Last night, in a performance hall off a small street in Paris, we witnessed magic. To access the hall, guests eagerly waited outside the large blue stable-like door of a nondescript building. Once inside, we walked into a stunning courtyard full of trees and flowers, surrounded by old buildings with tall windows reflecting the night sky. This perfect, quiet oasis nestled in the middle of the bustling city is Reid Hall, home to the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
The hall was to the left of the courtyard, and in entering its beautiful chambers, guests were seated like passengers on a plane for a journey through the many sounds and ideas of Afrodiasporic contemporary music. This event was dreamt up by composer and scholar George Lewis, who is also the Artistic Director International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). As a Fellow this year at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, he suggested to the directors that ICE come perform a program of “Composing While Black,” inspired by his recent book of the same name and co-written with Harald Kisiedu. The directors thankfully said yes.
The event is of historic significance. As George explained from the stage, there hadn’t previously been concerts in Paris programmed with an all-Black lineup of composers, and to date he hadn’t heard of many in France featuring even one Afrodiasporic composer. Before the concert, composers Alyssa Regent and Corie Rose Soumah spoke on a panel moderated by Harald Kisiedu about their compositional process, and answered a question from the audience about how their Blackness shows up in their work. Alyssa answered that as a Black woman from Guadalupe, her identities will always show up in her work. Corie, Alyssa, and George all acknowledged throughout the evening that just like there are a myriad of different types of Black life, so too are there countless different types of Black music. Corie pointed out that many people in her life -- when learning that she’s a composer -- assumes she’s a hip hop or jazz artist and seem perplexed to learn that she’s an experimental composer who uses electronics in her work. The music community has pigeonholed Afrodiasporic composers, but last night’s concert was testament to the great diversity of sound that Afroadiasporic composers are creating, something ICE too has celebrated through their programming over the past several years.
Following the panel, we were invited into many of those sound worlds, including Alyssa’s “Émergence,” inspired by the film “Woman in the Dunes,” expertly conducted by Rebekah Heller. In it, we heard the struggle of the man at the bottom of the dune trying to climb out of the sand through the high pitched, muted trombone lines performed by Weston Olencki, alongside a superb ensemble including Yua Souverbie (flute), Joshua Rubin (bass clarinet), and Mathilde Lauridon (violin, with a special braided bow to represent the importance of hair braiding from Regent’s roots in Guadalupe).
Mathilde Lauridon, Yua Souverbie, Joshua Rubin, Weston Olencki, Rebekah Heller, photo by Anthony Valette
Corie’s “Limpidités IV” for solo violin and electronics took us through multiplicitous soundscapes including violinist Mathilde Lauridon’s articulated whispers popping up to accompany her violin and electronics. Pianist Jacob Greenberg took us on a virtuosic and colorful journey through South African composer Andile Khumalo’s piece “Schau-fe[r]n-ster II.” We were beckoned into the spellbinding layers of harmony created by harmonicas, music boxes, and the yearning to speak with hands pressed to mouth in Hannah Kendall’s “when flesh is pressed against the dark,” performed by vocalist Damian Norfleet, bass clarinetist Joshua Rubin, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, and trombonist Weston Olencki; and we heard the screams of a larger ensemble performing Swiss composer Jessie Cox’s “(Noisy) Black/blackness (Unbounded),” including a vigorous bowed percussion by ICE percussionist/electronics wizard Levy Lorenzo.
All of the pieces were completely distinct from one another, with the final performance of the evening being no exception. The concert concluded with a powerful electronic and vocal duo called “Modified” with Levy and vocalist Fay Victor. Levy improvised on AI systems, a joystick, and other electronics to create multiple versions of Fay while she sang/spoke a text that came to her late one night about protests and liberation. The intricate conversation between Levy and Fay through electronics and live performance was a poignant reflection of the tension, uncertainty, and promise we find at the juncture of our digital and analog worlds.
Fay Victor and Levy Lorenzo, photo by Anthony Valette
Traveling to a new place and performing live music there can lead to great change. When we step out of our comfort zones, sit with new people over a meal and travel, we learn about other ways we can curate, collaborate, and listen. When ICE brings the music we’ve been working to advance, we’re sharing the sounds of living Afrodiasporic composers to an audience that has never heard of these composers before. We hope that the fact that we were in Paris (and also in Berlin the week prior for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt festival), performing an all-Black program, will reach far beyond those walls. Already, one music director told me she’d never heard of these composers and wants to program them more on her series. At lunch with Brune Biebuyck, Columbia Global Paris Center Director, Marie d’Origny, Director of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and Marie Volkea Doezema, Paris Global Center Senior Special Projects Manager, I learned about extraordinary programs for journalists and other visiting scholars. The directors were interested in bringing our musicians – who are also educators – back to Paris to lead workshops on improvisation and deep listening as models for collaboration and leadership. The interdisciplinary possibilities are endless, and when we leave our comfort zones, we can imagine new ways to collaborate that could have an even greater impact on the world than we ever thought possible.
At a post concert reception, as we shared what our favorite moments were from the concert, I was struck by the idea that probably nowhere else in France had these conversations ever happened before: over 150 people listening to and discussing not just one piece by a Black composer, but reflecting on an entire program featuring the sounds of some of our leading Afrodiasporic composers today. At another meal, all of us administrators enthusiastically agreed that we want to continue this partnership to make Reid Hall ICE’s Paris home. We could label this as cultural diplomacy, but I’d also like to think of this kind of partnership as a radical systems-changing act: the more we forge ongoing partnerships like these, the more concerts featuring historically underrepresented composers will become part of the future fabric of the concertizing world, and the more our musicians can continue to open doors through their workshops for other leaders to consider the many ways that listening and connecting through music can make our world a better place. At a moment in our history that is increasingly hostile and divided, it feels urgent that we create more spaces for stretching our imaginations through the arts. As Fay Victor wrote in her piece with Levy Lorenzo:
“What if we lived in a space where everyone would/could
Figure out in liberation who they wanted to be
And create pathways to become that thing.
(No intrusions).
There wouldn’t be all these intrusions, distractions
And roadblocks in the way
And one certainly wouldn’t have to dedicate
Their time and effort to protesting or being an activist
About anything/or demanding anything
Because anyone could at least pursue
What they want and need without any encumbrance
THAT would be an amazing world.
What an amazing world that would be.”
Indeed, it certainly can be an amazing world when we collaborate to elevate boundary-pushing music.
—Jennifer Kessler, Executive Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble
From left: Alyssa Regent, Corie Rose Soumah, Rebekah Heller, Jacob Greenberg, Yua Souverbie, Fay Victor, Joshua Rubin, Jonathan Finlayson, Damian Norfleet, Mathilde Lauridon, Levy Lorenzo, Weston Olencki, photo by Anthony Valette