A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, January 2, 2021
Jonathan Bailey Holland (b. 1974) : Outstanding, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, conductor producer, and teacher
A native of Flint, MI, composer Jonathan Bailey Holland’s works have been commissioned and performed by orchestras and chamber ensembles across America. Most recently, he served as Composer-In-Residence with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra—the first composer to serve that role with the orchestra. Highlights of recent seasons include a commission by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum inspired by John Singer Sargent’s dance-inspired painting, “El Jaleo”; and the premiere of his orchestration of songs by Charles Ives with mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. Other recent and upcoming performances will feature the Aeolus Quartet with the Arx Duo, Hotel Elefant, the Neave Trio, and more.
Other notable highlights from recent seasons include the premiere of his work Ode by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, his fifth work for the orchestra, following the initial commission in 2003 of Halcyon Sun, written to celebrate the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center; the release of Synchrony, a powerful classical music statement on Black Lives Matter on Radius Ensemble’s Fresh Paint CD; the commission of Equality for narrator and orchestra by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra featuring the poetry of Maya Angelou with narration by actor Regina Taylor and rapper/actor Common; and the premiere of Forged Sanctuaries by Curtis on Tour, commissioned to commemorate the centennial of National Park Service. His piece Clarity of Cold Air has been performed on tour this past season by Eighth Blackbird.
A winner of a Mass Cultural Council artist fellowship, Holland is also a recipient of a Fromm Foundation Commission at Harvard University. He has received honors from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, American Music Center, ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, and more. He has served as Composer-in-Residence for the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota (currently Vocal Essence); Ritz Chamber Players; Detroit and South Bend Symphony Orchestras; and the Radius Ensemble. His music has been recorded by Cincinnati Symphony, the University of Texas Trombone Choir trumpeter Jack Sutte; and flutist Christopher Chaffee, pianist Sarah Bob, and more. His work Rebounds will be featured on Transient Canvas’s upcoming release “Right now, in a second”.
His works have been commissioned and performed by numerous ensembles across America, including the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, among others. During the 20/21 season his music will be performances and streamed by Hotel Elefant, Tribeca New Music Festival, the Neave Trio, New World Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Oberlin Sinfonietta and Contemporary Music Ensemble, Radius Ensemble, and more. In addition his work has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today, and on Rob McClure’s podcast Lexical Tones. . Holland earned a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University and studied composition with Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute of Music. He is Chair of Composition, Contemporary Music, and Core Studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Founding Faculty of the Music Composition program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Jonathan Bailey Holland joined the Conservatory in 2014 and is chair of composition, contemporary music, and core studies.
Holland's works have been commissioned and performed by numerous
orchestras, including the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland,
Columbus, Colorado, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Memphis, Minnesota,
National, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Springfield, St. Louis, and South
Bend Symphony orchestras, as well as the Auros Group for New Music, Left
Coast Chamber Ensemble, Transient Canvas, Boston Opera Collaborative,
Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies,
Greater Baltimore Youth Orchestra, Orchestra 2001, and many others. A
recipient of a 2015 Fromm Foundation commission, he has received honors
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Music Center,
ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, and other institutions.
Holland has served as composer-in-residence for the Plymouth Music
Series of Minnesota (Vocal Essence), Ritz Chamber Players, Detroit and
South Bend symphony orchestras, and the Radius Ensemble. His music has
been recorded by the Cincinnati Symphony, the University of Texas
Trombone Choir, trumpeter Jack Sutte, and flutist Christopher Chaffee.
Upcoming recording releases are scheduled by the Radius Ensemble and
pianist Sarah Bob. Recent highlights include the premiere of Equality
for narrator and orchestra with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra,
based on poetry by Maya Angelou, and premieres by Transient Canvas, the
Radius Ensemble, and Curtis on Tour in celebration of the centennial of
the National Park Service.
Holland received his B.M. from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he
studied composition with Ned Rorem. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard
University, where he studied with Bernard Rands, Mario Davidovsky,
Andrew Imbrie, and Yehudi Wyner. He is also a founding faculty member in
the music composition program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has
served as professor of composition at Berklee College of Music.
Professional Awards and Recognitions
Fromm Foundation commission (2015)
Music Artist Fellowship grant, Somerville Arts Council (2006)
Winner, Marian K. Glick Young Composer’s Showcase, Indianapolis Symphony (1997, 1999)
Charles Ives scholarship, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994)
Third Prize, Boston Conservatory Young Composers Competition (1992)
“[The arts] are a place where we reflect the world around
us, and it's the one place that anybody can do that, honestly and,
hopefully, in an uncensored way.” –Jonathan Bailey Holland
Jonathan Bailey Hollandmay be known as a classical composer but he's been influenced by
everyone from NEA Jazz Master Wynton Marsalis to legendary rap group Run
DMC to 70s rock stalwarts Chicago. A native of Flint, Michigan,
Holland has received commissions from the National Symphony, the Detroit
Symphony, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, to name just a few orchestras.
