Shawn E. Okpebholo
Ballad of Birmingham from Two Black Churches “Mother dear, may I go downtown Instead of out to play, And march the streets of Birmingham In a Freedom March today?”
She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair, And bathed rose petal sweet, And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, And white shoes on her feet.
“No, baby, no, you may not go For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren’t good for a little child.”
The mother smiled to know her child Was in the sacred place, But that smile was the last smile To come upon her face.
“But, mother, I won’t be alone Other children will go with me, And march the streets of Birmingham To make our country free.”
For when she heard the explosion, Her eyes grew wet and wild. She raced through the streets of Birmingham Calling for her child.
“No, baby, no, you may not go, For I fear those guns will fire. But you may go to church instead And sing in the children’s choir.”
She clawed through bits of glass and brick, Then lifted out a shoe. “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, But baby, where are you?” —Dudley Randall
Shawn E. Okpebholo
Oh, Glory Oh Glory, oh Glory, There is room enough in paradise To have a home in Glory.
Oh, Glory! Oh Glory! There is room enough in paradise To have a home in Glory.
On that sweet day no more a slave I’ll be. To have a home in Glory.
I’ll see my child that once was sold away. In mansions bright, we’ll dwell for endless days.
In Jesus’s arms, where I am truly free. To have a home in Glory.
Oh Glory, oh Glory, There is room enough in paradise To have my home in Glory. —Shawn E. Okpebholo
Composer and Artist Profiles aya n n a w o o d s is a Grammy Award–nominated performer, composer, and bandleader from Chicago whose work spans multiple art forms and genres. She has been commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, Chanticleer, the Crossing, the Percussive Arts Society, Manual Cinema, Lorelei Ensemble, the Chicago Children’s Chorus, Boston Children’s Chorus, and Chicago Chamber Choir. In 2018, she originated her role as a vocalist in Place, a new oratorio co-conceived by Ted Hearne, Patricia McGregor, and Saul Williams. Two of her songs are featured in the Emmy Award–nominated web series Brown Girls, and in 2017, she and her sister Jamila Woods co-composed the score for the live film No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She is sought after as a bassist and improviser, and is currently recording a debut album with her own band, Yadda Yadda. Woods is a recipient PH OTO S BY KYL E PICHA , C OURTESY OF DALE TRUMBORE
of Third Coast Percussion’s Emerging Composers Partnership (2017), a 3Arts Make a Wave grant (2017), and a DCASE Individual Artist Program grant (2020).
dale trumbore is a com-
poser and writer based in Southern California. She has served as composerin-residence for Choral Chameleon and Nova Vocal Ensemble, and her compositions have been performed across the United States and internationally by ensembles including ACME, the Aeolians of Oakwood University, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, Modesto Symphony, and Pasadena Symphony. Trumbore’s choral works have been commissioned for premieres at the national conferences of ACDA, the American Guild of Organists, Chorus America, and NCCO. How to Go On, Choral Arts Initiative’s
inaugural album of Trumbore’s choral music, was a no. 4-bestselling classical album on iTunes the week of its release. Trumbore is passionate about setting to music poems, prose, and found text by living writers. She has written extensively about working through creative blocks and establishing a career in music in essays and in her first book, Staying Composed: Overcoming Anxiety and SelfDoubt Within a Creative Life.
damien geter infuses clas-
sical music with various styles from the Black diaspora, spanning chamber, vocal, orchestral, and full operatic works. Recent highlights include commissions Cantata for a Hopeful Tomorrow for the Washington Chorus, Invisible for Opera Theater Oregon, Buh-roke for the Portland Baroque Orchestra, and String Quartet no. 1 (Neo-Soul) for All Classical Portland and On Site Opera. His piece 1619 appeared with On Site Opera recently as part of their production What Lies Beneath. Geter made his Metropolitan Opera debut as the Undertaker in the Grammy Award– winning production of Porgy and Bess. His other credits include Angelotti in Tosca with Portland Opera, the title role in Errollyn Wallen’s Quamino’s Map with Chicago Opera Theater, and the bass soloist in Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 for the Richmond Symphony. Composition premieres in 2022 include An African American Requiem with Resonance Ensemble and the Oregon Symphony and I Said What I Said for Imani Winds. His second opera, Holy Ground, premieres this summer at the Glimmerglass Festival.
shawn e. okpebholo is a
critically acclaimed and award-winning composer whose music has been performed at some of the nation’s most prestigious performance spaces, including Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.
