East End Elegy No. 1
From the Cradle
Witness Tree
East End Elegy No. 2 – Spirits Flying
City Called Heaven
Archive of Love
East End Elegy No. 3
Leyla McCalla, cello, guitar, vocals
Ellen Cockerham Riccio, violin
Esther Kim, violin
Jocelyn Smith, viola
Adele Kelley, viola
Schuyler Slack, cello
Manuela Bonzo, cello
Please silence cell phones before the concert. Recording, Taping, Photographing are strictly prohibited.
East End Elegy is a personal and musical reflection of my encounter with the East End Cemetery, located on the Far East End of Richmond, where more than 15,000 African-American ancestors are interred. When I was invited by the University of Richmond to create a new commissioned work, my intention was to create a musical piece that would connect students at the University of Richmond with the larger Richmond community. I brainstormed with faculty in the Music Department on potential subject matter, and through this conversation, became aware of the AfricanAmerican burial ground on campus, where formerly enslaved people who lived and worked on the grounds of the University were buried.
The Center for Civic Engagement connected me with the East End Collaboratory, a collective of artists, scholars and archivists who compiled research and findings on those interred at East End Cemetery, including Maggie Walker, John Mitchell, and other notable figures in Richmond history. I had the privilege of visiting the cemetery, where I met Brian Palmer, co-founder of an organization called Friends of East End. This group organizes volunteers to assist with cleanup and maintenance of the cemetery, which had suffered well over a century of desecration and neglect.
African-American cemeteries were often established on the periphery of cities in underfunded and under-resourced communities, overwhelmed by racial inequality and left to fend for themselves. Brian illuminated the challenges and barriers to a healthier future for the cemetery. He also helped me to understand the power and meaning that can come to life when engaging in reparative cemetery work.
So many of the people interred at East End were born enslaved and some of them even lived through the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow – a painfully fascinating span of American history. Cemetery Citizens, a book by Duke scholar
Adam Rosenblatt, furthered my understanding of the work at Friends of East End as a new form of activism – an activism that centers care and repair, offering us an avenue to healing justice.
I started this project theorizing about how we can reconsecrate formerly desecrated spaces. But I realized that this was not truly the gut-wrenching truth that I was grappling with. East End Elegy is a project about Black grief in America. The idea that Black people feel pain differently than others is something that has been proliferated in our collective reasoning for centuries, to justify the hierarchy and power structure of our society. It is also something that, as a Black woman, I have felt and experienced firsthand.
I wrote these songs as an offering to the souls of the people interred at East End and the people who tend their graves. I think that this is a beautiful exchange – we learn about our collective history, sometimes even our ancestors’ lives and tend the physical spaces where they were laid to rest. This gives me hope. Working on East End Elegy has helped me to understand that we are capable of astounding beauty and healing when we fully honor each other’s humanity and commit to each other’s care, both in life and in death.
Born in New York City to Haitian emigrants and activists, Leyla McCalla fnds inspiration from her past and present– her music vibrates with three centuries of history and infuences from around the globe. McCalla possesses a stunning mastery of the cello, tenor banjo and guitar and, as a multilingual singer and songwriter, has risen to produce a distinctive sound that refects the union of her roots and experience. In addition to her solo work, McCalla is a founding member of Our Native Daughters (with Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah and Allison Russell) and alumna of Grammy award-winning Black string band e Carolina Chocolate Drops.
McCalla’s new album and fh studio recording, Sun Without the Heat (ANTI, April 12), is playful and full of joy while holding the pain and tension of transformation. roughout Sun Without the Heat’s ten tracks, McCalla achieves a balance of heaviness and light with melodies and rhythms derived from various forms of Afrodiasporic music including Afrobeat, Ethiopian modalities, Brazilian Tropicalismo, and American folk and blues.
Her 2022 album, Breaking the ermometer (ANTI-), is the album companion to a multidisciplinary music, dance and theatre work commissioned by Duke Performances. rough the story of the brave journalists at Radio Haiti who risked their lives to report news in Haitian Kreyol, Breaking the ermometer identifes the critical importance of a free and independent press to promote self and societal liberation. Breaking the ermometer was named one of the Best Albums of the year by e Guardian, Variety, Mojo and NPR Music, and her song “Dodinin” made Barack Obama’s short list of favorites. McCalla was awarded the 2022 People’s Voice Award by Folk Alliance International, an award given to artists who unabashedly embrace social change in their creative work. McCalla is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the University of Richmond.
Ellen Cockerham Riccio, violin, has served as Principal Second Violinist of the Richmond Symphony since 2009. She won the job while completing her Master’s degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she also received her Bachelor’s degree, as a student of William Preucil. Prior to moving to Richmond, Ellen served as Principal Second Violinist of the Canton Symphony and was a member of the Akron Symphony.
