REFLECTIONS/Jonathan Gramling
Historic Moment
Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to interview Dr. Bill Banfield, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra’s resident composer and Patrice Rushen, a gifted composer whose work has been heard in film, on the airways and on stage. While Black classical music composers have been hard at work for decades creating gifted pieces, they have remained hidden in the shadows of Mozart, Brahms and others.
The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra has committed to being a vehicle to bring Black composers out of the shadows. For the next several years, the WCO will be performing and recording original works by these artists each fall. And then the following spring, the recordings will be released on CDs created and distributed by Albany Records, a leading classical music record company.
Well, years in the making, the project will commence this Friday at the Overture Center when the WCO will perform symphonies by Banfield and Rushen before a live audience. While their symphonies are classical pieces, their muse, so to speak, are Frederick Douglas and Paul Robeson. In a symphonic way, the stories and voices of Douglas and Robeson will appear before the audience live via the WCO instruments.
In Testimony of Tone, Tune and Time, Banfield expresses the spirit and values of Frederick Douglas. Douglas, a free Black man, was the great abolitionist and orator who traveled the country speaking out on the evils of slavery who once spoke at Beaver Dam According to Banfield’s liner notes, “Douglas's work is purposely lifting up the ideals of imbuing a perfected national state. He delivered these ideas with song and speeches.
“The Tones piece is about how the songs carried the cementing sentiment of our nation’s value core.
Douglas's words in many ways tell us and take us forward, allowing us to leave having feasted on the sustainability of ideas that make us believe again in what we can accomplish, together.
“He is truly inspiring, as his call was on government, people of means and power to truly be humane and purge themselves of the chains that bonded them to greed, hatred, oppression, and injustice. It wasn’t a correction minute, it was for the life, soul, or death of a nation. He was truly a states person, national hero and for real. And he used the art of the folk song as a calling symbol to humanity. Civilization, as he said was, ..”all love and tenderness towards whatever accords and cooperates.”
“For Douglass, our saxophone soloist is the strong, defiant and soulful spirit, Frederick himself, the speakers share boldly his message to the world, and the world that surrounds him (saxophone, Frederick) is the orchestra.
“I worked very particularly with my word’s collaborator Dr. Ruth Naomi Campbell. In our collaboration we sought to get just the right words, and how rare these word collections are, in the way we’ve envisioned a modern rendering of Frederick Douglass as a thinker, public community worker, who envisioned a greater republic, truly based in common goodwill of citizens, freedom, equality, and love for all.”
Here I Stand is dedicated to Paul Robeson, the great concert artist, stage and film actor and community activist who withstood the heat of oppression to champion the cause of oppressed people. Symphony works on these two historical figures have been brought together for this first recording of the Black Composers CD Project.
“These 2 men had the advantage to develop their works, ideas, commitments over time, and to devote themselves to their principles, values and passions,” Banfield wrote in his linear notes. “And they were unswerving. They never diminished their cultural voices, identity and commitment to their people, other people and the critique of their nation to be a better place for all, as in equality.”
Black history isn’t just made in Montgomery, Alabama or New York City or Chicago. This Friday, it is being made at the Overture Center. Be a part of history and come hear and feel the works that champion these great African American figures.