He has written a ballet (for the Dallas Symphony and the Dallas Black
Dance Theater) and musically mused on everything from Chicago's storied
architecture to the history of the Underground Railroad. Holland holds
degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and Harvard University, and
he teaches at the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston. Holland
has commissions upcoming from the Cincinnati Symphony and Left Coast
Ensemble and most recently he's completed a work for orchestra, titled Elegy for Humanity,
written, he explains,"partly in response to all the injustices and
atrocities we continue to hear about in the news these days." We spoke with Holland via telephone about inspiration, failure, and his 2015 cultural resolutions.
NEA: What was your road to becoming a composer?
JONATHAN BAILEY HOLLAND: There was always music at
home when I was a kid, and I often talk about my dad's eclectic record
collection, where he had everything from Lou Rawls to Nat Adderley to
Miles Davis to Bootsy Collins to Handel's Fireworks. I always
remember getting excited when I would listen to his records, and my mom
also played piano just for her own enjoyment…. As a little kid, I would
always sit at the piano and kind of make up songs, and then I eventually
started taking instrument lessons, piano lessons, and trumpet lessons….
I ended up going to Interlochen Arts Academy for high school, which was
great, and started doing some composition while I was there, and this
was a kickoff for me, and I’ve just been going since.
NEA: If you think of the world of composers as a family tree, who do you see as your ancestors, and why?
HOLLAND: It's hard for me to really say that I feel
like I'm connected to any particular school of thought or any line or
composer. I think I've always been open stylistically [in terms of]
different pieces that I write. I would say that popular music influences
are just as important to me as classical music influences. Growing up
listening to jazz--Wynton Marsalis was a big idol of mine, both as a
performer and as a composer. But then, there was also groups like
Run-DMC or people like Phil Collins or groups like Chicago. I mean,
like, just all around everywhere, in general, anything that spoke to me.
It didn't really matter what the style of music was; I just wanted to
listen and enjoy it.
NEA:Is there any one piece of music or pieces that you find yourself going back to because they continue to inspire you?
HOLLAND: I often mention Appalachian Spring as
being one of my earliest memories of listening to a piece and really
just sort of… falling into a labyrinth of sound. Like hearing form and
hearing orchestration and hearing motivic development and all the kind
of elements that go into writing, and just listening to that piece over
and over again and kind of Copland general. I think a lot of that is, I
wouldn't say transparent, but it's worth repeated listening. I think
that spoke to me a lot right away. Music I go back to often? I mean,
Bach's keyboard music, like the English Suites. Miles Davis, the Porgy and Bess
album is one I go back to often, and recently, I was listening to it,
and realized a lot of how I think about orchestration is often
influenced by the tracks on that album.
NEA:One thing I'm always fascinated by is that
for many artists there seems to be a set of questions they're
perpetually pursuing or a narrative they're exploring, no matter the
specific piece they’re working on. How does that apply to your work?
HOLLAND: For me, I feel like every piece is a separate
entity from any other piece. I think that often, for instance, I'll
write a piece that's based on a work of visual art, and in those
instances, I think each time that I do it, I'm trying to find a point
where the art forms differ. Where are they the same and where do they
differ? How is my conception of color and a visual artist's conception
of color similar, and at what point does it change? Is it always
different because of the medium that we work in or is there a point
where we see it the same, but then when it comes to realizing that
color, visually or sonically, does our thinking then change? And the
idea of a visual piece of art that's there, versus music that has to
evolve over time, I think that's something that I think about often.
Just the idea of narratives is something that I come back to often. If
I'm listening to something, you have to go somewhere, in a sense, or
feel that there is something that has been developed or that you
experienced something. You do have to think about the linear aspect of
[the composition] and the idea of the narrative--is it a literal
narrative or is there a different way to achieve that sense of being
transported through time? And the sort of elasticity of time that exists
in music? I think those are probably the primary issues that I grapple
with. I think a lot about color, I think about just evolving over time,
just pacing, and form, and the evolution of sounds.
NEA:Can you talk a little bit about your process for composing?
HOLLAND: I don't feel like I have a necessarily set
process. Often I will maybe have a sound in mind, and then have to
figure out how to craft a piece out of that sound. Other times, I think
it might just be a concept, and I know I want to get from "A" to "B,"
and then just figuring out how does that happen, and "A" and "B" may not
be really clearly defined in my mind. Sometimes it may also be in other
pieces where I'll have an influence from maybe a different genre of
music, and so the challenge becomes how do I translate something that
might be more jazz-inspired or [rhythm and blues]-inspired? Sometimes
popular music inspires how I translate that into a "classical work"
without sacrificing either the genre [or] cheapening the music, but
making it feel as though it's a classical piece. But I think every piece
is different. Every time I start out to write something, there's a
different set of parameters, especially if it's commissioned, around
what the project is, what's involved, what the forces are that are going
to be performing it, and inevitably, all those ingredients go together
to suggest an idea at some point.
NEA:Making a work of art is trial and error,
and hopefully, eventually, getting to the place of success, whatever
that might mean for that particular work. Can you please talk about the
role of failure in your work?
