As some of you know, in the past years I have been teaching an interdisciplinary seminar at Duke bringing together aspiring writers and poets, composers and scholars. It’s called Double Consciousness: Perspectives on Composition in Black Poetry and Music, and I have been teaching it together with my Duke colleague from English and African and African-American Studies, the poet and scholar Tsitsi Jaji. We get everyone working together and have enjoyed the collaboration of many other artists and poets, like Nathaniel Mackey, Crystal Simone Smith, and this year the gifted choreographer Tristian Griffin. We have been joined in our work by the soprano Louise Toppin of the University of Michigan as Artist-in-Association with the seminar. Among other very interesting forays, such as the very compelling study of criticism, central to our work is song and the different spaces it occupies though settings of poetry–the students write their own haiku and haibun and fashion them into music–and they study, among other works Tyshawn Sorey’s settings of Terrence Hayes, Florence Price’s settings of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, William Grant Still’s settings of Langston Hughes and Wendell Logan’s reimagining of Robert Hayden’s Runagate, Runagate. We study Anthony Davis’ justly famous opera Amistad, with a brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis, and thinking of the global context of our study, Leopold Senghor’s Shaka and Akin Euba’s operatic adaptation of it (as Chaka). We investigate contemporary media works like Thomas de Frantz’ CANE, based on Jean Toomer’s novel and Steve Reich’s The Cave. One focus of the course has been the role of document and how artists can utilize our history to address our contemporary scene: Anthony and Thulani Davis adapt oral history about Middle Passage, they rely on poetry of Robert Hayden, and musical references such as blues and the “spirit songs” (Spirituals). Tsitsi Jaji and Shawn Okpebholo evoke other history in Songs in Flight, wherein every poem of the eleven set by Shawn Okpebholo uses a fragment from a runaway slave database (Freedom on the Move). Songs In Flight‘s poems, nicely varied in type and weight, are by Jaji, Crystal Simone Smith and Tyehimba Jess and very meaningfully set to music by Okpebholo, working with (among others) such gifted singers as Will Liverman, baritone, Reginald Mobley, countertenor and Karen Slack, soprano, with Rhiannon Giddens appearing in some performances. If you are aware we are now in a Golden Age of Black singers–and if you ever thought about the role of institutions in releasing talent, consider that a generation ago, Leontyne Price or Martina Arroyo had to struggle to be heard in operatic and recital roles except those that audiences would experience as “black.” Lawrence Brownlee, the great tenor, doesn’t have to conduct his career in such a limited environment as Marian Anderson, Price or Arroyo, and we are richer for it.
Among the many talented graduates of this seminar is Duke’s recent Ph.D., Brittany Green, who was part of the class in 2021 on her way to a 2025 Ph.D. Together with the soprano Karen Slack, the American Composers Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony and the Durham Symphony, Brittany has fashioned a piece for soprano and orchestra worthy of musical America’s attention. The Durham Symphony, under composer/conductor William Henry Curry, presented LETTERS TO AMERICA last night. Accompanying the settings of poetry were the publication of actual letters written by Black women to ask the question: What would America be like if it listened to Black women? In workshops through the Pauli Murray Center in Durham with poet Jaki Shelton Green assisting, a compendium of letters was created, which Maestro Curry suggested were notable for their forthright, angry and hopeful messages. Congratulations to the poets (Andrea Petifer, Ilina Ewen, Kayla Beckett, Resita Heavenly Cox, Akeeya Umstead, Amanda Bennett, Alani Rouse, Tiffany Mills and Dartinia Hull) whose work was REMARKABLE. Several of the pieces touched me greatly, as in “yes, these are very forthright and angry”. Frederick Douglass posed many of these same questions in 1852 (The Meaning of the 4th of July for the Negro). “It is the birth of your national independence and your freedom”, he said. Some of these sentiments were echoed last night. However, Brittany and Jaki Shelton Green’s focus was on women, and contemporary women who enjoy the gift of American citizenship 124 years later, so the expressions of disappointment and anger and hope were unique to our time. As concerns America 250, the Durham Symphony concert was about the best encapsulation of ambivalence in the landscape of our love for the country that one could imagine. “How does it feel to be a problem?” DuBois asked. What would America be like if it listened to Black women? , Brittany asks. I was moved by the whole evening. Congratulations to Brittany Green, Karen Slack, William Henry Curry and the Durham Symphony, and to these writers, creating with their individual voices.
