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    Her Symphony Reclaims an Ancestral Story, and Classical Music

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    Tamar-kali, a former punk rocker, wove episodes of Gullah Geechee history into “Sea Island Symphony,” premiering at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.When the composer Tamar-kali goes fishing in the South Carolina low country, she thinks about her ancestors — the Gullah Geechee — singing spirituals like “Wade in the Water.” And she pictures Harriet Tubman arriving with Union gunboats in the summer of 1863 when those ancestors actually had to wade in the water to their freedom.The Gullah Geechee, who called Tubman Black Moses, helped create a rich book of spirituals that fused biblical imagery with their own plight. “You think about a people who have been engaging in this faith as a form of coping with their lot in life,” Tamar-kali said, “which is the absolute removal of their agency, their humanity, as chattel slaves.”Tamar-kali, who lives in Brooklyn, is always thinking about history, and it infuses her music. The largest expression yet is her “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo,” a new work for orchestra and vocalists that is to have its world premiere on Wednesday in Manhattan as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City.The programmatic symphony paints the Gullah Geechee story from the Civil War through the rise of Robert Smalls, a Carolina man who was born enslaved and became a United States congressman in 1875.“I’m a full-concept girl,” said Tamar-kali, who began working on the piece in 2019. “I started it and then I realized: Oh, this is not something small. Because it’s like I really go with the guidance from the muses.”The symphony’s world premiere, performed by American Composers Orchestra, is the culmination of a series she curated called “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” that has included panel discussions about the complex and often neglected history of America’s Black composers and classical music. Tamar-kali said it was important to her that the piece be contextualized and that the series happen around Independence Day to emphasize that “the end of colonial British rule only symbolized independence for a very small population.”The four-movement “Sea Island Symphony” is the most ambitious addition yet to a composing and performing career that has included punk rock, film scores and opera. Tamar-kali’s eclectic output is the product of wildly varied input — her family’s juke joint in the Sea Islands, blues and jazz, and the Ashkenazi cantorial melodies and classical music she absorbed growing up in New York City.Tamar-kali, center, at Joe’s Pub in 2008.Scott Ellison SmithTamar-kali C. Brown — that’s her full name — describes herself as “a kid that classical music lost.” She received a formal music education at an all-girls Catholic school in Brooklyn in the 1980s, studying theory and singing in a classical choir. But her experience there — she called it “a post-colonial missionary mind-set institutional space” — gave her “no desire to continue that journey that basically felt, to me, like a war,” she said. “So I figured out early on that I would deal with music on my own terms.”She arrived on the New York musical scene screaming — shredding an electric guitar and belting out lyrics of resistance by way of punk rock, becoming a fixture at Joe’s Pub. Shanta Thake, the new chief artistic officer at Lincoln Center, was an early fan. “If you were just to describe her visually, walking around, she is so fierce,” Thake said. “There’s this warrior fierceness to who she is onstage, and just such a command of the audience, of the songs themselves.”Another fan from the Joe’s Pub days was the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, now a professor at Arizona State University. Roumain was living in Harlem in the early 2000s, and he invited Tamar-kali to his apartment, where they recorded a raw electric version of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”“She was this seminal New York artist who was bold and brash, avant-garde,” Roumain said, “incredibly powerful and incredibly inventive. She was a destination, and her career was, even at that time, landmark.”Tamar-kali transcended punk to found the Psychochamber Ensemble, an all-female string and choral group that also covered Kate Bush. She was dipping back into classical music, and she realized, if only after the fact, that she was trying to recreate the fellowship she had experienced in school choir — but now in a safe space while maintaining her agency. “I didn’t even realize I was trying to heal myself,” she said.Before long, Tamar-kali’s string writing and story sense attracted film directors. She made her scoring debut with Dee Rees’s “Mudbound” in 2017. She recently scored a PBS documentary about the Gullah Geechee, “After Sherman,” and is working on John Ridley’s biopic of Shirley Chisholm starring Regina King.The film work is acoustic and often chamber sized, with a handmade quality, created in her studio in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. She often incorporates her own singing voice. Her music is always, in a way, vocal, Roumain said: It “is always boundless, is always wanting to speak. In some ways, it can’t be contained.”Tamar-kali described herself as “a kid that classical music lost.