HOLLAND: If I think about failure in composing, the
first thought that comes to mind is failing to actually finish a piece,
failing to meet a deadline. I think that stresses me out more than the
idea of failing in a work of art. I remember hearing a quote somewhere
about the fact that as a composer you're always ready to write the next
piece, or the reason you write the next piece is that you didn't quite
say what you wanted to say with the last piece. Or you keep thinking of a
way to say what you were trying say better in the next piece. If you
apply failure to that I don't feel like failure is necessarily a
negative thing. I don't think about failure. I think more about “fail
until you complete an idea.” There's a failure to take advantage of
opportunity. I think that that happens often, like say you're writing a
piece for violin and piano, and by failing to take advantage of the
opportunity, I mean, if you get so engulfed in the music that you're not
actually thinking about who it is that you're writing for, and taking
advantages of the sound of the piano, the sound of the violin, the
things that they can do together, the things they can bounce off of each
other. I mean, it's failing to fully embrace a particular project
that's the failure that I think about the most if I'm thinking about
failing.
NEA: Who’s a composer that you don't think enough people know
about and should listen to? And what would you recommend we listen to?
HOLLAND: I think of composers like Samuel Barber, the
vocal music, I don't know that people aren't listening to him, but I
think people should listen to more Barber vocal music. When I was a
student [at] the music library at the school I went to, you could look
through the records on the shelves, and you could go to the library and
flip through records and discover people you hadn’t heard of before.
Just say, "I'm going to pick a composer that I don't know anything about
and listen to this piece." Or you go to a CD store and flip through the
rack and just hang out in the classical annex for just endless new
stuff to discover. And nowadays there isn't any of that.
To a certain degree, everybody needs to listen to everything, because
nobody knows what they're supposed to listen to. You can go to Spotify
and hit "Discover," but it's not going to get too deep and too anything
that's not the top selling, top grossing thing, or really closely
related to what you're already listening to. So I think that,
unfortunately, nobody listens to much outside of what they're directed
to listen to. Because there's no way to kind of discover things anymore,
which I think is kind of sad, and I'm hoping that somehow the next
thing helps to reverse that trend, but I doubt that there will be that.
Especially, in the world of music there's no tangible object for you
anymore. You don't have CDs. You don't have records. When you buy music,
no money exchanges hands. All you do is click a few buttons and have
some music that you can carry around with you all day. I don't know
where the value lies and there's also no ability to find new things
because there's no new actual thing to find. So I think it's a strange
time in terms of listening to music.
NEA:Finish the sentence: The arts matter because....
HOLLAND: Because they are a place where we reflect the
world around us, and it's the one place that anybody can do that,
honestly and, hopefully, in an uncensored way.
NEA:We’ve just started a new year. Any cultural resolutions for 2015?
HOLLAND: I'd like to make more time to make art, and [I
hope for], in terms of arts funding, more focus on time for artists to
create art, funding just directed not necessarily toward specific
projects [but] just allowing artists to be artists, which is harder and
harder to do. I’m an acoustic composers, but there are
electro-acoustic composers, and electronic composers. I've always had an
interest in electronic music and I'm familiar with some electronic
music, but I guess it's partly the time to learn the technology that I
haven't had or taken. I always feel like I should be writing something
as opposed to learning about the technology, but I'd like to explore
that. Not necessarily because I want to write electronic music, but
rather explore the sound world and the way that you think about sounds
when you're generating them completely from scratch. That's something I
would like to tackle sometime in the future.
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Jonathan Bailey Holland. Photograph by Robert Torres
One morning
in the spring of 2015, the composer Jonathan Bailey Holland, Ph.D. ’00,
was riding the bus to Boston’s Berklee College of Music (now the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, where
he’s chair of composition, contemporary music, and core studies). He
had recently been commissioned to write a new work for the Radius Ensemble,
a local chamber group, and ideas for the piece tumbled through his
mind. Also weighing heavily on him was the crescendo of news stories
about police brutality against African Americans. Holland had challenged
himself to watch the bystander and dash-cam videos of some of these
events in their entirety. Bent over his phone, playing footage of Eric
Garner’s last moments on a Staten Island sidewalk, Holland eventually
had to stop and look up. “The visceral quality of it…,” he recalls.
“It’s difficult to take in.”
With each repeat view and each new
tragedy in the headlines, he felt increasingly entangled. “Simply
because of who I am and what I look like, I could easily be on the other
side of these stories,” he continues. “Suddenly the music couldn’t be
about anything but that psychological space.”
The resulting work,
“Synchrony,” explores the idea of duality, or two realities existing at
once—for example, the Black Lives Matter movement taking shape during
the country’s first black presidency, when “the notion of a post-racial
America was thrown around,” says Holland. The score is written for
violin, cello, oboe, bassoon, and piano—an unusual combination but
beautiful in its symmetry, says Jennifer Montbach ’95, Radius Ensemble’s
artistic director. “There are two stringed instruments and two double
reeds. Plus, with the similar ranges of oboe and violin, cello and
bassoon, you have two pairs of instruments that cover an entire timbral
range, top to bottom. Piano is the anchor.” The piece opens with the
gentle tonal sounds of the double reeds, and the music builds almost
ceremonially as the others join in. Throughout, Holland expresses
duality through musical devices: call and response, repetition,
dissonance, instrumentation, and so-called “extended
techniques”—unconventional ways of using an instrument.
