The last thing you could hear was his breathing, and the squeaking of his stool, as drummer Jessie Cox ended the set. He had just played an hour-long improvisation with bassoonists Rebekah Heller and Joy Guidry last month at the Stone, an experimental music venue on West 13th Street. Guidry supplemented bassoon with synth, dueting and diverging with Heller, who scampered through spontaneous, anxious, spoken monologues and crafted beautiful melodies with her bassoon. Cox dragged a violin bow across the edge of a cymbal, hit a gong that he muted between his legs, and cycled through rhythms that he created with the more conventional parts of his drum kit. Heller and Guidry struck a note in unison, which they intoned gently, fading out while Cox kept gently tapping the snare and tom with little metallic springs. Then the bassoonists went quiet, but Cox kept on. Guidry let go a surprised smirk at Heller, indicating that they had intended to end there, but this unexpected ending, with Cox solo, was even better than a pretty unison between the bassoons. He kept tapping the springs, rotated on his stool, and breathed in and out slowly, louder each time, pausing between each breath. He froze, the room was silent, and everyone enjoyed the dead air for probably two whole minutes.
And then we applauded.
In Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today, a volume of essays on post-war Black composers published last year in a bilingual edition by the German publisher Wolke Verlag, Cox, who is completing his doctorate in composition at Columbia, contributes a piece about the music of Nigerian-Swiss composer Charles Uzor. Within his essay, there is one concept that should give pause to anyone who learned that music is “sound organized in time,” a definition memorized by music students everywhere. “I hear in his work spaces for those whose place in the world is denied,” Cox writes. “His compositions fashion a place for meetings in excess of those whose voice, or sound, is authorized.” Discussing Uzor’s song cycle Mothertongue (2019), which presents recordings of the composer’s mother speaking in Igbo, a dual-pitched language spoken in Nigeria, Cox concludes with a definition of Blackness: “music as fugitive space-flight.” This cryptic, abstract definition becomes clearer when read with the book’s introduction, written by editors George E. Lewis (composer and Columbia professor) and Harald Kisiedu (historical musicologist and saxophonist). The duo emphasizes that the contemporary music world has predicated itself upon the “absence of Blackness.” For Cox, this absence is in fact a hyper-presence — a big blatant gap filled with potential. No matter what kinds of music Black composers create, it is this space they must fill, and there is a sort of freedom afforded, musically, in filling that space.
Or flying through that space, as Cox, or for that matter Sun Ra, who said he was an alien from Saturn, would have it.
The sounds of music have always occupied space, in churches, concert halls, streets, clubs, and ears. Sound is, after all, vibrating air. But the writings in Composing While Black show that music’s role in filling space — any space with air to vibrate —has largely been taken for granted and that since at least the 1960s, composers, especially composers of color, have capitalized on this underutilized dimension of music. They have used different spaces to reveal and enhance the nuances of underheard musical qualities, whether that’s timbre, pitch, resonance, or duration. And they have taken an almost anatomical approach to the bodies of music machines, from bassoons to synthesizers, exploiting their mechanics and quirks to the point that the listener may feel disoriented, like they’re in another world. Compare that to Beethoven, who evokes the sounds of nature in his Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), but isn’t trying to make us think we’re in the woods.
Unless you are Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tried to convince Bertrand Russell that he couldn’t prove that a rhinoceros wasn’t in the room, you can’t say that the hall becomes a ship’s hold when the performance starts.
Flip through Composing While Black (if by some miracle you can find it in a bookstore or library) and you’ll find “place” and “space” deployed to wildly different contexts. The book amounts to no less than a reconceptualization of the multidimensionality of modern classical music. John Cage, who, it may be argued, kicked off this movement with works like 4’33” (1952), which invites the audience to listen to the sounds around them while the pianist on stage sits silently and turns pages, would be happy.
Journal editor and music theorist Scott Gleason’s essay, “Listening to Place, Space, and Afro-Modernism in Two Compositions by Andile Khumalo,” chronicles how this South African composer’s Tracing Hollow traces (2014) actually transports the listener, if only in fantasy, to a different physical space. Although the piece is for solo clarinet, Khumalo has written that his intention is to conjure the space through which a steam locomotive moves. He achieves this primarily through the resonance of the setting where the music is played. In the right venue, the “almost silent parts and sounds of the clarinet seem to be acoustically amplified (given space to be heard).” He also instructs the clarinet to use multiphonics — several notes produced on an instrument that usually produces only one at a time. Gleason, who is white and lives in New York City, hears the train’s steam whistle and imagines an open countryside in the Western United States, or in Africa. He goes so far as to assert that the “spatial, resonant” performance setting conditions the listener to “experience freedom.”