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe composes most of her music with her voice, which she then translates into software and synth mock-ups before it’s interpreted by other musicians.It was Roumain who nominated Tamar-kali in 2019 for an Arizona State commission that became the seed for “Sea Island Symphony,” a work she describes, stylistically, as Americana, a synthesis of all of her influences. “It just … it sounds like me,” she said.The finished symphony opens with a movement depicting the Port Royal Experiment of 1861, in which the Gullah were left to manage themselves in the low country’s undesirable marshlands, with text sung by a tenor representing a newly freed person.The second movement travels forward to the Combahee River Raid of 1863, when Tubman led a Union military operation to rescue more than 700 enslaved people, and reclaims the true origins of the song “Kum ba yah.” “It’s not about making amends or being all happy and sweet,” Tamar-kali said. “It’s a cry for intercession by the higher power: ‘Come by here, my lord.’”The segment culminates in a ring shout, a call-and-response circle that enslaved Africans developed to preserve their heritage while strategically not offending their white captors. The singers will be accompanied by a “shout stick,” historically often a mop or broomstick, since drums were outlawed at the time.The third movement is a scenic piece inspired by General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, an 1865 military order that granted the area’s newly freed people ownership of the Gullah Geechee corridor. The final movement traces the story of Robert Smalls, who used his navigational skills to sail to freedom; he joined the Union army and later become a congressman. Though Smalls’s name is all over his hometown, Beaufort, it’s another piece of history that Tamar-kali discovered only as an adult.Tamar-kali said she hoped eventually to take the symphony down to the low country and to Washington, D.C. She insisted on this premiere being part of free summer programming, which means it’s one night only, with a small budget and very limited rehearsal.Having grown up attending free concerts in Brooklyn and Central Park, she knows that “the most multicultural, multigenerational audiences, of the most diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, exist at free public programming,” she said, adding it was “the gateway to diversity in the halls. But it’s overlooked, and it’s underfunded.”Classical music lost her once. She wants it to find more people like her. More

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      Review: In Chicago, an Opera Triptych Reaches for Connection

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      Lyric Opera of Chicago follows a recent world premiere with yet another: “Proximity,” a set of works by three librettist-composer pairs.CHICAGO — Major opera companies used to put on new or recent works once in a blue moon. But, astonishingly, pieces by living composers make up about a third of the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season. And on Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a month after one world premiere, presented another.Houses like these have been spurred by a hunger for fresh audiences that don’t have any particular devotion to “Aida” or “La Traviata.” But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Creaking into development mode is a huge shift for institutions that have, for decades, almost solely done works from the distant past.And in Lyric’s premiere here on Friday, “Proximity,” the company gave itself an even more ambitious assignment than one new commission: three of them, by three composer-librettist pairs, sharing a single evening. Moreover, each opera takes on a different capital-I Issue, dealing with our closeness to and dependence on others: gun violence in Chicago; the difficulty of connection in a world mediated by technology; and the threat we pose to our planet.That this unwieldy idea ended up being stageworthy — sober, often blunt, sometimes meditative, sometimes listless, sometimes aggressively affecting — is largely because of the production’s ingenious director, Yuval Sharon.In shows like his “La Bohème,” which presented the opera’s four acts in reverse, Sharon has proved himself adept at executing thorny, even silly-sounding concepts in ways that end up being surprisingly clever and moving. With “Proximity,” he avoided the obvious decision to play the three pieces one after the other, à la Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Instead, Sharon showed them off to better effect by putting them in closer, well, proximity: weaving them together, alternating scenes from the operas in a two-act evening. So, for example, the final half-hour of Act I brings the audience from a stylized Chicago L ride in “Four Portraits” (music by Caroline Shaw; text by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke) to a realistic funeral in “The Walkers” (Daniel Bernard Roumain; Anna Deavere Smith), to the abstract poetry of “Night” (John Luther Adams; John Haines).Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke’s “Four Portraits” features a stylized ride on Chicago’s elevated train system.Todd RosenbergWith the edges of the scores smoothed by the conductor, Kazem Abdullah, and Lyric’s excellent orchestra, the three sound worlds play nicely together, with a shared grounding in repeating, minimal motifs, steady tonality and sensible, self-effacing lyricism — no earworm melodies, but no harshness, either, and hardly any look-at-me virtuosity.For a flexible set, the production designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras have stretched an LED screen across the stage floor and, halfpipe-style, up the backdrop. The screen is filled with spiffy and colorful imagery: slowly panning Chicago streetscapes seen from above; vast vistas of outer space; pulsating visualizations of communications networks. Without unwieldy scene changes, the three operas blend into a single performance with impressive seamlessness.It helps that Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera, is experienced with collaborations (and logistics) even more complicated than this. For “Hopscotch” — presented in 2015 by the Industry, the experimental company he founded in California — audience members got into cars that drove around Los Angeles, and six composers and six writers shared billing.And his job is made easier here in Chicago by the fact that these are not three roughly equal installments, like the ones in “Il Trittico.” “The Walkers,” at an hour, is longer than “Four Portraits” and “Night” combined, so those shorter pieces naturally feel like interludes, breaking up a work that would otherwise dominate the threesome.And none of the three tells a story so realistic or sustained that it feels jolting to interrupt. The libretto of “The Walkers” is the latest in Smith’s long career of creating politically charged dramatic texts drawn from interviews she has conducted — in this case, with people she was introduced to through Chicago CRED and Choose to Change, organizations devoted to addressing gun violence in the city.Some passages from the interviews are sung as lamenting monologues, in the style of TED Talks; some remain spoken, with light underscoring. Quirks of speech — “you know,” “uh” — are preserved in a bit of naturalism that, especially when sung, is also endearingly strange.But some confusion is introduced because Smith and Roumain have, alongside these somber, stand-alone statements, embedded a loosely developed, difficult-to-follow plot about a gang rivalry, formed from composites of interview subjects. However impassioned the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown may be, it’s hard to make the plight of her roughly sketched character — who is targeted for killing after she is wrongly assumed to have shot a child — as clear or compelling as the plain-spoken truth of the longer monologues.The score is least convincing in slouchily rhythmic, singsong passages with drum kit. But Roumain pulls his orchestra back to a mellow steady-state undercurrent for the monologues, emphasizing the clarity of the text above all.And the funeral scene near the end of Act I is a persuasive Requiem, with lightly neo-Baroque solemnity and some stirring arias, including ones for the noble-toned baritone Norman Garrett and the shining tenor Issachah Savage as two of the figures who “walk” among vulnerable youth and attempt to guide them.The first of Shaw’s “Four Portraits” conveys a relationship between characters named only A (the countertenor John Holiday) and B (the baritone Lucia Lucas) that is stymied by an inability to connect: The call literally won’t go through.Shaw’s instrumental textures — ethereal strings; pricks of brasses and winds; sprightly pizzicato plucking; Minimalism-derived repetitions, more tentative than relentless — support a babble of fractured voices representing the technological ether, a conceit Nico Muhly explored in his 2011 opera “Two Boys.” Here and in the second section, that crowded L ride, the dramaturgy is hazy, the music bland.The last two sections are more interesting and beautiful, with troubled darknesses under the surface serenity. Shaw renders a car’s GPS as an electronically processed voice that veers from turn-left instructions to poetic flights, yielding to an introspective aria just right for Lucas’s tender voice.And in the final “portrait,” Lucas and Holiday, his tone floating into a soar, at last encounter each other without barriers, the music grandly building as a choir makes a trademark Shaw sound: a kind of modest, sliding low hum. (While Carlos J. Soto’s street clothes in “The Walkers” are an agile mixture of everyday and fanciful, the shapeless gray robes in “Four Portraits” do neither singer any favors.)Zoie Reams as the Erda-like narrator of John Luther Adams and John Haines’s “Night.”Todd RosenbergThe most disappointing of the three pieces is the 12-minute “Night,” a monotonous and clotted score from Adams, a usually inventive composer whose sonic depictions of ocean depths and parched, flickering deserts have been uncannily evocative. Here, his mezzo-soprano Sibyl (Katherine DeYoung, filling in for an ill Zoie Reams), like Erda in Wagner’s “Ring,” is a kind of earth goddess offering gnomic warning about a coming reckoning. Lowered from the flies and walking amid images of planets and stars, she is interrupted for stretches by a stentorian chorus.It’s a dreary way to end the first act. The second comes to a close in more powerful, if also emotionally manipulative, fashion, with the