Holland
decided to add documentary voices to underscore the idea of
juxtaposition—of hope and despair, harmony and discord. About two
minutes in, President Obama’s voice intones over the music, “We, the
people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of
security and dignity.” From there the score becomes fraught with
tension, and Eric Garner is heard repeating “I can’t breathe” through
the chokehold of a New York City police officer. “There’s a very
specific rhythm to how he says it, so I had the musicians pick up on the
rhythm, which they keep up even after the audio clip ends,” Holland
explains. The oboist and bassoonist remove their reeds and breathe into
their instruments in that same pattern; the pianist reaches into the
instrument to dampen the strings, hammering out the rhythm to produce a
dull, percussive sound without pitch. These extended techniques create a
sound that’s both percussive and breathy, like the wheeze and punch
patterns of a hospital respirator.
Then comes a second set of voices.
First, actress Cicely Tyson is heard addressing the young women in the
audience of the Black Girls Rock awards ceremony: “The moment anyone
tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great
you are. No one is going to bother to put you down if you are not a
threat to them.” Her words are countered by audio from the dash-cam
footage of the arrest of Sandra Bland. The instruments respond with
gnashing sounds, and the piece ultimately closes in a decrescendo of
dissonant whole notes. This unresolved conclusion represents Holland’s
view of the national conversation about race.
Reacting to the world around him in this way is one of the artist’s responsibilities, he says, but it’s also impossible for him not
to. “Dream Elegy,” a somber orchestral piece that he wrote around the
same time as “Synchrony,” came from a similar psychological space,
sparked by the senseless deaths of Tamir Rice and Michael Brown. “I had
to write [it] as a meditation,” he says, “as a way of using my art to
work through the weight of all of those events.”
Holland, who grew
up in Flint, Michigan, and earned his bachelor’s at the Curtis
Institute of Music and his Harvard doctorate in composition, didn’t take
this approach from the outset. Early in his career, he had hang-ups
about “who I was supposed to be as a classical composer,” he says. “I
didn’t want people to expect a certain kind of music because I’m a black
composer, I wanted people to come to my music without any preconceived
ideas about what the music was going to be.” At some point, he stopped
worrying about how to manage audience perceptions. Soon after this
realization, he completed a 2003 commission for the Detroit Symphony
Orchestra, influenced by Motown, R&B, soul, and other popular music
genres he’d always listened to. It was, he thinks, the first time he
consciously decided to let that side of him come out clearly in his
music. He wrote what felt true.
Today, Holland tries to convey the
same message to his composition students: “If I’m not telling you who I
am in a genuine way, I’m not sure why you’d want to listen to what I
have to say,” he reasons. Without that, he says, “Who cares what I’m
writing?”
This story was edited on January 3, 2018, to clarify the name of the institution where Holland teaches.
A native of Flint, MI, composer Jonathan Bailey Holland’s works
have been commissioned and performed by orchestras and chamber ensembles
across America. Most recently, he served as the Composer-In-Residence
of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for the 2018-19 season—the first
composer to serve that role with that orchestra. Highlights of his
2019-20 season include a commission by the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum inspired by John Singer Sargent’s dance-inspired painting, “El
Jaleo.” He will be featured on the American Composers Orchestra season
at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall where he will orchestrate two Charles
Ives songs to be sung by mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton. The Aeolus Quartet
and the Arx Duo premiere his latest work, Third Quartet, for string
quartet and percussion duo. Boston Opera Collaborative will delve into
an evening of Holland’s works; the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival
performs His House is Not of This Land as part of the Gamper Festival of
Contemporary Music; and his music will appear on the Juventas New Music
Ensemble season.
Other notable highlights from recent seasons include the premiere of his work Ode by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, his fifth work for the orchestra, following the initial commission in 2003 of Halcyon Sun, written to celebrate the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center; the release of Synchrony, a powerful classical music statement on Black Lives Matter on Radius Ensemble’s FreshPaint CD; the commission of Equality for narrator and orchestra by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra featuring the poetry of Maya Angelou with narration by actor Regina Taylor and rapper/actor Common; and the premiere of Forged Sanctuaries by Curtis on Tour, commissioned to commemorate the centennial of National Park Service. His piece Clarity of Cold Air has been performed on tour this past season by Eighth Blackbird.
A winner of a Mass Cultural Council 2019 artist fellowship, Holland is also a recipient of a 2015 Fromm Foundation Commission at Harvard University. He has received honors from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, American Music Center, ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, and more. He has served as Composer-in-Residence for the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota (currently Vocal Essence); RitzChamber Players; Detroit and South Bend Symphony Orchestras; and the Radius Ensemble. His music has been recorded by the Cincinnati Symphony; the University of Texas Trombone Choir; trumpeter Jack Sutte; flutist Christopher Chaffee: and most recently pianist Sarah Bob, on her debut solo CD “…nobody move…”.
His works have been performed by symphony orchestras across America, and he has been commissioned by the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, among others. Future collaborations and performances are scheduled by the Arx Duo, Buffalo Philharmonic, Concord Chorus, Chicago Modern Orchestra Project, and Eighth Blackbird, and more.