Ellen is the founder of Classical Revolution RVA, the Richmond chapter of a worldwide movement to bring live classical music into non-traditional venues, and served as the organization’s Executive Director from 2012 to 2018. In April of 2020, Ellen began giving private solo violin concerts as A Violinist in Your Backyard, as a way of bringing live music to people during a time of isolation, uncertainty, and digital overload. During the summer of 2020, she gave more than 150 such concerts throughout the Richmond area. Ellen is also a member of Rosette, a string quartet based in Richmond. In 2021, Rosette launched a new concert series called So Hot Right Now which brings the music of living composers to a variety of venues in Richmond.
Esther Kim, violin, is a senior at the University of Richmond, double majoring in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Music. She began playing the violin at age thirteen and has since performed in various settings, being active in solo performances, chamber ensembles, and orchestra at the University of Richmond.
Violist Jocelyn Smith is currently in her sixth season as a member of the Richmond Symphony and her thirteenth season in the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. She has performed in the Crested Butte Music Festival in Crested Butte, CO, since 2001. She earned her Bachelor of Music degree in viola performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music. Ms. Smith is a founding member, along with husband and cellist Peter Greydanus and violinist TaraLouise Montour, of the Clivia String Trio, which was named Artists of the Year by Young Audiences of Virginia in 2008. Ms. Smith lives
in Norfolk with her husband Peter, their two daughters Mirabelle and Eda, and their cat Lily.
Adele Kelley, viola, has been studying music since the age of four. Beginning with piano, she added the violin at age six and then transitioned to viola at twelve. She attended Interlochen Arts Camp for seven summers, and also played with several youth orchestras before college. Performing at the University of Richmond is one of her favorite campus activities!
Cellist Schuyler Slack has performed in orchestral, chamber music, and recital settings across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. e Alexandria, VA native was appointed to the Richmond Symphony’s Kenneth and Bettie Christopher Perry Foundation Cello Chair in 2016. Previously he held the joint position of Artist in Residence at the University of Evansville and Principal Cellist of the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra. He is also a member of the Des Moines Metro Opera Orchestra, Williamsburg Symphony, and is on the music faculty at Randolph-Macon College. He performs frequently in the cello sections of major orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra and the Baltimore and National Symphonies. His primary teachers were Cleveland Orchestra principal cellists Mark Kosower and Stephen Geber at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
A devoted chamber musician and lover of string quartets, Schuyler has studied with and performed alongside members of the Tokyo, Orford, Cleveland, Brentano, Guarneri and Juilliard Quartets, Alban Gerhardt, Nadia Sirota, and Donald and Vivian Weilerstein. He has performed on some of the world’s biggest stages, including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, and the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, as well as given recitals at some of the country’s top music schools, such as the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan.
In 2017 he was granted artist sponsorship by the Virginia Commission for the Arts to perform recitals alongside pianist Ieva
Jokubaviciute. Equally committed to the music of living composers and crossover musical endeavors, Schuyler has commissioned new compositions for the cello by composers Douglas Boyce and Steven Snowden. He was praised by the Washington Post for his “excellent” contribution – noted for his “pluck and scrape effects!” – to a new music-theatre adaptation of Kaa’s “Metamorphosis” that was taken to the Prague Fringe Festival in 2015.
Manuela Bonzo, cello, is an international student from France, and originally from the Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic. She has been passionate about playing cello since the age of seven. She has also performed at UWC (United World Colleges) Atlantic College in Wales, where she finished high school. Manuela says, “It is a huge opportunity for me to play in front of you tonight!”
is project would not have been possible without the generous support of Andy McGraw, Joanne Kong, and the rest of the faculty at the Music Department at the University of Richmond. ank you Byron Asher for your beautiful transcriptions and arrangements of this music. A very big thank you to our student performers Esther Kim, Adele Kelley, and Manuela Bonzo for your commitment and enthusiasm for this music. It has been such a joy to work with you all!
Thank you to Derek Miller and the Center for Civic Engagement for connecting me with the East End Collaboratory and the Friends of East End. Thank you Brian Palmer and the Friends of East End for teaching me so much about the legacy of the East End Cemetery and what community care can really look like. Thank you Ana Edwards for the tour that you gave me of the African Burial ground at Shockoe Bottom, which led me to Kristen Green's fantastic book, The Devil’s Half Acre. Thank you Regina Boone for your cheerleading and friendship. Lastly, but not least, thank you to Marland Buckner and the Shockoe Institute for keeping me in conversation with Richmond for a few more years.
-- Leyla McCalla
Leyla McCalla was supported in part by New Music USA’s Creator Fund in 2023-2024
This performance was commissioned by the University of Richmond Department of Music with help from the A&S Dean’s Office.