For Roger Angell

As antithetical as it may sound, once someone reaches their early to mid 90s, I begin to believe that they will live forever. I’d be surprised if these nonagenarians feel this way, but from my vantage point, once someone reaches 94, 95, 96, they have surpassed a benchmark of which few achieved and now occupy an almost ageless space. They have already seemingly lived forever, so they will obviously continue to do so. When the American composer Elliott Carter began suddenly churning out pieces at rapid speed in his early 90s, musicologists and biographers deemed this to be his late-late style, having surpassed what was presumed to be the final phase in his career. We place folks in their early to mid 80s to be in their own “late style,” but for those who make it another decade or two with more than enough gas left in the tank, they seem to be set for invincibility. I felt that way about Stephen Sondheim who pasted away in November of last year at 91 (Of course he will finish this long awaited Buñuel musical, how could he not?) and I felt the same about the writer Roger Angell who died yesterday at 101.

When I surprisingly descended into a baseball wormhole at the start of the pandemic, Angell and his insightful, infectious, spirited essays on the game were one of my companions. His analysis is not one of a baseball beat reporter relaying facts and figures (there is plenty of that to be sure), but one of an eloquent and articulate fan who invites the reader to participate in his excitement, disappointment, and astonishment. Like Carter, who met or sat next to or chatted with the likes of Charles Ives, Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, and so on, Roger Angell had a number of just jaw dropping recollections at his disposal. He saw Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at Yankee Stadium, witnessed Joe DiMaggio’s rookie year, detailed the stadiums of yesteryear which are long gone: The Polo Grounds, Ebbett’s Field, Crosley, Riverfront, Forbes. Even putting baseball history aside, as a fiction editor at The New Yorker, he worked with everyone from Nabokov, Updike, and Thurber (who apparently Angell played Ping Pong with according to David Remnick’s obit this morning). But with all of this, he was never one for the overly sappy nostalgia of the game (“Field of Dreams…I could hardly stand it, it was so sentimental. Those were the good old days in baseball? And the world was good? Give me a break!”). Rather, he made the game itself a thing to be admired for its beauty, as he did in the final essay of his first collection The Summer Game (1972):

“Sit quietly in the upper stand and look at the field. Half close your eyes against the sun, so that the players recede a little, and watch the movements of baseball. The pitcher, immobile on the mound, holds the inert white ball, his little lump of physics. Now, with abrupt gestures, he gives it enormous speed and direction,converting it suddenly into a line, a moving line. …In time, these and other lines are drawn on the field; the batter and the fielders are also transformed into fludity, moving and converging, and we see now that all movement in baseball is a convergence toward fixed points.”

And so began a series of pieces in The New Yorker which would later be collected in more volumes of baseball essays over the course of nearly half a century. He ushered in his own “late style” with collections entitled Late Innings in 1982 and Once More Around The Park in 1991…there were still another thirty baseball seasons still to come.

During the spectacle that was the 1975 World Series between Angell’s long suffering Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, he detailed the absurd joy of a being a fan, after Carlton Fisk willed a ball into fair territory on the first baseline in order to clench Game 6 in the bottom of the 12th inning, writing:

“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
— Agincourt and After from Five Seasons

It would be wrong to consider Angell solely a great baseball writer. Rather, he is an infectious writer who happened to pick baseball as his subject of choice. He is a joy to read simply due to his masterful wit and style (his stepfather, the equally masterful essayist E.B. White quite literally co-wrote the book on literary style.)

I just recently picked up a copy of Late Innings at a bookstore earlier this week and, due to a No-iPhone-For-A-Month reset, I was toying around with the idea of sending him a snail mail letter, in thanks and appreciation. But now, I send off a simple farewell and thanks into the ether.

Far West

A busy couple of weeks, culminating in a doctoral recital and a 20 hour round trip to North Carolina for a premiere with the Durham Symphony. So now that the dust has cleared, time to post some recordings!