Holland earned a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University and studied composition with Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute of Music. He is Chair of Composition, Contemporary Music, and Core Studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and former Co-Chair of the Music Composition program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Halcyon Sun, Movement 2
An orchestral work based on the underground railroad and sunlight.
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Synchrony
This work, written for the Radius Ensemble, is about duality,
simultaneity, and living in the age of the first African American
President juxtaposed with the need for the Black Lives Matter campaign.
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Ode for Chorus and Orchestra – Movement 1: The Anticipation
Commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Ode was
meant to precede Beethoven’s 9th symphony. It begins with the orchestra
emerging from the sound of the chorus, and presents music that is
introspective while also alluding to some of the motives we hear in
Beethoven’s epitomic opus.
Jonathan
Bailey Holland's "Synchrony" mixes classical music with sound from
viral videos related to violence involving unarmed African Americans and
the police. (Courtesy Robert Torres)This article is more than 4 years old.
This year has been prolific and emotional for a local contemporary composer named Jonathan Bailey Holland.
Just
this fall, the 42-year-old premiered not one, but two works — a
marimba/violin duet and a 10-minute opera. But another one of Holland's
accomplishments is the recorded release of his heartfelt response to
issues of racial injustice in the United States. He's been grappling
with the ongoing social unrest that's come in the wake of police
violence against unarmed African-Americans, and it's caused him to
reflect on his own identity as a minority in the classical music world.
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The composer has wrapped his conflicting feelings into a compact, complex and compelling chamber piece called "Synchrony."
'That Could Be Me'
Holland
remembers exactly how he felt at his home in Arlington as the riots in
Baltimore led the news in the wake of Freddie Gray's death in 2015.
"All
of that really affected me, watching it on TV, and feeling this strange
disconnect of 'that could be me' in that situation," he recalled. "But
also feeling like I'm not in that situation, and that I'm many hundreds
of miles away from Baltimore and all of the emotions that were going on
in the city up close with all of that at the time."
That profound
pull drove him to create. For him he says, "The whole idea of
'Synchrony' is about two things happening at the same time."
Holland and pianist Sarah Bob after their first reading of "Synchrony." (Andrea Shea/WBUR)
The
piece channels what Holland felt while witnessing the spate of
disturbing, now notorious, altercations, including the viral video that
captured a white police officer forcibly holding down a young black girl
at a Texas pool party.
"I'm
watching that and the emotion just comes up immediately. I wanted
somehow to convey that sensation in the piece," Holland told me. "So I
ended up including some audio clips that didn't need a lot of
introduction."
You can hear optimistic
words from President Obama and actress Cicely Tyson. But also sounds
from the brutal arrest tapes of Eric Garner gasping for air, and Sandra
Bland confronting police as she sits in her pulled over car.
"The
contrast is really what he's trying to underscore," said Jen Montbach, a
founding member of the local Radius Ensemble, which commissioned
Holland's piece. "Synchrony" is one of the new works on the group's
recording, "Fresh Paint."
"The
thing that I love about the piece is that he explores racial justice
not just from its negative perspective, but also from its positive
perspective," Montbach continued, citing the empowering excerpt from Tyson's speech at an award ceremony hosted by the Black Girls Rock organization.
Holland
conjures tension musically, too, with Montbach's oboe in
combination with bassoon, violin, cello and piano. The instruments play
off each other — repeating, imitating and responding — to represent the
shifting duality between race relations, class relations, morality and
emotion.
"Sometimes we're
even asked to produce unpleasant sounds," Montbach said. "That's hard
to do when you spend a lot of your training trying to make the most
beautiful sounds. But sometimes — especially in contemporary music —
we're looking to explore the full expressive range of our instruments
and it isn't always pleasant."
Radius Ensemble performed "Synchrony" on their latest album “Fresh Paint." (Courtesy)
Holland acknowledges it's
not easy to relive the fraught events he's documenting in "Synchrony."
But he has hopes for people who choose to spend seven and half minutes
listening to it.
"I want
people to sit through all of the clips," he told me, "and whatever way
they personally react to be able to have the space to do that."
Holland
says he lives with his own duality each day as an African-American
classical composer. He grew up in Flint, Michigan, listening to his
father's vast record collection that included everything from Handel to
John Coltrane to the Doobie Brothers, Bootsy Collins and Lou Rawls.
Holland was also a fan of hip-hop. He studied trumpet, his mom played
piano and his parents took him to see the Flint Symphony Orchestra. In
the '80s, it was led by the pioneering African-American conductor Isaiah
Jackson.
"In the Flint I
experienced, there was a mix of people doing all kinds of things,"
Holland recalled. "I felt like I saw people in prominent roles that were
as diverse as you would want them to be."
That wasn't the case when Holland went on to pursue a career in classical music. Early on he rejected being labeled.
"I
felt like I didn't want there to be any adjective in front of the word
composer because I had to make a mark as a composer first and foremost,"
he said. "I thought it to the point that I wanted to make sure that
nothing in my music would've suggested anything about who I was."
A
lack of diversity has been an enduring problem across the classical
music world. At a certain point Holland says he had a realization that
his job as an artist is to be honest about how his background influences
his art and about who he is.