Some honors include the Academy of Arts and Letters Walter Hinrichsen Award, First Place Winner of the 2020 American Prize in Composition, First Prize Winner in the Flute New Music Consortium Composition Competition, and the inaugural Adams-Owens Prize. Okpebholo is currently in residence at the Chicago Opera Theater as its Vanguard Opera Composer and is Fifth House Ensemble’s composer-in-residence. His music has been featured on PBS NewsHour and on radio programs across the country, including NPR’s Morning Edition, SiriusXM’s Symphony Hall Channel 76, and Chicago’s WFMT. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in composition from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he also studied music theory. He is professor of composition at Wheaton College Conservatory of Music. American soprano joelle l amarre is an in-demand
performer of new works by living composers. This season, she returns to Lyric Opera of Chicago to sing Verna in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Long Beach Opera to perform in Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning opera Central Park Five. Also this season, she originates the role of Elizabeth Alumond in the world premiere production of Quamino’s Map at Chicago Opera Theater. Notable past performances include those in George Lewis’s experimental opera Afterword: The AACM (as) Opera and the Chicago premieres of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. A 3Arts Make a Wave grant recipient, Lamarre performs across genres in theater, musical theater, and opera, and seeks to push boundaries as a librettist, poet, and artistic advisor. She is the creator of the one-act play The Violet Hour, which explores the life and career of American soprano Leontyne Price.
2021/22 SEASON JESSIE MONTGOMERY MEAD COMPOSER-IN-RESIDENCE Monday, March 14, 2022, at 7:00 Harris Theater for Music and Dance at Millennium Park
NIGHT OF SONG Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Joelle Lamarre Soprano Damien Geter Bass-baritone
Major support for CSO MusicNOW is generously provided by the Zell Family Foundation, Cindy Sargent, the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, and the Julian Family Foundation. This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Theater rental and services have been underwritten through the support of the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. Media partners:
Ayanna Woods
I Dream from FORCE!* (2021) 1, 7 World premiere arrangement for soprano, baritone, and piano; with double bass and percussion (reprise only)
MusicNOW Ensemble
Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and guests Joelle Lamarre Soprano Damien Geter Bass-baritone1, 3, 5, 7 Mio Nakamura Piano1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 Cynthia Yeh Percussion3, 4, 7 Shanna Pranaitis Flute2, 3 1, 2, 4, 6, 7
Wagner Campos Clarinet Yuan-Qing Yu Violin2, 4, 6 Katinka Kleijn Cello 2 Christopher Polen Bass3, 4, 7
2, 5
Joelle Lamarre Soprano Damien Geter Bass-baritone Ayanna Woods on I Dream from FORCE! FORCE! is an opera in three acts about a group of Black women and femmes waiting in the visitation
room of a prison. As they wait, the women begin to realize that they barely remember how long they’ve been there, or the faces of the loved ones they came to see. Something in the room has been erasing their memories. In “I Dream,” from the opera’s third act, these waiting women realize they’ve shared a similar dream—one in which they and their entire communities are joyful, powerful, and at ease. Their shared dream is a call to action.
Dale Trumbore
The Gleam (2018) 2 p oems w hile you wa it is a collective of
poets and their vintage typewriters who provide their patrons with an unexpected and decontextualized encounter with poetry. Concertgoers may give their name, a topic for a poem—ranging from specific to abstract with as much information or
for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano
as little as desired—and a $5 donation, and poets will compose a poem during the performance. At the end of the concert, patrons may pick up their custom-made, one-of-a-kind original poem to keep or give as a gift.
P H OTO S BY R ACH E L H A D I A S H A R , G R E G O RY S CH R E CK , TAYLO R P H O E NI X
Joelle Lamarre Soprano Dale Trumbore on The Gleam The Gleam sets a poem of the same name by contemporary writer Robin Myers. Myers’s poem encapsulates what it means to be alive now, from
the vulgarity of what we encounter every day to the beauty that threads our daily lives and, finally, to a reconciliation of the two. This piece was commissioned by CHAI Collaborative Ensemble and premiered May 4, 2018, at Heaven Gallery in Chicago with soprano Gillian Hollis.
