Face to Face

The face of American concert music has been changing dramatically in our time, immeasurably enriched by the acknowledgment and celebration of voices that, not long ago, were largely excluded. Contributions by woefully undervalued Black American composers of the past are finding eager new audiences, and young artists of color are galvanizing the scene by bringing their own perspectives to classical traditions. This morning’s program spans three generations of composers active today, with a nod to a rediscovered elder from the last century.

Commissioned as part of a project inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, Shawn Okpebholo’s mi sueño: afro-flamenco responds to the Spanish-flavored fourth movement, “Alborada del gracioso” (“The Jester’s Morning Song”), from Ravel’s original piano suite. The title (“my dream: afro-flamenco”) combines his “prepandemic nostalgia” with “post-pandemic dreams” to travel again and revisit Spain and Africa. References to flamenco as well as rhythms and idioms inspired by his Nigerian musical heritage and African American music convey the composer’s longing to reconnect to these sources.

American Tableau (Tableau XI) is one of a larger cycle of a dozen pieces,

Michael ABELS (b. 1962) Iconoclasm (2017)

Jessie MONTGOMERY (b. 1981) Rhapsody No. 2

Nasim KHORASSANI (b. 1987) Growth (2017)

Nina BARZEGAR (b. 1984) Inexorable Passage (2020)

Lei LIANG (b. 1972) vis-à-vis (2018) each for a different solo instrument, by Tyson Gholston Davis, the youngest composer on Leonard Hayes’s opening set for solo piano. Davis interrogates the straightforward assurance of the melody known as “America the Beautiful” — and the betrayal of the values it signifies — by weaving it into a chromatically ambivalent context.

A student of Florence Price who later collaborated with her and with the poet Langston Hughes, the composer and pianist Margaret Bonds in 1933 became the first Black musician to perform with the Chicago Symphony. Troubled Water originated as the finale of a threemovement suite Bonds composed to bring her solo recitals to a rousing close. Rather than a mere “arrangement” of a famous spiritual, Bonds offers a multifaceted pianistic fantasy infused with idioms from jazz and European Romanticism. The words to “Wade in the Water,” her source, originally encoded lifesaving information for fugitives following the Underground Railroad to freedom.

For her album marking the Leonard Bernstein centennial in 2018, the pianist Lara Downes asked an array of composers to write short pieces honoring his legacy. Michael Abels explains that he sought to convey his impressions of “the personality and not the sage” in his witty Iconoclasm Bouncy rhythms and restlessly shifting meters echoing Bernstein’s own style evoke how he embodied “the puckish life of the party.”

Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2023, Jessie Montgomery grew up amid the rebelliously creative experimental scene of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. Both her parents led active careers in the performing arts, and their home became a meeting place for boundary-crossing musicians from free jazz; their prodigy daughter meanwhile pursued training in classical violin and began composing as a child. Rhapsody No. 2 is part of set of in-progress solo violin works, each dedicated to a particular contemporary violinist. Citing Béla Bartók as one of her inspirations, Montgomery wrote No. 2 for Michi Wiancko, who included it on her Planetary Candidate album (released in 2020).

Both Nasim Khorassani and Nina Barzegar are members of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see sidebar on p. 48). Khorassani began composing at the age of 8 and spent time in Germany and the U.K. before coming to San Diego, where she is a doctoral composition student at the University of California. In her single-movement string trio Growth, she restricts herself to just four pitches that are closely adjacent (B, C, D, and E-flat). But changes in texture, dynamics, and rhythmic articulation produce a sense of restless pressure to metamorphose.

Both a composer and an actor, Nina Barzegar studied in Tehran before enrolling in the graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and combines interests in film music, improvisation, and the Iranian classical tradition. The New York Times singled out the world premiere of her quintet Inexorable Passage at a concert last October, noting that the work was “thrilling in its fusion of experimental, extended-technique effects, as well as melodic and chordal inventions.” Barzegar introduces the piece as a depiction of “the stages of life”: “We enter this world with hope, we learn, we strive, fall in love, we fight, we fail and triumph. Despite all our wishes, we eventually surrender, accept, and get off the train of life. This is the miracle of being in this world.”

Our morning program concludes with an innovative reconsideration of the principle of musical dialogue and virtuosity. Lei Liang composed vis-à-vis for Wu Man and Steven Schick — fellow San Diego–based colleagues who, he notes, share a “magnetic stage presence and unparalleled virtuosity on their instruments.”

This substantial duo for pipa and percussion goes far beyond simple confrontations of East with West or the traditional with the experimental. Lei Liang uses the paradoxical formula “new music that is old” to depict his aesthetic, adding that he prefers writing “music that has layers of memories underneath.”

Although he grew up in Beijing, Lei Liang has observed that he didn’t discover China until he was living in America. The process of using instrumentation outside one’s own culture, he says, resembles constructing a “mirror that makes us look at ourselves with a kind of X-ray vision. It allows us to penetrate the surface.” The part that Schick plays alone in vis-à-vis accomplishes this by inhabiting three states of mind or three very different spaces simultaneously: “looking inward, looking outward, and resting in a state of motionlessness.”

Juxtaposing the ancient pipa, an instrument with thousands of years of history, versus modern percussion, which began to come into its own in Western classical music only over the last century, is intentionally extreme. Lei Liang points out the jarring humor inherent as well in pitting the pipa’s image as a silk-string instrument of refined delicacy against the brute strength of the sonorities percussionists can produce. “I imagine the piece to be at times serious, challenging, probing, and even contentious; and at other times, relaxed, playful, and humorous,” writes the composer. “This is what a contentious friendship between kindred spirits would be like!”

This concert is approximately 70 minutes.

Emmy- and Grammynominated composer Michael Abels, winner with Rhiannon Giddens of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music for their opera Omar, is best known for his genre-defying scores for the Jordan Peele films Get Out, Us, and Nope. The score for Us won a World Soundtrack Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, a Critics Choice nomination, multiple critics awards, and was named “Score of the Decade” by The Wrap. Both Us and Nope were shortlisted for the Oscar for Best Original Score. In 2022, Abels’s film music was honored by the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image. Other recent media projects include the films Bad Education, Nightbooks, and the docu-series Allen V. Farrow. Current releases include Chevalier (Toronto Intl Film Festival) and Landscape With Invisible Hand (Sundance), his second collaboration with director Cory Finley. Upcoming projects include The Burial (Amazon) and a series for Disney Plus.

Abels’s creative output also includes many concert works, including the choral song cycle At War With Ourselves for the Kronos Quartet and the Grammy-nominated Isolation Variation for Hilary Hahn. Abels’s other concert works have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and many others. Some of these pieces are available on the Cedille label, including Delights & Dances and Winged Creatures. Recent commissions include Emerge for the National Symphony and Detroit Symphony and a guitar concerto (Borders) for Grammy-nominated artist Mak Grgić.

Abels is co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group to increase visibility of composers of color in film, gaming, and streaming media.