"I
am African-American and I am a composer," he stated emphatically from
behind his rounded glasses, "And if that means something to someone
that's great. I'm a classical composer and if that means someone that's
great. If none of that means anything but somebody still gets something
from the music that's great as well."
The Impact Of 'Synchrony'
Since
2014 Holland has been chair of the Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s
composition, theory and history department where he's been sharing his
genre-crossing approach to making contemporary classical music with
students.
Post-grad Joshua Jandreau recalls turning to his teacher for help with incorporating voices into one of his music projects.
"Across
the board artists are feeling a need to respond somehow to everything
that's going on," Bailey says, "either to reflect it, or to comment on
it or to make it more present." (Courtesy Robert Torres)
"As
a solution to my particular problem he suggested I gotta listen to
Biggie Smalls and transcribe the rap so I could get a better sense of
the flow," Jandreau said. "It helped reinforce this idea of looking
outside of the 'classical' bubble and to look at all the resources as a
means for figuring out what you need to do."
In
recent years Holland has received commissions from organizations
including the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati Symphony
Orchestra.
Looking back on "Synchrony," Holland says he felt like writing it was his responsibility.
"Across
the board artists are feeling a need to respond somehow to everything
that's going on — either to reflect it, or to comment on it, or to make
it more present."
Or, Holland added, to "confront" the discord — somehow.
Boston Opera Collaborative To Present 3 Operas By Jonathan Bailey Holland
The Boston Opera Collaborative will showcase a number of one-act
operas by Boston-based composer Jonathan Bailey Holland on Nov. 7, 2019
at the Room&Board Boston Showroom.
The one-night event will show “Naomi in the Living Room,” “The Battle
of Bull Run Always Makes Me Cry,” and “Always,” with a number of
artists including Britt Brown, Junhan Choi, Lindsay Conroy, Carley
DeFranco, Ethan DePuy, Carina DiGianFilippo, Alyssa Hensel, Wes Hunter,
Rebecca Krouner, and Tamara Ryan.
The works will be directed by Greg Smucker and Patricia-Maria
Weinmann with Jean Anderson Collier and Patricia Au as music directors.
“We are incredibly excited about presenting these fabulous operas in a
stylish, cool venue on Newbury Street,” stated co-artistic director
Patricia-Maria Weinmann in a press release. “Audiences will be delighted
to luxuriate in the surroundings and warm hospitality of the beautiful
Room and Board showroom while enjoying appetizers and wine. A perfect
combination of comfort, style and sheer fun.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Prior
to creating OperaWire, DAVID SALAZAR, (Editor-in-Chief) worked as a
reporter for Latin Post where he interviewed major opera stars including
Placido Domingo, Anna Netrebko, Vittorio Grigolo, Diana Damrau and
Rolando Villazon among others. His 2014 interview with opera star
Kristine Opolais was cited in a New York Times Review.
He also had the opportunity of interviewing numerous Oscar nominees,
Golden Globe winners and film industry giants such as Guillermo del
Toro, Oscar Isaac and John Leguizamo among others.
David holds a Masters in Media Management from Fordham University.
During his time at Fordham, he studied abroad at the Jagiellonian
University in Poland. He also holds a dual bachelor’s from Hofstra
University in Film Production and Journalism.
The
International Contemporary Ensemble performing the music of Beethoven
and the composer and scholar George Lewis at the 2013 Mostly Mozart
Festival.Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
by William Robin
“We’ve been invisible,” the composer T. J. Anderson
declared, almost immediately after answering the phone for an
interview. “Like Ralph Ellison said, you know: We’re invisible, and any
chance we get for exposure is very important.” Ellison, who in his youth
aspired to be a composer before turning to literature, might have
sympathized with Dr. Anderson’s plight.
At
85, Dr. Anderson is an elder statesman among black composers, and his
forceful emphasis on visibility emanates from a career-long experience
of exclusion. “It’s inevitable, once you are identified — and you always
are identified because of race — there’s a certain different
expectation,” he said. “You know that you’re not going to be
commissioned by the major artistic institutions like the New York
Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.”
Why
do black composers remain on the outskirts of classical music? Along
with broader societal prejudices, there are also factors exclusive to
the classical world. Past musicians like James P. Johnson and Duke
Ellington, who wrote symphonic works alongside playing stride piano and
leading a big band, are typically confined to the jazz canon. Black
composers have been criticized in both African-American and white
intellectual circles for refusing to embrace mainstream commercial
trends. The influence of African-Americans on the orchestral tradition
is represented more often by Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” than William
Grant Still’s “Afro-American” Symphony.
And African-American music is often relegated to special events outside
the main classical season, like Black History Month concerts or Martin
Luther King Jr. Day celebrations.
Mr. Lewis. Credit: AllisonGannon/Oberlin Conservatory
Dr. Anderson once noted that all black composers were avant-garde because of their ostracism from the establishment. In his music — which can be heard on releases by New World Records and Albany Records
— jazz and spirituals undergird a steely modernist language.
“Fragments,” a 2006 concerto dedicated to Bach and Thelonious Monk,
features an improvised piano solo. In the wind trio “Whatever Happened
to the Big Bands?” each instrument plays independent music — the
musicians sit as far apart as possible — that orbits around the riffs of
the swing era.