Here is a score follower video of my homage to the always awe-inspiring California landscape, Far West, performed by the Kuttner Quartet.

Reexamining Durham's Past Through Music

I wrote a somewhat lengthy(ish) essay about coming back to my piece ‘No Name In The Street’ after a two year delay due to the pandemic

The timeline from the completion of a new orchestra piece to its premiere is, in the scheme of life, a fairly quick one. In the case of most composers, the piece is done a few months or so before the first performance, though we all admit sometimes to cramming the night before a deadline like a term paper; the first rehearsal — the time in which the composer finally gets to hear the piece for the first time — usually occurs about a week before the premiere. The pandemic of course changed this traditional timeline, as it changed all aspects of time for many of us. During the pandemic, orchestras were in most cases the first to shutdown and the last to reopen. Needless to say, dozens of musicians cramped together on a stage in close proximity blowing and spitting and sweating next to one another didn’t transition well into the world of social distancing and face coverings. In the case of a recent piece of mine, No Name In The Street, the normal timeline of weeks or months, stretched out to nearly two years.

But with that expanded time between the completion of the piece and its upcoming premiere next month, a lot changed. According to what I jotted down on the final page of the score, No Name In The Street, a ten minute piece written for the Durham Symphony Orchestra about the near destruction of an all Black neighborhood near Durham, was finished on January 19th of 2020. Roughly a month later, on February 23rd, Ahmaud Arbery went for a jog in his hometown of Brunswick, Georgia and was murdered by three white men in what has now been officially ruled as a racially-motivated federal hate crime. Nineteen days later, in Louisville, Kentucky, Breonna Taylor was murdered by the Louisville Metro Police Department when serving a no knock warrant on the wrong apartment in the middle of the night. And then twelve days later, Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds until he died outside of a Minneapolis, Minnesota grocery store after being suspected of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. The ensuing two years would, at first, show one of the largest mass protests in American history, calling for racial equality and an end to systemic police brutality against black and brown Americans. Then, a reexamination of American history and its roots in white supremacy and systemic racism. After that, a cultural backlash from the conservative right, pushing forward, not dog whistles, but all out assaults on telling the ugly truth about American history and what aspects of that history are still smoldering in our current society.

When I wrote No Name In The Street, few if any school board members knew what “critical race theory” was. Few white Americans could understand why one would want to reallocate funds from police departments to other social programs. I would bargain that a good number of white Americans had little to no knowledge about redlining or other methods in which our government kept our society segregated. There has been a seismic shift in this country, much like after the 1968 murder of MLK and the 1991 beating of Rodney King, in regards to examining who are we as a country and how does race intersect with that idea of who we are collectively. 

I wrote No Name In The Street because of my own ignorance.

St. Joesph’s AME Church in 1911 and 2018

When I was asked by William Curry to write a new piece for the Durham Symphony, I had little to no clue where to start. Having a million ideas and no idea is virtually the same thing when beginning something new; it leaves one frozen and creatively immobile. So in desperation to find something to latch on to, I looked up the concert venue, the Hayti Heritage Center, on the internet. The Hayti Heritage Center was built as an extension to the former St. Joseph AME Church, a National Historical Landmark built in 1891. The church, the space in which the piece would be premiered, was what caught my eye initially. Beautifully frozen in time, the dark brown wood which frames the proscenium arch flows out into the pews and up towards the banisters of the balcony. The ornate stained glass illuminates the equally intricate patterns of the cream and turquoise ceiling. As a resident of the Raleigh-Durham area from birth until college, I had never heard of this church, never heard of the Hayti Heritage Center, never heard of the Hayti District of Durham period. 

And there was a reason why I hadn’t heard about Hayti.

