Friday Night Jazz" from 2012 to 2018, provides audio introductions to each poet, artist or composer. While he narrates, historical portraits and other images will fill the screen.

Former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove has provided audio of herself reading two of her poems. Jackson, who published Scattered Clouds: New & Selected Poems in 2019, will read one of his, as well. Works by three Vermont BIPOC artists — Crystal Stokes of Worcester, Alan Blackwell of Brattleboro and Haitian-born Julio Desmont of Burlington — will be projected on a screen behind the musicians as they perform. (The performances were recorded at Essex Cinemas.)