The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra’s Transcendence: Transcending Excellence
Brittany Green (above) and Stewart Goodyear (below) are two of the composers being featured in the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra’s Transcendence, in which WCO performs and records the works of composers of color.
by Jonathan Gramling
For the past three years, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra has been giving classical composers of color more visibility through its Musical Landscapes in Color Project. Each year, the WCO performs and records the works of 3-5 composers of color and then issues a CD of the recordings.
In this fourth year of a five year project, WCO will be performing the works of five composers for its Transcendence performance on Friday, October 9th in Overture’s Capitol Theater. The composers are Quenton Blache, Brittany Green, Stewart Goodyear, Anthony Kelley and Carlos Simon.
Brittany Green was called to the musical profession early, performing in her pre-school and elementary school youth choirs. And in sixth grade, she started her formal musical training playing the clarinet. But it was in high school that she became interested in music theory and got her big break, so to speak, in composing music.
“It was in an independent study,” Green said. “I got to decide what I wanted to do in that class. And so we worked some on theory, but a lot of that ended up working on some original compositions. At the time, because I was in band, I was writing a lot for band, but I also wrote a couple of chamber pieces. That was fun. Yes. It was such an exploratory phase. I was so fortunate to have that opportunity. I know a lot of people don’t get that. It was just the perfect scenario for someone who is just really interested and curious about writing music, have the chance to do that and he would then let me hear my stuff played. We played it in rehearsal, so I was also able to get that experience. Reaction and response from performers and getting a sense of what happens when I take this music and put it in front of a live player, how they are responding to it, what am I conveying. What are the things that I don’t realize I am conveying, what are the things that I am missing and how does it sound in an acoustical space. It was a really, really awesome experience to have that so young.”
In college, Green earned a degree in music education and then taught music and taught in schools from elementary to high school. But she still had that music composition itch.
“I was still composing kind of on the side, just for myself,” Green said. “I decided I was curious about what it would look like to pursue composition and I sort of made a pivot and went back to school for composition. And I’ve been composing ever since then. As I have gone down this journey, my interest has been really wanting to study the work of Black Composers, particularly Julius Eastman’s work and then also finding ways to incorporate all of these sort of shouting communities that I have from my life, whether it be incorporating a variety of genres into classical music or just sounds and the memories that they invoke that I have come across on my path. That’s how I ended up where I am now.”
At heart, Green is a social activist who expresses her feelings about social issues through her compositions.
“Something that I am really fascinated with is just looking at the system of oppression and what does it mean for us to be navigating these systems,” Green said. “How might we reimagine the systems that we are in? How might we rupture them and rebuild them again to create something that feels more equitable and more attainable and relatable to everyone? For me, what that looks like in my music a lot of times is building these sort of sonic structures. So whether it be a particular type of form or a particular motif or music idea that slowly builds on itself and then dismantling that idea to create something new and make way for something new. It’s building a musical idea and then sort of breaking it apart at the seams and then taking that material and reconstructing a completely new idea.”
And Green lets the instruments do the talking.
“It might be, for example, the strings are sort of building this rhythmic groove and they sort of loft into a particular symphonic structure. And then the winds come in and sort of disrupt that as sort of this dissenting voice, using the difference in timbre to kind of create something different. And then sometimes, I’ll have pieces where all of the voices are working together to create this one, singular sort of rhythmic idea and then the voices all sort of chip away at that in their own way, in different ways. Sometimes it’s at the same time. Sometimes it’s in different times. Yes, there is a lot of diversity and yet harmony in the piece.”
WCO will be performing Green’s Testify, a composition influenced by Green witnessing her mother perform as a part of her church’s gospel choir.
“This piece sort of infuses gospel idioms into the classical style and also sort of post-minimalist rhythmic building structures as well,” Green said. “And it is inspired by my mom who is an avid tambourine player at church. It is inspired by those rhythms that I would hear her play growing up, the actual rhythms, but also just a feeling of joy and jubilance is sort of an idea that things will be better. I have this image of watching her. She would play the tambourine and the joy that she would have, but also watching this sort of sparkle of the jingles on the tambourine from the sun coming in, from the windows and also have some filters and rhythms from the hand. I was so glad that I was in her particular plain. It takes all of that. It takes those rhythms and puts them in this sort of groove in a post-minimalist way.”
Stewart Goodyear hails from Toronto, Canada. His father died one month before he was born from skin cancer. And yet his father left him with a legacy, boxes of LP s that Goodyear began to listen to when he was three-years-old.
“Among his collection were two boxes of symphonies, the complete Beethoven symphonies and the Tchaikovsky symphonies,” Goodyear said. “I was very much intrigued by the concept of this composer writing so many works for one instrument and it took maybe 30 LPs. I was just riveted by every note. I didn’t realize that I was binge-listening until I went through the entire box set. And it changed my life because from there, I knew I wanted to be a concert pianist that would one day perform all of the sonatas. And piano was my main instrument. I took to the instrument very naturally when I was around four-years-old. And the pianos I was playing on were either neighbors’ pianos or pianos in stores. And finally, I had a piano of my own when I was five-years-old. And I was inseparable from the piano and wanted to learn as much as I could. And the journey really began from there.”
Goodyear was a child prodigy.
“My first public performance was when I was six-years-old at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto,” Goodyear said. “But for me, my professional debut began after I was in a Canadian music composition at age 11. It was my debut performing with an orchestra. I performed with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. From that performance, word of mouth really spread. And I made my debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and have played with many Canadian orchestras during my teenage years. My first U.S. orchestra was the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at age 14. My love of performing and my love of collaboration really began to take place, bear fruit and led to improvement more and more. It’s been a wonderful journey and there have been many return engagements and new collaborations. Every engagement and every moment making music together with fellow musicians is a highlight for me. I’m enjoying it very much so after all of these years.”
WCO will be performing Goodyear’s Piano Concerto with Goodyear performing as the guest solo pianist.
“It’s my first piano concerto,” Goodyear said. “This is a work that was commissioned by the Peninsula Music Festival. And it’s basically a postcard of my childhood. Many of the themes that are in this concerto were written when I was eight-years-old. My love of listening to piano concertos and the dreams of playing piano concertos of my own really stem from there. It’s a very youthful work, a very optimistic piece. And it’s a work that makes me smile every time I revisit it.”
Goodyear’s use of instruments in his piece is driven by the sound and the almost abstract voice that it brings.
“I think whether or not it’s the brass instruments, the woodwind instruments or even the piano, each of these instruments have a timbre,” Goodyear said. “I am very much inspired by the various voicings and the different colors of every instrument. And so I try to utilize that. And my voice and my piano will be featured. It’s a good way of the piano being used as a percussion instrument as well as a singing instrument, which is very much explored.”
Blended together through Transcendence, the works of these composers will reveal the richness and diversity of classical music today.
For more information, visit the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra’s website at https://wcoconcerts.org/concerts-tickets/musical-landscapes-in-color