It is remarkable that this is a conclusion reached by an academic — one whose methodology is grounded by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the experiential criticism of John Dewey — because it is one that is reached by lay listeners every day. You don’t need theory to use your ears. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played a piece of classical music for a non-aficionado and they have responded with something like “It reminds me of the ocean” (Debussy’s La Mer) or “I feel like I’m in New York City” (Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue). Describing one’s reaction to abstract music — music without words and thus with an atmosphere more than a narrative or poetic idea — in terms of an imagined setting different from one’s own might be the most primitive and purest form of music criticism. But Composing While Black illustrates that this is only recently an acceptable form of academic critique, probably because so much recent classical music makes space impossible to ignore.
For Black composers, specifically, political and musical space have always been inextricable.
Other authors contributing to Composing While Black think of space more politically. Harvard ethnomusicologist Alejandro L. Madrid considers Pulitzer Prize–winner Tania León’s place in the classical music canon and her rejection of identity politics. Composer Yvette Janine Jackson writes about soundscapes and their ability to invite listeners to “contemplate cultural identity and place.” And Columbia composer Hannah Kendall discusses Sweet Tooth, an improvisatory multimedia music theater project by vocalist and movement artist Elaine Mitchener.
Sweet Tooth had its London premiere at St. George’s Church, whose early benefactors had links to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Kendall writes that when the piece is performed in British-European spaces that have direct connections to the slave trade, it transforms these spaces into plantations, holds of slave ships, and the Atlantic Ocean itself. She explains:
Mitchener’s text score instructs that [violinist Sylvia] Hallett should enter the performance space first and “eyeball” the audience whilst playing the violin and vocalizing. This prepares the space and immediately establishes the multi-sensory complexity of Sweet Tooth, making audiences aware that they are not mere spectators, but have a consequential connective involvement in the work. The explicit lines of visual communication, along with the purposefully crammed, uncomfortable seating arrangements, results in forced close proximity to strangers that charges the body and mind in a way that connects it back to the space. This complexity is also established through the heterophonic textures created between Hallett’s violin and vocal work that are repeated, sounded back, or re-oralized, due to the specific reverberant structural and material qualities of St. George’s, which Mark Sanders [the percussionist] called the fifth member of the ensemble.
Sweet Tooth thus exists, according to Kendall, in several “time zones, dimensions, and histories.”
Assertions like Kendall’s are not true. That is, they can’t be proven. St. George’s Church cannot literally turn into water just because its early benefactors were linked to the slave trade. And unless you are Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tried to convince Bertrand Russell that he couldn’t prove that a rhinoceros wasn’t in the room, you can’t say that the hall becomes a ship’s hold when the performance starts. But logic isn’t the point. The point is that Kendall is taking Mitchener seriously. She doesn’t dismiss her metaphors. She doesn’t make the composer out to be silly. She acknowledges the necessity of imagination and the power of thinking, “Well, what if that could happen?” And that, really, is the only way to wrap your head around the meaning of a work like Sweet Tooth. Indeed, that’s the way most people think of abstract music anyway — “What does this sound like?”, “What images come to mind?”. This embrace of imagination, articulated by many of the authors with imprecise, metaphorical language, is the best part about Composing While Black.
After the pandemic, when we were so long unable to be physically in the spaces we loved, it makes sense that music and music criticism would now be preoccupied with how music transforms space and how space transforms the listener. But for Black composers, specifically, political and musical space have always been inextricable. This is not so for white composers, whose hallowed halls have for so long been taken as where music happens, and who never actually interrogated why that is or if it could be any different, since they knew they would always be included in those spaces.
Lewis puts it best. In his essay on Anthony Davis’s opera Amistad, which premiered in Chicago in 1997, he recalls how harshly the Chicago Tribune panned it. John von Rhein, the paper’s chief music critic, called it “inherently weak.” But it was television critic Gene Siskel, in conversation with von Rhein, who really showed his fangs. “None of the music was memorable,” he said. Worst of all, he went on, the opera “makes slavery boring.” For Lewis, their conversation exemplifies the three “consistent tropes” that he has noticed among reviewers and other powerful members of the classical music establishment: Black composers, librettists, performers, and directors are “out of their place, out of their depth, and perhaps out of their minds.” In fact, Composing While Black shows that Black composers are creating new places, plumbing new depths, and actually rethinking where music happens. Music in time is passé; music in space is in. ❖
Ben Gambuzza is a writer, pianist, book editor, and researcher living in Brooklyn. He is also the host of The Best Is Noise, a live classical music show on Radio Free Brooklyn. You can find his recital album, Baroque Jewels, Romantic Revivals, on Bandcamp and elsewhere.
