September 12, 2021, 7:00 pm.: Baldwin Auditorium
After a yearlong postponement, the barrier-breaking, repertoire-expanding wind ensemble Imani Winds & Cory Smythe will return to Durham. This fall’s offering, “Revolutionary AKA The Civil Rights Project,” thematically organizes several commissions from the past dozen years around the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Following an arrangement of Sam Cooke’s plaintive and pointed “A Change is Gonna Come,” we hear Frederic Rzewski’s “Sometimes,” commissioned by and premiered at Duke Performances in 2015 in celebration of the legacy of historian John Hope Franklin. Vijay Iyer’s “Bruits,” composed in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s 2012 killing, features pianist Cory Smythe and treats “the murderous consequences of the stand your ground law,” while Jason Moran’s “Cane” — a reference to his ancestral home near the Cane River in Louisiana — explores the impact of slavery within his family history. The evening rounds out with Imani co-founder Valerie Coleman’s “Bronzeville,” an invocation of three poems by Chicago literary legend Gwendolyn Brooks.
Program:
Sam Cooke, arr. John Clark: “A Change Is Gonna Come”
Frederic Rzewski: Sometimes
Vijay Iyer: Bruits (for Wind Quintet & Piano)
Jason Moran: Cane
Valerie Coleman: Bronzeville (for Wind Quintet & Piano)
Thursday, September 16, Noon, Biddle 104
Techniques and Themes of Blackness in Chamber Music Performance:
A Conversation with the Imani Winds (POSTPONED)
The Imani Winds explore the question of race in the conception, programming and execution of the repertoire they perform.
What African Diaspora-adjacent musical concepts and/or techniques come into play when rehearsing and performing the music of Black composers?
Are racial and cultural factors even relevant in preparing a concert by a wind quintet?
These questions and others will be explored in a conversation moderated by Anthony Kelley.