The original NC Mutual Life Insurance Company Building on Parrish Street in Durham (RAL Today)

Shortly after the Civil War, Hayti was founded by formally enslaved African Americans on the southern edge of Durham. Named after Haiti, the first independent black republic on the Western Hemisphere, Hayti quickly grew into the first entirely self-sufficient black community in the U.S. after the Civil War, operating over 200 businesses as well as theaters, schools, hospitals, hotels, and notably the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest and richest African-American company at the time. After several visits to Hayti, Booker T. Washington, who in 1911 penned his Durham, North Carolina: A City of Negro Enterprises, wrote that “in addition to many prosperous doctors, lawyers, preachers and men of other professions, I found some of the most flourishing drug stores, grocery and dry goods stores I had seen anywhere among Negros.” After visiting St. Joesph’s, he noted that “never in all my travels have I seen a church as great as St. Joseph’s.” Washington was frankly astounded by “the information that the white people everywhere encouraged the new Negros to buy and own property.” Along side Tulsa, Oklahoma’s so-called “Black Wall Street,” Hayti was a successful example of what was possible for freedmen during Reconstruction; that there could be, at least in the eyes of Washington, successful racial integration in the south.

But in 1958, under the guise of “urban renewal,” North Carolina Highway 147, also known as the Durham Freeway, was constructed. The path of the new highway was designed to go straight through the business district of Hayti. By design, more than 200 acres of Hayti, which housed many of the businesses Booker T. Washington first saw as the future of a truly integrated America, were cleared for the Durham Freeway. In his 2017 book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein documents how cities across the country from Detroit to Miami to Camden systemically placed new highways through predominately black communities. The Chrysler Expressway or I-75 in Detroit, for example, displaced “4,000 families, 87 percent of whom where African American.” He goes on to note that “federal appeals courts concluded that HUD officials knew that the highway would disproportionately destroy African American homes and make no provisions for assisting them in finding new lodging.” Barbara Perry, on returning to Hayti during the construction of the Durham Freeway, referred to it as “a nightmare, worse than pictures of a war torn or burned out riot area. Who caused all this?” According to research done by Bull City 150, after the freeway’s construction, over 4,000 families and 500 businesses were displaced from the once prosperous district. Those who were renting, and even those who previously owned their own homes, were relocated to housing projects. 

Because the piece was going to be premiered at St. Joesph’s, I wanted to write something that was a sort of memorial to that space. No Name In The Street borrows its title from a collection of essays by James Baldwin and is, in essence, about the history of Hayti. The piece begins with a long melodic solo line in the strings (based upon spelling the word H-A-Y-T-I into musical pitches). This “Hayti theme” grows and fleshes out into a broad, sweeping orchestral statement. This moment is slowly taken over by the brass and winds which begin to distort and obscure the theme. The theme, now abstracted by the winds and brass, only occasionally can be heard. The piece reaches a great climax and is abruptly cut off. The “Hayti theme” is now heard in its most clear and intimate form played by a solo string quintet. Slowly, over time, the theme begins to get erased by the orchestra, note by note, until one solo viola is left trying to sing out.

Hayti during the construction of NC Highway 147

But how was it that I, as a student going to school about 20 minutes away, had never heard about this? Having whole years of public school, in my case fourth and eighth grades, devoted to North Carolina history, how was this never brought up? These were the questions I asked myself two years ago and now these questions are really at the core of this national conversation about how race is talked about in schools. Rather than discuss it, states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and indeed North Carolina, are passing legislation that doesn’t simply say don’t mention these historical facts, but rather, don’t talk about race, period. In the eyes of these legislators, race was not and should not be a factor in teaching history. The goal is to make history race neutral which is to wildly distort history. And contrary to their talking points, there is no boogeyman lurking around public school corridors hellbent on making white children feel bad about themselves. That argument is the same thread which binds this current backlash to that of the Boston busing protests of the 1970s and to the backlash all over the south after Brown versus Board of Education. In this case history doesn’t just rhyme, it is in many cases saying the exact same thing. 

