MusicWorks Collective member Holly Dyer proposed the repertoire featured in this week’s Season Opening concerts. CMW’s Founder & Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth talks with Holly about how she came to this program, what inspired it, and how reflections on identity have been part of her experience in playing this music.
Sebastian Ruth: Last year you went to a conference and came back with an armful of ideas about MusicWorks Collective programming. Can you share a little bit about what inspired you?
Holly Dyer: I went to the National Guild for Community Arts Education conference and sat in on a breakout session with an organization in Baltimore called Wide Angle Youth Media. In Baltimore racial tension was really high and they really felt the need to address it with their kids and in their mission and their organization, and one way that they addressed it was by creating a year-long unit called Why Black Lives Matter. They talked about a lot of things like ‘what is racism?’ ‘what is white supremacy?’ and the historical imbalance of wealth, a lot of the topics that we talked about at the MusicWorks Network Summer Institute.
What came out of those talks were these short media projects that they made and I watched a few of them and some are emotionally moving. It was around the same time that when we were getting ready to propose ideas for the upcoming season at CMW and it just really resonated with me to follow along that line of Why Black Lives Matter, not necessarily to have a token program, but as a response of ‘hey, this is still a big issue in our country in our society.’
At CMW we have a goal of trying to promote and include more composers of diverse backgrounds that aren’t traditionally in the Western classical tradition and my feeling was just well, how about let’s just do a showcase of all African-American composers because you don’t see that very often…sometimes around Martin Luther King Day or Black History Month but how about just ‘this is how we’re going to start our season.’
Sebastian: You just mentioned the problem of programming one token program of black composers. Sometimes there’s this critique that if you have a show that’s like: this is the black composer show, in some way that’s like segregating them to a featured theme. One of the things that drew me to your proposal was it seemed deeper than that.
How do you reconcile those two ideas: Why Black Lives Matter versus showcasing African-American composers in just a part of the season?
Holly: I was considering the arc of the whole season. This is just one program in the collection of the whole. We see so many programs with all-white composers and no one says anything, right? But then if we do a program by black composers then it’s time to say something.
This is just a start for me. Why Black Lives Matter in this context is just that I feel like these three pieces are really enjoyable pieces of music that don’t get showcased often enough and mainly just to show that yeah, anyone can write really great music. It shouldn’t have to matter what race you are or what kind of background you have. But these are three composers [whose identities] are just underrepresented in the classical tradition. There’s some jazzy elements throughout all three pieces, especially in the Florence Price piece where you also hear some spiritual tunes.
It’s very interesting as I’ve been going through the process of rehearsing this music, you’ll hear very distinct things like, ‘Oh, I don’t usually hear that’ but then you also hear moments that sound like Bach, for instance. In the first movement of the Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson piece, I feel he pays a lot of homage to Bach, and he says that Bach is one of his favorite composers. Also with the Florence Price Five Folksongs in Counterpoint there is a very interesting dichotomy of traditional folk tunes, with very distinguishable melodies, but done in a contrapuntal way, which is something that’s very much like Baroque Western Bach tradition. But she still adds her own kind of a spin with harmonies and voicing and so it’s not like I’m listening to Bach again. It’s okay to have that blend of the Western tradition and other sounds. There’s room for that too.
So it has been enlightening for me as I’m considering, in classical music this kind of showcasing African-American composers that there can still be an homage to the Western tradition, a twist and that kind of blend, or you could say integration, is okay and it’s good. It could be another thing to consider when we are programming music by composers that are more representative of the communities that we serve that there could also just be a theme of diversity.
Sebastian: My teacher talked about studying music in Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s in Europe. Whenever would be playing chamber music, he would talk about the distinctions between a Hungarian tune in a piece of Brahms versus a German tune and or a Viennese and for him those were culturally specific pieces of music, and one of the things that Brahms would do is pull from these different traditions.
In talking about classical music we tend to call all of that ‘the canon’, but really that’s what composers have always done: draw from multiple influences, some of them reflective of their own cultures, sometimes drawing from others like the French impressionist folks who drew from hearing the pentatonic scales from East Asia. And so that sense of combining cultural voice with lots of different voices and the technique of counterpoint is actually the musical tradition, right? So it’s an element of racism that keeps people, black people, women, out of that mainstream, that makes that music stand out, sit outside of the norm. But in fact all the things you’re describing are what the norm has always been: drawing multiple themes, multiple influences, and not trying to sound like everybody else. Trying to sound like your own voice.
Another part of this is that you brought this forward in a moment of exploring these issues of racism and exploring your own identity. I don’t know what, if any, reflections you’d have about how this ties into personal reflection and explorations of blackness, and what this means to you personally.
Holly: [Laughs] This is my introverted side coming out and being like, ‘Oh, I need to talk about how I feel?’
Well, maybe just one thing. Earlier, I was attempting to articulate that I was fascinated with seeing the diversity coming out in each of these pieces, and as CMW has been addressing this programming and what kind of repertoire we’re having our students play, knowing that I was personally having kind of a divide. I’m racially expressed one way, but I still really like classical music. I come from a mixed background, from parents of two different races and two completely different family backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds and societal backgrounds. And just for me personally, I’ve been thinking more about, then what does that make me? I feel like I can’t really swing one way or the other, you know, and I’ve been recently just trying to embrace that.
The mixture is okay because that’s just what I am. I feel like if I stress too much on one side then I neglect the other half of my life, that both sides need to be acknowledged. For me just exploring these pieces and seeing that yeah, Perkinson also really liked Bach, and Florence Price also had influences, for instance I hear a lot of Dvorak in her music as well as other white composers. I guess for me that has been a time to come to peace for me, to be like, yeah this mixture is okay and it’s okay for me to also like classical music. Because in a way couldn’t it also be racism if we think that black people aren’t going to like classical music?
And I was also kind of thinking about: why am I defining for my students that they don’t want to play Bach but they would rather play salsa music? Isn’t that racism too?
Sebastian: At some point a couple of years ago we debated among the musicians the issues of programming for representation and saying well, that’s exactly what we should be doing, that reflects the social justice ideals we hold as a group and we should make noise about it. Like, this is what we’re doing, right? We should say we’re trying to have a program of 50% women composers and program Black and Latino voices and others that are underrepresented in the typical canon and make noise about it because that’s the change we’re looking to make.
And the opposing side is that we should play all that music but we should play it for its own artistic merits and if we make too much noise about it then it risks looking like tokenism. We should just play it because we think it’s great music and stand behind it.
And I brought that question to my student Marieme and she said, “Well it’s the CMW way to do things and talk about it. So why wouldn’t we talk about it?”
Both sides of that debate are interesting to me.
Holly: I also see both sides and feel like it’s a very fine line. If we leave it as it is, we’re missing an opportunity to have some more conversations, even to hear the opposing side.
Sebastian: Maybe it’s a stronger statement not to point it out, as in ‘this is what we did because it’s the way the world should look’ but we risk not having any message about it. And we are trying to send a message. The difference is that we’re making noise not because we deserve the noise for programming the music, but because this music deserves the noise.
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The MusicWorks Collective performs Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1, and Five Folksongs in Counterpoint by Florence Price in three concert events this week:
Thursday, September 12, 7pm
Mixed Magic Theatre
560 Mineral Spring Avenue, Pawtucket
Admission is $20 and tickets are available here.
Directions here.
Saturday, September 14, 4pm
Southside Cultural Center, SouthLight Pavilion
393 Broad Street, Providence
Admission is free to the concert and potluck picnic
Directions here.
Sunday, September 15, 2pm
RISD Museum, Grand Gallery
20 North Main Street, Providence
Admission is free
Directions here.