Damien Geter
I know, I know, I know / Ourself to be. (I know it cuz / I feel it. Me watching me in an / Old-growth prairie.)
The Bronze Legacy (2021) 3 World premiere, CSO MusicNOW commission for baritone, flute, piano, double bass, and percussion
Damien Geter Bass-baritone Damien Geter on The Bronze Legacy Effie Lee Newsom (1885–1979) was a poet of the Harlem Renaissance whose primary audience was children. In fact, her poem “The Bronze Legacy” leads with the line, “To a brown boy,” which
suggests that it was written for a child (of any gender) with the intent to uplift and inspire. Its theme centers on the power of Black pride, and the mighty strength and beauty of Black people, which she compares to some of the grandest images in nature. Although not specifically written in a jazz style, the ensemble evokes a mood that is reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance.
Ayanna Woods
A Reckoning from FORCE!* (2021) 4 World premiere arrangement
Ayanna Woods on A Reckoning from FORCE!
for soprano, violin, double bass, and percussion
This song, from act 2 of FORCE!, is a dirge sung by the women who wait and care for their forgotten loved ones. The women aren’t incarcerated, but they aren’t free: the orbit of their lives pulls them back, week after week, to this prison.
Joelle Lamarre Soprano
Shawn E. Okpebholo
Ballad of Birmingham from Two Black Churches (2020/2022) 5 World premiere arrangement for baritone, clarinet, and piano
Damien Geter Bass-baritone Shawn E. Okpebholo on Ballad of Birmingham from Two Black Churches “Ballad of Birmingham” is an art-song setting of Dudley Randall’s poem of the same name: a narrative account of the tragic 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing from the perspective of the mother of one victim and her child. Stylistically, this movement includes 1960s Black gospel juxtaposed
with contemporary art song. Subtly, at moments, the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and the hymn “Amazing Grace” are heard. While there are strophic elements consistent with those of the poem, the work is also rhapsodic, though serious and weighty in nature. “Ballad of Birmingham” is dedicated to the four girls who lost their lives in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church: Addie Mae Collins, age 14; Carol Denise McNair, age 11; Carole Robertson, age 14; and Cynthia Wesley, age 14.
Oh, Glory (2018/2022) 6 for soprano, violin, and piano
Joelle Lamarre Soprano Shawn E. Okpebholo on Oh, Glory “Oh, Glory” is a spiritual that I reimagined from the perspective of an enslaved mother, portraying the anticipation and hope of heaven. The music
immediately evokes the mystery of paradise with the quotation of “Bright Mansions,” another spiritual about the afterlife. The emotional climax begins in the second verse, as the mother yearns for the day she will reunite in heaven with her child, who was taken and sold away.
*Excerpted from FORCE!, an opera in three acts, co-composed by Ayanna Woods, Anna Martine Whitehead, Angel Bat Dawid, and Philip Armstrong with words by Anna Martine Whitehead.
Texts Ayanna Woods
I Dream from FORCE!* Blooming . . . / I dream it. I dream blooms, too.
I wander elder / And years go by. In a dream / I am fierce, And wise, and I / I, I, I, I, I, I . . . I am she / Who watches me From across the field. / I am I and we
The Royal We. / I dream it Blooming. / I dream blooms, too. I dream. I do. And I dream. / Was in that dream. With oh, such endless time. We spend it wandering— / We pick up rocks And put them down. / Pick them up again. Curl our fists / Around the rock. The cool against / Hot skin. What can we do / With rocks like these? I get to know / My force in dreams: I am Destroyer / Of all things. Doula of what / Destruction brings.
