Composing While Black, Berlin Edition

Alyssa Regent
Émergence (2024, German premiere)
Rebecca Lane, flute; Joshua Rubin, bass clarinet; Weston Olencki, trombone; Caitlin Edwards, violin; Rebekah Heller, conductor

At the composer’s request, there is no further information on this work.

Nyokabi Kariũki 
The Colour of Home (2021, German premiere)
Levy Lorenzo, percussion

The composer writes:

‘The Colour of Home is a ten-minute audiovisual work inspired by three maternal figures in the lives of the work’s collaborators: Nyokabi Kariũki (composer), Chris O’Leary (percussionist on fixed media), and Eucalyptus Segovia-Breaux (filmmaker). The maternal figures are from and were raised on different soils—Kenya, the Philippines, and El Salvador—but are connected by their stories of immigration to the United States. ‘What colours remind you of home? What was the moment it first hit you that you’d left everything behind? And what do you hope for your children as they grow up here, in America?’, you hear the interviewees being asked. They respond to these questions in their languages of Kikuyu, Tagalog, Spanish, and English, highlighting several things: their journeys and sacrifices as immigrant parents, as well as how ‘home’ can have several meanings at once.’

Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson
Rotations III (2017/2021)
Joshua Rubin, bass clarinet; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet

The composer writes:

‘This is the third work in my Rotations series, in which I combine improvisation with fully composed music. The clarinet has fully composed music, and the trumpet ‘rotates’ around it with improvised and composed music.’

Leila Adu-Gilmore
Freedom Suite (2014)
Damian Norfleet, voice; Joshua Rubin, clarinet; Rebekah Heller, bassoon; Caitlin Edwards, violin; Leila Adu-Gilmore, voice, piano

The composer writes:

‘I wrote this song cycle from songs I had written over seven years in the United States. In 2020, this piece began to feel more relevant as I continued to live in a country and in a world that seems less united. The subject matter of the two songs selected for today’s programme, ‘Negative Space’ and ‘Ghost Lullaby’, are about police and environmental brutality through structural colonialism, and racism, exacerbated by monolithic western culture and education. As my original programme note from 2014 explains:

For over half of my life, I have written, performed and recorded songs and improvisations for piano and voice. Attimes the accompaniment is very simple. In Freedom Suite, I have arranged three songs in different ways, with a goal of capturing their initial simplicity in different ways for each song. … The second, ‘Ghost Lullaby’, is a song I wrote when I came to the town of Princeton, New Jersey, and realized that only a couple of people mentioned Native Americans, and that no one spoke of the tribe of people who inhabited the actual space that we lived on. The third, ‘Negative Space’, is a song I wrote upon hearing of the murder of Trayvon Martin. It speaks to the vacuum created for many Black people through continued effects of colonialism, slavery, prison, and the justice system.

As a Ghanaian British Pākehā (New Zealander of European or Non-Māori descent), the situation can feel extreme in the US, but the roots of these systemic problems of coloniality continue to cause problems for the world and the future. These themes in a classical music setting are powerful, as inclusive and collective voices continue to create, educate, and bring about positive change.’

Corie Rose Soumah
Limpidités IV, for solo violin (2022, German premiere)
Caitlin Edwards, violin

The composer writes:

‘In this piece, I sketched seven cadenzas in relationship with my own personal voice, the voice of the performer, and the voice of the violin, all under the scope of soundscapes, emergences, and bodies. Limpidités IV explores the three states through complex virtuosities that are mapped on the violin, including the eternity of endings, layers of improbable topographies, and plastic intimacies. But, in reality, these are just some espaces fictifs (fictional spaces). As things were melting away, as you were quietly breathing next to me, I heard the violin expanding through your body, a long stroke of life falling inside your lungs with the freshness of unbraided dreams. It almost made me wish for eternal life, only briefly.’

Hannah Kendall
when flesh is pressed against the dark (2024, German premiere)
Damian Norfleet, voice; Joshua Rubin, bass clarinet; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Weston Olencki, trombone

At the composer’s request, there is no further information on this work.