During
the interview, Dr. Anderson invoked the harsh legacy of segregation as
continuing to divide the concert hall. But younger composers like Jonathan Bailey Holland
don’t necessarily share his vigilance. A professor at the Berklee
College of Music, Dr. Holland, 40, writes bright music in a
post-Copland, Americana tradition. Race is not central to his musical
identity. “As an African-American, I have certain experiences that
shaped who I am, and that I draw on as a composer,” he said in a recent
phone conversation, but added, “I also have experiences growing up in
Michigan that shaped who I am as a composer.”
Expectations
about how an African-American composer should sound felt confining at
the beginning of Dr. Holland’s career. “I really didn’t want to be
thought of as a black composer, because I felt like people were going to
pigeonhole me or have certain expectations when it came to the music,”
he said. “I would make conscious efforts to not include anything in the
music that might have any connection to black music, or might somehow
suggest something about who I was, which in and of itself is completely
not the point of being an artist.”
The composer and professor Jonathan Bailey Holland. Credit: Sancho Maulion
In March, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performed Dr. Holland’s “Shards of Serenity”
as part of the New Music Readings for African-American Composers, an
initiative organized by the American Composers Orchestra program EarShot.
A languid, shimmering tone poem, “Shards of Serenity” is Dr. Holland’s
tribute to a Mies van der Rohe building. “I’ve always responded to
visual ideas,” he said. His similarly radiant “Halcyon Sun” is available
on a 2011 “American Portraits” album by the Cincinnati Symphony.
Since the Detroit Symphony began its Classical Roots
series in 1978, it has advocated for African-American composers, a
stance maintained under its music director, Leonard Slatkin. In a phone
interview, Mr. Slatkin said that Dr. Holland showed “great talent.” He
stressed that though the readings were helpful, no single program was
more important for fostering diversity than a broader emphasis on arts
education. Mr. Slatkin also hesitated to oversell the wider effect of
promoting black composers. He asked: “Is going to hear music written by
an African-American meaningful — not just to the regular attendees, but
is it meaningful within the African-American community? Does it inspire
others to want to follow that? I wish I could answer that question. I
don’t know.”
That
skepticism about long-term ramifications is exemplified in Dr.
Holland’s own history with the orchestra. Nearly 20 years ago, he took
part in a similar Detroit program for African-American composers. “It
left me wondering: ‘Is this really the right answer? Are we still
waiting for something to happen that’s not going to happen?’ ” he said.
“It felt a little like being stuck in time.” Though he expressed
ambivalence about writing music for select events for black composers,
he also acknowledged the rarity of any orchestral opportunity
Leonard Slatkin with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Detroit Children’s Choir. Credit: Ron Warren
Major
orchestras, of course, are just one avenue for African-American
composition. Black classical music finds its strongest support in
nonprofits like the Sphinx Organization and Videmus.
These institutions hark back to ensembles like James Reese Europe’s
all-black Clef Club Orchestra, which performed at Carnegie Hall in 1912,
or the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,
an experimental collective founded in 1965. Though the association is
more often linked with free jazz, the co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams
noted the importance of composition, itself a radical idea for
African-American improvisers at the time.
The composer and scholar George Lewis told the story of the association in his monumental 2008 study “A Power Stronger Than Itself.”
A longtime member of the collective — known as a trombonist and for his
groundbreaking work in electronics — Mr. Lewis also documented the
history of how black composers have been excluded from experimental
music.
He cited a panel in London in
which he palpably felt that racial rift. “They had these ready-made
lineages all made up,” he said with a laugh. “They had a black one for
me, and they had a white one for the white guy on the panel. So it was
like, ‘Well, wait a minute.’ They were very offended when I didn’t put
on the suit that didn’t really fit.” A white composer had spoken about
the influence of R&B on his own music, Mr. Lewis said, and “it
occurred to me that he knew a lot more about Bo Diddley than I did. Why
couldn’t that be a part of his lineage, and why couldn’t Andriessen be a
part of mine?”
Mr.
Lewis’s career has gotten a second wind recently, with commissions by
youthful groups like the International Contemporary Ensemble. His latest
work is “Memex” for orchestra,
based on a proto-Internet information system theorized in 1945. “The
thing about the memex is that associational memory is nonlinear,” Mr.
Lewis said. “You don’t make these changes from A to B to C. It’s more
like you can go from anywhere to anywhere.”
“Memex” is a dense masterwork, alternately skittish and pummeling. Mr. Lewis’s latest music is available on Soundcloud.
“If
there is a definition of an African-American composer, there isn’t a
single profile, there isn’t a single mold,” Mr. Lewis said. “If you look
at Tyshawn Sorey, or Daniel Roumain, or if you look at Jessie Montgomery — younger people — these are three very different models of what it means to be a composer.”
T. J. Anderson, an elder statesman among black composers. Credit: Clyde May
“There’s just no way to make a generalization based on African-American-ness,” he added. “It’s not a category that works.”
There
was a time in classical music when black composers seemed on the cusp
of the mainstream. In the 1930s, pioneers like Still and William Dawson
wrote symphonies inflected by folk tunes and the blues that were given
their premieres by prominent American orchestras. Alain Locke, the
spiritual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in 1936 that “the
Negro has been the main source of America’s popular music, and promises,
as we shall see, to become one of the main sources of America’s serious
or classical music, at least that part which strives to be natively
American and not derivative of European types of music.”
