In Review: Castle of our Skins

Anyone expecting to hear Jazz-inflected late-Romantic lushness at the Brattleboro Music Center on Saturday night was in for a shock. That evening, members of Castle of our Skins — a Boston-based organization dedicated to uplifting Black artistry through education and performance — presented an evening of music anchored in the Great Migration, the period from roughly 1910 to 1970 that brought around 6,000,000 Black Americans from the US South to industrial cities of the North, radically reshaping the country’s social, political, and cultural life. Musically, the Great Migration is linked in popular memory to the burgeoning Jazz scene of the Harlem Renaissance and classical composers like Florence Price, but, as this past weekend showed, the Great Migration’s artistic legacy is rich and varied indeed.

The program opened with three works elided together into a seamless whole: Undine Smith Moore’s Before I’d be a Slave (1953), Charles Samuel Brown’s A Song Without Words (1974), and Shawn Okpebholo’s setting of the spiritual “Oh, Freedom” (2013), the first for piano alone and the rest for piano and baritone voice. Moore’s piece begins with heavy, low clusters — played with ferocious intensity by Sarah Bob — before opening out into a bruising landscape where phantasmagorical glimpses of comforting melodies can be caught only fleetingly between craggy masses of sound. Philip Lima, the baritone, had been seated in the audience at first, and started humming Brown’s vocalise from his chair before standing and making his way to the stage. It was an unexpected gesture that fit the piece’s subtly disorienting material — the work’s prevailing mood is gentle, but it’s a fragmented gentleness, shot through with dissonant pinpricks like slivers of ice in a frigid wind.

After an a cappella opening, Okpebholo’s setting brought back clusters like those in the Moore, assembling a rigid, uncompromising machine in the piano deliberately at odds with the expansive flexibility of the vocal line. At first, set against the lyrics’ repeated, ever-more-emphatic invocations of Freedom, these harsh interjections struck me as caustic jabs at the long American hypocrisy of trumpeting freedom while stripping it from millions as a matter of course, but by the work’s climax, they had transformed into a shattering insistence on being truly free at any cost, driven home with the furious determination of Nat Turner’s rebellion or General Sherman’s apocalyptic march to the sea.

After this, Trevor Weston’s Juba (2017) for string quartet^[1] took things in a more atmospheric direction. Full of languid harmonies and jittery musical gestures, the music often seemed to be melting between states, with trills slowing down into wide vibrato and performers sliding gradually from pitch to pitch. Throughout, the players often layered over each other in quick imitation, haloing the material like gnats swirling around each other on a hazy summer day. Though it had plenty of foot stomps and moments of raucous dance, it never lapsed into shallow pastiche; for all its swampy headiness, the work is laser focused and taut. (The musicians were in top form here, conjuring an entire vivid world while navigating the dense polyphony with balance and flair.) Carlos Simon’s Warmth of Other Suns (2019), also for string quartet, closed out the first half with sorrowful warmth, conjuring a place with little comfort except that it’s home.

The second half began with one of the most peculiar musical experiences I can remember. Adolphus Hailstork’s “Detroit” piano quintet (2018) is a four-movement tribute to that city, full of bustle, vigor, and motor-oil grit. That may make it sound picturesque, almost campy, but it’s something far stranger and more sublime. I’m used to hearing works that assemble sounds in unfamiliar ways, that build new languages with new sonic grammars arranging the usual musical words. Throughout the first three movements here, however, this was flipped on its head: the grammar all felt familiar, but I did not know the words — I could follow the musical reasoning without ever quite being able to pin down what was being reasoned about. I struggle to capture the strange wondrousness of it; the closest I can come is that hearing the first three movements had the sinuous disorientation of trying to read a novel in a dream.

This tension was resolved in the final movement, “Prayer” in a compositional coup of the first order. Cast from the simplest materials — an aching leap here, a gentle lilt there — the movement built to an expansive, cosmic vision of radiant transcendence that can rival anything in the literature, before drawing to a close with a well-earned, all-encompassing amen.

Okpebholo’s setting of “Great Day” for baritone and piano, from the same 2013 set as “Oh Freedom”, ended the evening on a high note, Lima pealing out thunderous prophecies of joy over Bob’s manic, scurrying piano filigree. In her pre-concert talk, Castle of our Skins co-founder and Artistic Director Ashleigh Gordon tied themes from these works and the Great Migration to the Declaration of Independence, explaining that this was their offering for the US’s 250^th year. In a moment when our national government is run by revanchist white supremacists, mere days after the segregationist majority of our highest court gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act, it can be tempting to tell a story of this country as fundamentally, unsalvageably white, just as it can be tempting to tell a story of classical music as an exclusively white affair. Saturday’s concert was a vital reminder that these stories go too far, erase too much. This, too, is classical music. This, too, is America.

In Brief

Personal affairs have curtailed some of my recent concert-going, but I still wanted to share two things recently that had tickled my ears since last time. First, there’s a delightful recording of Terry Riley’s groundbreaking minimalist work In C on traditional Irish instruments over on Bandcamp. I don’t know that I have anything particularly insightful to say about it, but it sure is a great deal of fun. And then over on YouTube, there’s the world-premiere performance of Julia Perry’s violin concerto. It’s perhaps a less polished recording than the Riley, but I’ve listened to it more times; Perry brings a structural inventiveness to bear in this work that manages to make the violin concerto form sound new — no mean feat given just how many of them there are!

In My Calendar

This set of listings is not comprehensive; it’s just what happens to be on my radar that I’m particularly excited about. If you are a performer, presenter, or publicist in the local classical music scene, please add me to your mailing list so I can keep an eye out for your offerings!

Entries marked with a ∅ are free and do not require advance registration.

• Ø May 7, 7:30pm: The UMass^[1] graduate wind quintet plays works from mostly the 20^th century. This was postponed from April 19, which just means I have a chance to hype it up again. I’m still looking forward to it!
• May 8–10, various times: The Hartford Symphony Orchestra pairs Anna Clyne’s Color Field with works by Mozart and Mendelssohn.
• Ø May 8, 7:30pm: Also at UMass (and with a livestream), the UMass Opera Studio presents a potpourri of scenes from larger works. Many are drawn from the standard repertoire, but there are a few unexpected selections mixed in for good measure.
• May 9, 3:00pm: Glimmerglass brings their production of Happy End to the Clark museum in Williamstown. Glimmerglass’s home base is over in upstate New York, so this is a fabulous chance to catch Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht’s dark satire a little closer to home.
• May 9, 7:00pm: Just across the state line, Brattleboro’s Epsilon Spires presents Meredith Monk’s Book of Days. Monk is one of those endlessly inventive artists who defy tidy categorization; Book of Days meditates on plague, war, and the end of the world — all as close to home today as they were when it premiered in 1988.
• May 17, 4:00pm: The Ulysses String Quartet comes to The Drake in downtown Amherst. The Drake website doesn’t list their repertoire, but the quartet’s promises a mix of standard repertoire, Danish folk arrangements, and contemporary American works.
• May 17, 4:00pm: The Illumine vocal arts ensemble presents Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil along with two works by a contemporary of Rachmaninov that take advantage of having an extra-low bass voice available to show off. Expect profundity, quite literally!