I’m still wrestling with another conversation which has come into focus after the murder of George Floyd, that being, is this piece a story that I even have the right to tell? Is it my piece to write? And I still don’t know. Is music so abstract an art form that it frees me from criticism unlike white novelists who write about marginalized populations or playwrights that write about urban renewal? And am I hiding behind that abstraction? I briefly thought about discarding this piece after the summer of 2020 in favor of writing something new. I had time on my hands being locked down and free from teaching responsibilities. But ultimately I kept the piece largely as is. My hope is that, first off, the piece is a worthwhile ten or so minutes for the listener. But secondly, I hope, if anything, this piece gives an artistic perspective to something that has sadly become more inflammatory over the intervening two years. The main question of the piece, as I see it, is what happens when a community fails to discuss their own history and erases it from memory. My lack of education on this topic is proof positive that as a student in NC public schools, I was shielded from this history. This piece was written out of that initial ignorance and because the history of the Hayti District was to some degree successfully erased. That in and of itself is the argument plaguing school boards right now. And it’s not just the race neutral teaching of history that has become inflammatory but Durham’s contemporary problems of housing affordability, single family zoning laws, and gentrification which were at the root of the “urban renewal” movement decades ago which led to the construction of the Durham Freeway.

In all likelihood, on the day of the premiere, I will drive on the Durham Freeway to get to the Hayti Heritage Center and will probably leave on that same road, as will most audience members. Maybe we all will, at the very least, look at it differently.

George Crumb (1929 - 2022)

The first thing one notices when approaching a score by the American composer George Crumb, who died Monday at 92, is the beauty of his calligraphy. In a bygone age before computers took over music notation, composition students and composers studied musical penmanship and took care in ensuring their handwritten scores were legible and hopefully aesthetically pleasing. But even during that analog age, George Crumb stood alone. The near perfect curvatures and swoops that bend and entangle staves into peace signs, zodiac symbols, or something out of a satanic cult could easily stand alone hanging on the walls of a contemporary art exhibition. Unlike most musical scores, Crumb’s have an uncanny ability to look like a physical manifestation of the sounds he created; heavy black boxes indicating a pianist use their forearm to depress a cluster of keys, canonic musical lines falling inward in concentric circles. His obituary in The New York Times quoted the flutist Tara Helen O’Connor who described his scores as “his way of expressing how music flows through time…[he] also leaves some of the magic and creativity up to the performer.”

But beyond the sheer aesthetic value of the score is of course the music itself. Crumb, like a handful his contemporary colleagues across the pond, was interested in the very stuff of sound itself. Rather than using musical color as window dressing for melodic lines or harmonies, Crumb lets color lift most of the weight in this works. As such, a great deal of his output was written for solo piano as well as a vast array of percussion. He had percussionists smack chains against large gongs, bow crystal wine glasses to create an ethereal hum, hit the inside of the piano with an open palm for a rich boom, and dip large cowbells into water for a sustained tone which bends and evaporates. These odd sounds Crumb congers up seem to emerge organically out of the primordial ooze of the earth, as though these deep rumblings, piercing shrieks, and distant bells have been going on for millennia.

And even though this almost prehistoric type of music making had followers on other continents, Crumb’s boyhood memories of growing up in the hills of Appalachia gave his pieces a uniquely American sound. Think as if we excavated the hundreds of layers behind the music of Aaron Copland or Stephen Foster to find what elements of the land inspired their tunes. During the last twenty years, for instance, Crumb focused almost entirely on cycles of songs scored for vocalist, percussion quartet, and piano which re-contextualized familiar American folk tunes in an eerie and haunting soundscape. His 2004 cycle, American Songbook IV (The Winds of Destiny), written shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, takes classic Civil War tunes like ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again’ and places it in a misty soundscape of distant, deep bass drum booms with the vocalist singing the folk tune ironically or with deep cynicism. The final song, ‘Shenandoah,’ sounds as though the tune is echoing against the southern mountains that Crumb knew so well in the far off distance.

