16 January 2009
Baltimore Orchestra Performs Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
Conductor Marin Alsop hails rise of new African-American composers
Baltimore — Since the untimely death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the slain civil rights leader’s life, words and philosophy have found their way into the public consciousness of Americans and others through various artistic disciplines. Books, plays, films and dance have commemorated King’s career and values.
In 1982, American composer Joseph Schwantner created a symphony called New Morning for the World (subtitled Daybreak of Freedom). It blends a text drawn from King’s speeches and writings with a bold musical score that seeks to convey African Americans’ experiences and collective spirit, as well as their hopes for brotherhood and peace.
“It’s extremely visceral music, with all its percussion and colors,” said Marin Alsop, artistic director and conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. “And then comes the slow string writing that is so moving.”
Interviewed by America.gov on January 9, the morning after she conducted the piece as part of an annual musical tribute to King, Alsop offered her thoughts on the composer and his symphony.
Schwantner, who won the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1979 for an earlier composition, structured New Morning for the World as one continuous movement, musically speaking. Textually, he divided it into three distinct sections, representing African Americans’ past struggles for racial equality, their contemporary struggles, and the future that would fulfill King’s dream of equal opportunity and harmony. The words and music interact throughout, as do the narrator and orchestra at each performance.
For example, as the narrator (invoking the past) intones King’s words that “there comes a time when people get tired of being humiliated, segregated,” the music pulses and thunders, producing a sense of tempestuousness and discord. Later, recalling King’s vision of historians pointing to “a great people — a black people — who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization,” a lush lyricism takes hold in the score.
“The way Schwantner uses the [verbal] extracts isn’t obvious,” Alsop said. “He saves ‘I Have a Dream’ until the very end. And then it comes in such a classic, quiet moment.”
The adjective that best describes the selected texts is “irrepressible” — references, for instance, to the will of African Americans to move forward, “lifting our nation from the quicksand of injustice to the solid rock of equality,” as King famously said. That sense emerges in the music as well, Alsop said.
“It’s complex music,” she said. “But it’s music that also allows easy access. I think that reflects Dr. King’s words: complex, but easily accessed emotionally. So the music does reflect his philosophy and speech patterns and the content of what he was saying — very sophisticated ideas, but right to the heart and very important.”
Several works created by a new generation of African-American composers of classical music were also on the program of the King tribute concert. Music lovers around the world are indebted to African Americans for many categories of popular music: gospel, jazz, blues, rap, hip-hop and more. But classical compositions by African Americans are less familiar and, Alsop said, less prevalent. She likened it to the modest representation of women among contemporary composers of classical music.
“One of the inherent problems was historical — that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when African Americans were becoming interested in classical music, they were steered toward popular music because classical was extremely elitist,” Alsop said. “James P. Johnson, who wrote [the jazz piece] Charleston, revolutionized popular music, but he was an aspiring classical composer. Women, too, were considered lightweight and weren’t allowed into the hallowed halls. So it’s about time, and has been so long in coming.”
She pointed to Darin Atwater and Michael Abels — two composers who were represented in the previous evening’s King tribute — and also to two others, James Lee and James Sanford, whose works she has conducted previously.
“I think, finally, we may be entering a period in which, as Dr. King said, [race] won’t matter anymore. Perhaps we really can be color-blind,” Alsop said. “I’m an optimist. I hope so.”