No
composer of this era was more impressive than Florence Price, the first
black woman to have a work played by a major American orchestra. Price
grew up in the Jim Crow South, divorced an abusive husband and had her
first symphony performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her Symphony in E minor — available on an Albany recording — is a silvery, post-Romantic work that should be a cornerstone of the American repertory.
At
the height of her career, Price tried to convince Serge Koussevitzky —
conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra — to program her music. “To
begin with,” she wrote in a 1943 letter, “I have two handicaps — those
of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. I
should like to be judged on merit alone.”
The Boston Symphony has yet to play a note of her music.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 10, 2014, Section AR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Great Divide at the Concert Hall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper |
Composer and educator Jonathan Bailey Holland, a mainstay of the contemporary music scene in Boston, will be the local site host when New Music Gathering comes to Boston Conservatory at Berklee,
May 17 through 19, 2018. Jonathan’s composition career began at
Interlochen, then wound its way through studies with Ned Rorem at
Curtis, and on to a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard, where his teachers were
Bernard Rands and Mario Davidovsky. Jonathan is Chair of Composition,
Theory, and History at Boston Conservatory. His recent works have been
commissioned by Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Radius Ensemble, Dallas
Symphony/Dallas Black Dance Theater, and many others. We caught up with
Jonathan to find out about #NMG2018 coming to Boston and more.
How did you arrange to bring NMG to Boston Conservatory?
Nearly a year and a half ago, I began speaking with Dan Felsenfeld (a co-founder of NMG) about the possibility of bringing the New Music Gathering
to Boston, and specifically to Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Knowing
that part of the premise of the NMG is to highlight new music happening
in various parts of the country, I wanted to showcase what’s happening
in Boston. Dan and I were both graduate students in the Boston area, so I
knew he was aware of the vibrant new music community here. It was easy
to convince him that this was a great location to present the event.
Hosting NMG felt like the best way to bring broader attention to the
abundance of activity in the Boston music community. Boston
Conservatory at Berklee is also very much committed to promoting
contemporary music, which makes it an ideal institution to host this
event.
What will be the focus of the NMG panel you’re moderating?
The panel is called “Finding Your Place
in a Densely Populated Community.” Part of the reason there are so many
new music ensembles, concert series, performers, etc., in Boston is that
there are so many different motivations for each of them to co-exist
here in the same community. And while Boston is a smaller big city
compared to many, the number of highly regarded conservatories, colleges
and universities produce a wealth of artists and enthusiasts for every
flavor of new music that is presented. We will highlight only a few of
the many groups in town and allow them to talk about why they chose to
start their organization here and what niche they are filling. The panel
will include representatives from Castle of Our Skins, Guerrilla Opera, Equilibrium, and others.
How does “the music conservatory” continue to be relevant now and into the future?
Boston Conservatory at Berklee is an institution with a strong focus on contemporary music. The Contemporary Classical Performance program
is one of the few Masters degree programs allowing students to focus
primarily on contemporary repertoire as the core of their study. In
addition, every year the school premieres over 200 works written
primarily by our composition students. Contemporary works are often
featured on programs by the large ensembles, as well as the opera
productions, choral performances, chamber music, and more. The
conservatory’s purpose is, in part, to perpetuate the art forms
represented therein. At the same time, everyone in the conservatory is
living a contemporary life, so we must think about how the conservatory
reflects our current world. New styles, technologies, and innovations
have always been viewed as a threat to that which is familiar, but we
are still here, having the same conversation. So, I don’t worry about
the future of the conservatory. The conservatory will remain relevant.
What inspires or surprises you about today’s conservatory students?
Some things don’t change. The typical
student wants to perform or create at the highest level, and to be
competitive. They want to push boundaries, and they want to keep up with
all that’s going on in their fields. Students have to focus on
developing their own voice and their own story, and they have to be
honest about it. That is what speaks to an audience the most. Right now,
student composers seem increasingly interested in using texts and
theatricality in their works, perhaps because this is a more direct way
of communicating their message. I believe that art is essential in
telling the story of now, just as art is integral in our understanding
of historical times.
Jonathan Bailey Holland (photo: Robert Torres)
What are you working on?
In some of my more recent works I find
myself responding to political, cultural, and social issues because I
can’t help but react and respond. Recent and current works of mine deal
directly with issues of equity and justice. One commission I am
currently working on is for the Cincinnati Symphony, and it will be
programmed alongside Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. For any piece that is on a
grand scale–be it a string quartet or an orchestral work–I think an
artist has to work past worrying about whether it will inevitably be
compared and measured against similar works written throughout history.
Instead, composers must think about what it is they have to say right
now. I am deciding how to respond to the Beethoven 9th, how to
foreshadow it, how to co-exist with it, or even whether or not to just
ignore it. But ultimately I need to determine what I want to say. That
is always an exciting juncture during the process of composing any
piece.
THE
MUSIC OF JONATHAN BAILEY HOLLAND: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITHJONATHAN BAILEY HOLLAND:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