I know my force, / I feel it. And I’ve been there. / Did you all see me? There’s a place far afield / Map-less, but green. Can’t say its name . . . Its name! Its name! / Its name! Its name! But it’s not nameless! / Hear it Naw, Feel it. It is mound of grass . . . / Ecology most complex. Greens and reds and / Blue-tinted blacks. We feel it, we know it / Futures unfold. Yes! A thousand voices / Call us back. Urge to gather / Up our work Of wandering: / This field is blessed. —Anna Martine Whitehead
Dale Trumbore
The Gleam We dig deep into the earth, Nina. We cut it up. We do not try to fix it. We lurch in circles underneath, we string lights where there is no light, we will do anything to go faster than we can go alone. We point our guns at people we do not intend to kill. Sometimes we kill them. We shove our men into a ring and they shove each other until they bleed and swell. We boil lobsters alive. We whip adulterers. We adulter. We skin deer. We rape our altar boys. We strike pedestrians, who die instantly. We die instantly. We shear our corneas with lasers. We burn our neighbors’ orchards, we slice our thighs with razors, we turn our backs to sobbing daughters every day of the whole first month of first grade so they will learn to leave us. We give birth, Nina, we give birth incessantly. We ravage our cuticles, we explode entire mountains, we forget nearly everything, proportionally speaking, and decide who does and does not have the right to live in the new luxury apartment building, and prop up museums over the ruins of massacred villages, and stride with purpose past the glue-sniffer convulsing across the street. We sniff glue, and drink until we say things we don’t mean, and introduce feeding tubes into our grandmothers’ tracheas, and lock adolescent girls into the backs of trucks with a mattress underneath them, and ink our skin, and perforate our faces,
blend ice to foam, break horses, disappear, disappear others, maim verbs, and put away childish things, and ignore the men we loved, and speak of love in tenses that are not the present tense, and fling ourselves from airplanes, and flay our children until they can’t speak our native tongues, and throw our sewage to the sea, and lie, Nina, and lock our hands around the throat of what we desire until both throat and hands go white. We do. Yet it’s also true that we pull softened butter across a slice of bread with a softened knife. We entrust our bones to bus drivers, the napes of our necks to hair-cutters, the lobes of our ears to the cloudy mouths of lovers who may love us or not love us but touch us as if they could. We brush the birch bark with our fingers as we pass by. We share our blood, distribute lollipops to grown men to prevent them from fainting when they’re done. We nurse the shoots that burgeon from potatoes. We wait. We burn the rice, we eat the rice, we dog-ear books, we seek a single face in every passing face and find it, or don’t find it, and trudge up the hill, and sled down the hill, and sing with our eyes squinched shut, and shut our windows against the parade so we can lie down together and hear everything we say, and let the house fire have its way with what we own. That we have no choice is not the point. We yearn.
We confess to deeds we haven’t done. We wash our feet. We laugh until we’re sick. We let the turtle go. We’re certain that we’re right. We come, which is a curious way of saying that we go away, with a joy that would be desolation if it weren’t so joyful. We are told that we must first learn joy, so we can later bear the desolation. No. We are told that we must first learn desolation, so we can later bear the joy. No. We bear what we can bear. No. We do not know what we can bear. Don’t we? I don’t know, Nina, I don’t know. I’ve seen a schoolboy drop to his knees in a posture of prayer, or betrayal, or cartilage injured during a soccer game, so what do I know? I’ve seen an aging woman wrench her limbs from an embrace in a gesture of rancor, or sorrow, or desire passed over, or rheumatoid arthritis, or missing her mother,
or old terrors made new, and what, Nina, can we do? We do what we can do. No— I know a man who, years ago, would hover at the highway’s edge to feel the eighteen-wheelers pass and feather his body backwards, to feel the minefield between the yellow line and his own two feet. The mine. The field. How does the body get to where the world has told it not to travel? I’m asking you. Our choices, in the end, are few. I love this man whose body said it did not want to go. And I loved you, who went. Love, not loved, my friend; forgive me. We know not what we do, as awed before the green corn gleaming in the field as with a foot into the mine. We go, we go, we go, Nina. We gleam. —Robin Myers
Damien Geter
The Bronze Legacy ’Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown, Like the strongest things that make up this earth, Like the mountains grave and grand, Even like the very land, Even like the trunks of trees— Even oaks, to be like these! God builds His strength in bronze.
To be brown like thrush and lark! Like the subtle wren so dark! Nay, the king of beasts wears brown; Eagles are of this same hue. I thank God, then, I am brown. Brown has mighty things to do. —Effie Lee Newsom
Ayanna Woods
A Reckoning from FORCE!* A reckoning, a reckoning. / I need it. Someone to answer for / All of my suffering.
Have I left / This place Or any place—at all? / (I can’t recall.)
Each time I blink / A week goes by. And another, and another (and another).
Someone must answer / For my suffering.
Another week down: / I should be free. I see myself / Come in, go out: Afloat above the carnage. I’m still here. / Why I’m still here?
A reckoning, a reckoning. / I need it. Someone to answer for / All of my suffering —Anna Martine Whitehead