last scene of “The Walkers.” Singing the first-person account of Yasmine Miller, whose 20-month-old baby was killed in a 2020 shooting, Whitney Morrison’s gentle soprano is a little timid and tremulous. But the story is so obviously heartbreaking, and her performance so sincere, that criticizing her feels like actually criticizing a grieving mother.Mustering a warmly supportive chorus and a clichéd, echoey faux-choral keyboard effect, this finale is almost orgiastically sentimental, down to Miller’s smiling story about the new child she’s pregnant with and a quotation ascribed to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey emblazoned on the screen: “For Black people, hope has to be resurrected every day.”Treacle is, of course, hardly foreign to opera. But bending real tragedy into thin uplift is.ProximityThrough April 8 at the Lyric Opera House, Chicago; lyricopera.org. More

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      Review: The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Returns, With Gusto

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      The dynamic conductor Xian Zhang opened the symphony’s new season at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on a balmy night in Newark.NEWARK, New Jersey — Since becoming the music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in 2016, the dynamic conductor Xian Zhang has worked steadily to reflect diversity and inclusion through the institution’s programming, outreach initiatives and guest artists. This was crucial in a city where a majority of residents were Black and Latino; it also spoke to Zhang’s own experience as one of a small number of Asian female conductors leading major ensembles. These priorities were in evidence on Friday when, 557 days after its last full orchestra concert (because of the pandemic), the New Jersey Symphony opened its new season at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on a balmy night in Newark.The program opened with the premiere of Michael Abels’s “Emerge.” Best known for his scores for the contemporary horror films “Get Out” and “Us,” Abels describes this eight-minute piece as suggesting a group of highly trained musicians getting back together after a long break, a scenario that speaks to the moment.It begins with an evocation of an orchestra tuning up. We hear the oboe playing a single pitch of A, which the other instruments pick up on. Soon the various players break off into short three-note melodic bits, quivering strings, fidgety rhythms and sustained sonorities that keep swelling and diminishing. During one episode the players seem almost to be in free-for-all, somewhat reminiscent of the way many orchestras warm up on the stage as the audience drifts in, creating a borderline-annoying mass of sounds. But the music here becomes as a restless aural collage pierced with flinty dissonance. Soon various players take off in bluesy solos, or engage in fleeting bits of counterpoint. Finally, the musicians team up in passages of mellow lyricism, skittish bursts, manic scales, all leading to a brassy, celebratory coda.Roumain fuses elements of hip-hop, jazz and classical contemporary styles in his work.Dan GrazianoNext up was the composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain’s “Voodoo Violin Concerto,” a 25-minute work from 2002 that reflects his Haitian heritage but also fuses elements of hip-hop, jazz and classical contemporary styles. The solo part drives this work, and Roumain played commandingly on a violin that was amplified, including electronics with which he could eerily process certain sounds. In the first section, “Filter,” the violin jumps into orchestral atmospherics with perpetual-motion, repeated-note riffs. The instruments respond with pungent backup music for woodwinds, and jarring, jazzy full orchestra harmonies.There were extended episodes where Roumain improvised winding strands of frenzied yet lyrical lines over orchestra music that maintains a respectful distance. Though an unabashedly episodic work, with passages evoking call-and-response jazz styles and a bravura cadenza that tweaks the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the concerto still has compositional sweep that carries into “Prayer,” the mellow, elegiac second section, with the violin playing over a chorale-like piano music, and a funky, wailing “Tribe” finale.Though it’s hard to imagine that, as a music student at a traditional conservatory in Beijing, Zhang could have imagined performing a score alive with jazz, blues and improvisation, she led a confident and irrepressible account. Roumain, who has collaborated excitingly with Bill T. Jones, Savion Glover and other creators from outside classical music, this season begins an appointment as the orchestra’s Resident Artistic Catalyst, and the title says much about his ambitions in this role. After the concerto, he spoke to the audience about the responsibility we all have to love one another and be creative during what has been “a time of death and despair.”Zhang then led an elegant, rich-toned and spirited account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The slow movement was especially fine, taken at a true Allegretto pace, steady yet never forceful, restrained yet coursing with inner intensity. It was a long-awaited and rewarding return for an essential orchestra. More