Andile Khumalo
Schau-fe[r]n-ster II (2014)
Jacob Greenberg, piano

The composer writes:

‘Schau-fe[r]n-ster II is part of a series of piano works that explore different approaches to conceptualizing music for keyboard instruments. The title of this piano series comes from a combination of two German phrases, Schaufenster (display window) and aus der Ferne schauen (looking from afar). These two phrases lent a critical poetic significance to the compositions’ development, showing different influences that shaped the compositional journey. The two phrases triggered the idea of detailed observation or enhanced sensitivity towards observation or listening. The composition draws strongly on the principle of using timbre as the foundation of musical composition, an approach common in the music of the Xhosa people of South Africa, which has rarely been highlighted. This piece is a profound exploration of the piano’s versatility, serving as both a percussive and an orchestral instrument. The result is a unique blend of intimate sounds, delicately emerging from fading shades, creating new timbre surfaces that propel the music forwards. What I find particularly intriguing is how some movements reference the interlocking techniques of African xylophone playing, further expanding the piano’s sonic possibilities. In other movements (the third in particular), there are references to my African traditions. In some movements, this is combined and blurred with spectral influences from the French school of thinking about sound, but also complemented by the amaXhosa’s approach to timbre. So, we hear a multilayered complexity of sound that projects a much bigger instrument than the piano. What is truly impressive is how the listener perceives sounds projected in space, giving an illusion of an ensemble work, creating an immersive and expansive experience for the audience.’

Charles Uzor
Elegy for Maririanne Schatz, for solo violin and electronics ad lib (2024, German premiere)
Caitlin Edwards, violin; Charles Uzor, electronics\

The composer writes:

‘The story of my elegy is quite elegiac in itself. Marianne Schatz was a patron of music, whom I had known for many years. I kept seeing her rush past in contemporary music concerts—which amazed me because of her advanced age. It was said that she had money, which naturally kept me at a distance. For years, our communication was limited to a shy ‘good evening’. Then I received her letter in which she asked me to set some poems to music. 

They were the poems of her long-dead childhood sweetheart, which she had rediscovered. Maybe just before forgetting, a discovery of what was important to her. I hesitated, but said yes. Then I had a hard time setting this lyric with the apocryphal images of humanity and nature into music. Fate took a sudden turn when, after just a few meetings, Schatz died without me being able to keep the promise of completing the composition in time. The elegy, written four years after her death, is a ‘settlement of a score’, the posthumous fulfilment of a promise, the testimony of an attraction that hovered over the hurdle of strangeness. The piece seems to me like the connection between a Black man and a white woman who left this earth in old age.

The sound material consists of simple, minimal gestures: at the beginning and at the end there are double stops with large intervals, in which perhaps Anton Webern can be heard. In the extended middle section, a flow of ascending four- to six-note motifs washes over us, increasing in unpredictable algorithms to twelve-note permutations, whose underlying pulsation resembles the hocket rhythms of the Ba-Benzélé in Cameroon. At this point, in the middle of the piece, where the lullaby matches the pulse of the violin, I remember this strangely beautiful rhythm of a people who are foreign to me and ask myself: what is (not) mine, who do I belong to (not)?’

Jessie Cox
(Noisy) Black/blackness (Unbounded) (2024, world premiere)
Fay Victor, voice; Damian Norfleet, voice; Joshua Rubin, clarinet; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Levy Lorenzo, percussion; Caitlin Edwards, violin

The composer writes:

‘In this piece, I engage the history of one-colour square paintings and its corollary in music. The history of black square paintings is bound up with questions of Black lives and blackness as abstraction. In the nineteenth century, Alphonse Allais painted a black square painting, Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit. This racist joke is part of a claim over perception that holds the other in a square, authorizing a regime of truth, knowledge, interpretation, subject status, and more. Musically, the black square, or the one-colour square (Allais painted other one-colour squares as well), became a question of silence, particularly since it was Allais who wrote the first silent piece of music; John Cage’s 4'33'' (1952) is the most famous silent piece in music, and it is also a musical corollary to black square paintings and abstract painting in the twentieth century.

Of particular importance to my thinking of this history as a question of blackness is Charles Uzor’s 8'46'' George Floyd in Memoriam (2020) which consists of two different kinds of silences: one with breathing sounds and one without any breathing sounds. Today, we might think of a continuation of this connection between the visual and aural in the digital realm: the concept of white noise (all frequencies equally present) and black noise (silence) in sound come from the visual, from photography, and from a mistaken understanding of the composition of white light. For me, the question that arises by way of Black liveness is: What happens when this abstraction called ‘blackness’ breaks out of its confines and begins to redefine appearance, perception, sense, and meaning? It is an opacity introduced into a regime of absolute audibility that blackness bespeaks as the blurring of the distinction between audible and inaudible, sound and silence, abstraction and representation, object and subject, observer and artwork. This is a musical, or artistic, question that is also about who gets to speak, about who may have a voice. It is no coincidence that Black voices are erased and stolen at once, that Black sounds are erased and demonized at once, that Black sounds must conform to an antiblack world to stake their claim of legitimacy. In this sense, Black lives’ musicking, as the liveness of the abstraction in the square, as blackness’s unboundedness, refigures the whole world.’