George Crumb’s music has a spiritual, theatrical, bombastic, and often times ritualistic quality to it. His landmark 1970 work Black Angels for amplified string quartet has the players whisper, make noises with their tongues, and shout. The piece, written as a reaction to the Vietnam War, integrates these sounds into an utterly convincing nightmare of a piece. I remember distinctly first hearing this piece when I was back in high school and being completely blown over by the fact that the first violin in the movement ‘Sounds of Bones and Flutes’ sounded like a flute (accomplished by a technique in which the player bows the strings with the wood side of the bow rather than the hair).

In Ancient Voices of Children, also from 1970, Crumb sets text by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a poet he was seemingly obsessed with for most of his career. The work feels like glancing in on some sort of cult like ceremony from an alien nation. When the work opens, a soprano sings, chants, and yells into an open piano creating a haunting resonant echo, as though someone is singing from deep inside a well. During the final movement, a boy soprano who has been heard but not seen comes onstage, singing with the soprano. The work ends with the text “… and I will go very far … to ask Christ The Lord to give me back my ancient soul of a child.” The premiere recording of the piece on the Nonesuch label sold more than 70,000 copies making it one of the best selling 20th century classical recordings ever.

For all of it’s eerie bombast and intellectual rigor, Crumb’s music has a great ability to communicate to an audience. There is a wonderful beauty that emerges from his works, albeit almost always shrouded in a dark veil.

About an hour before I wrote this, I was in a class at Indiana University in which there was a bit of snickering from the professor about the recent death of George Crumb. “I guess he’s a type of composer I have to appreciate but don’t like to listen to at all.” This was met with some sizable agreement from the class of graduate students. And who can really blame them? Crumb has been relegated to the slot in the music history textbook in which they point to how crazy his scores look and how loud the opening of Black Angels is. And with that ends most student’s relationship with Mr. Crumb. There is a bit of knowing what you are getting yourself into with Crumb’s music. You will be engaging with a composer who wants you to listen, carefully and deeply, and be, in the end, rejuvenated and maybe even a little disturbed. As there is room in the visual arts and film and television and novels to be uncomfortable and disturbed, so is there in music.

But if you are willing to go on a deeply cathartic, theatrical, and haunting journey through instrumental and vocal colors and sounds — and yes even harmony and melody — you have found the right composer.

Inferno

During the 'before times,' I was got an email from Joey Walker, an Indiana based singer-songwriter, to collaborate on a new album. His concept was to write a sort of modern take on the first part Dante's epic poem the Divine Comedy. Out of this came Inferno which will be released tomorrow, January 28th, and is currently available for pre-order! This is my first time orchestrating/arranging an album of what one could call pop songs and not "officially" composing anything. Joey would send over the piano/vocal versions of songs he wrote and I play around with it; turning chords on the piano into slowly glissing string parts, adding some odd instrumental sound effects, etc. It's the musical version of an interior designer; the house isn't mine but I picked out the couches and the pillows. The final product has a little bit of everything baked into three songs; a little big band influence, some hymn-like string orchestra sounds, a chirpy woodwind quintet. It's a liberating feeling to mess around with someone else's material than to write everything yourself. You are in some ways more willing to take certain risks that you wouldn't take in a piece that's entirely your own creation.

I hope you give the full album a listen, either by streaming it on all the platforms (Spotify, Apple Music) or, better yet, purchasing a copy!

Also, after being under a consortium contract for the better part of a year, my saxophone and percussion diatribe Deep State will be officially released and available for purchase starting February 1st! Any saxophone/percussion duos out there who were not part of the original commissioning group can now perform this, admittedly, very difficult piece.

Stephen Sondheim (1930 - 2021)

At the moment, I am at a complete loss for adequate words. Perhaps I will write something more substantive and worthwhile later. But in the meantime: this is the end of an era, a seismic shift not only in American musical theatre but in American music.

”Anything you do
let it come from you
then it will be new
give us more to see…”