Program Book - CSO MusicNOW Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR): Voices of Migration & Innovation
TWENTY-SEVENTH SEASON
CSO MusicNOW
Daniel Bernard Roumain Mead Composer-Curator
Sunday, November 24, 2024, at 3:00
DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN (DBR):
VOICES OF MIGRATION & INNOVATION
Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson Flute
Daniel Bernard Roumain Violin
Kedrick Armstrong Conductor
ROUMAIN String Quartet No. 5 (Parks) “I made up my mind not to move.”
Klap Ur Handz Isorhythmiclationistic
Danny Jin, violin
Mihaela Ionescu, violin
Danny Lai, viola
James Cooper, cello
GREEN shift.unravel.BREAK.
John Bruce Yeh, clarinet
Mihaela Ionescu, violin
James Cooper, cello
Daniel Schlosberg, piano
ROUMAIN Uncertainty Our Country
World premiere. CSO MusicNOW commission
Daniel Bernard Roumain, violin
Danny Lai, viola
James Cooper, cello
Daniel Schlosberg, piano
LOGGINS-HULL Homeland
Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson, flute
ROUMAIN
Voodoo Violin Concerto No. 1
Filtering—
Prayer—
Moment—
Tribe
Daniel Bernard Roumain, violin
Kedrick Armstrong, conductor
Hillary Horton, flute
John Bruce Yeh, clarinet
David Inmon, trumpet
Reed Capshaw, trombone
Cynthia Yeh, vibraphone
Ian Ding, drum kit
Daniel Schlosberg, piano
Mihaela Ionescu, violin
James Cooper, cello
Robert Kassinger, bass
There will be no intermission.
Leadership support for CSO MusicNOW is provided by the Zell Family Foundation, Sargent Family Foundation, Sally Mead Hands Foundation, and the Julian Family Foundation.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
“My role as a composer is some ways, provocation, in other ways, education. My hope is that it forms a temporary, allusive community.”
MUSICNOW CO-CURATOR DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN
For full interview, visit cso.org/experience.
DANIEL BERNHARD ROUMAIN
String Quartet No. 5 (Parks) (2005)
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move. Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it.” —Rosa Parks
As a Black, Haitian American composer, I was raised by immigrant parents from Haiti, who experienced American life both before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their views were informed by life on a free island nation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; life in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois;
BRITTANY J. GREEN
shift.unravel.BREAK. (2022)
shift.unravel.BREAK. takes on the form of its title. Musical material forms and comes together out of silence and shifts around the ensemble. As the material develops, it stretches and begins to unravel into a rhythmic frenzy before breaking into fragmented moments of
and life in the complex diversity of Pompano Beach, Florida. They identified with Malcolm and Martin, Maya and Rosa, and the great Haitian warriors Mackandal and Toussaint. Civil rights, for our household, was global, local, and part of the very fabric of our lives and culture. Icons of the civil rights era, as they had been in Haiti, were our warriors and heroes. I composed String Quartet no. 5 (Parks) as a musical portrait of Rosa Parks’s struggle, survival, and legacy. The music in the first movement, “I Made Up My Mind Not To Move,” is a direct, musical reflection of a dignified resistance. “Klap Ur Handz” remembers Ms. Parks thinking about her father, and his hand-clapping and foot-stomping during church services. “Isorhythmiclationistic” is an isorhythmic motet, a reflection of recurring causes for struggle and justice, over time, space, and cultures.
sound and silence. This work was composed for CULTIVATE 2022, Coland House’s emerging composers’ institute, and was premiered by the Music from Copland House ensemble on June 12, 2022.
DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN
Uncertainty Our Country (2024)
For me, these are uncertain, divisive times for our country—“the center cannot hold”—and I find solace in
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
the words and wisdom of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” (1919):
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Uncertainty, Our Country is a musical response to the struggles that are here—and coming for us. In this music, I am emulating the ringing of bells, the sounds of peace and glory, and an
urgent sense of honest patriotism—all within a musical variation of Samuel Francis Smith’s “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (America).
ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL
Homeland (2018)
Homeland was written shortly after Hurricane Maria stormed through Puerto Rico in 2017. Maria represented the increasing strength of natural disasters and the intense, sometimes deadly, repercussions of climate change. While this was going on, there was also a rise of political and social turmoil in the United States and global unrest throughout the world, including the civil war crisis in Syria. For weeks, the news was flooded with these stories. With so many people throughout the world dealing with tragic domestic issues, I began to think about the meaning of home during a crisis. What does home mean when the land has been destroyed? What does it mean when there’s been a political disaster or
DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN
a human disaster? How does a person feel patriotic when they feel unwelcomed at the same time? Homeland is a musical interpretation and exploration of those questions. The flute opens with timbral trills representing troubled waters, then transitions into passages that are anxious and distorted. There is a moment of hope and optimism, a remembrance of past struggles that have been overcome, followed by an off-putting play on the “Star-Spangled Banner,” representing an unraveling of patriotism. In the end, we come full circle, still with unanswered and unresolved questions.
Homeland was commissioned by the Texas Flute Society for the 2018 Myrna Brown Competition.
Voodoo Violin Concerto No. 1 (2002)
This violin concerto is most concerned with the notion of the ritual, or our collective rites of passage.
From the current state of a highly technological country in the United States of America (the techno textures and rhythms of “Filtering”), to my own relationship with Catholicism (the meditative tonality of “Prayer”), I find “Tribe,” in all of its primitive repetition, to be, perhaps, the most accurate depiction of where we are right now, as a collective, civilized society—a collective, civilized world.
My parents are from Haiti, and I too have heard the stories, myths, and folklore of that country and its current struggle to survive. Yet I wonder, how much different is the suffering, rioting, and sense of loss from my home of Harlem, New York City?
Moreover, how much different is the intoxication of a voodoo ceremony from the myth and propaganda of the American dream?
I don’t know.
PROFILES
Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) Composer and Violin
Known for his signature violin sounds infused with myriad electronic and African American music influences, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) takes his genre-bending music beyond the proscenium. He is a composer of solo, chamber, orchestral, and operatic works and has composed an array of film, theater, and dance scores. He composed music for the acclaimed film Ailey (Sundance official selection), was the first music director and principal composer of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, released and appeared on thirty album recordings, and has published over 300 works. He has appeared on CBS, ESPN, FOX, NBC, NPR, and PBS and has been presented by and collaborated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Kennedy Center, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Sydney Opera House. He was artist-in-residence and creative chair at the Flynn in Burlington, Vermont. Currently, he is the first artistic ambassador with Firstworks, the first artist activistin-residence at Longy School of Music, and the first resident artistic catalyst with the New Jersey Symphony.
A student of William Albright, Leslie Bassett, and William Bolcom, Roumain graduated from Vanderbilt University and earned his doctorate in music composition from the University of
Michigan. He is currently a tenured associate and institute professor at Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
Brittany J. Green Composer
Brittany J. Green (she/her(s)) is a North Carolina-based composer, creative, and educator. Her music facilitates intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses at the intersection of sound, video, movement, and text. Recent works engage sonification and black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. Her artistic practice includes spoken and electronic performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential projects, and acoustic and electroacoustic chamber and large ensemble works. Her music has been featured at TIME:SPANS, NYC Electronic Music Festival, WoCo Fest, and Experimental Sound Studio. Her collaborators include the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Transient Canvas, Castle of our Skins, Emory University Symphony Orchestra, and Wachovia Winds. Green holds awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP Foundation, and New Music USA. She is a doctoral candidate at Duke University,
pursuing a PhD in music composition as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow.
Highlights of the 2024–25 season include performances with Fayetteville Symphony Orchestra, Wheeling Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta, Rebekah Heller, and Mark Stevens alongside premieres by the Louisville Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, the American Pianists Association and Black Echoes//Brick Ripples, an audio-visual interactive installation created in collaboration with media artist Kate Alexandrite.
Allison Loggins-Hull Composer
Allison Loggins-Hull is a composer, flutist, and producer whose work defies genre, from symphonic music to film scores, chamber and electronic music. Her signature style of composition is characterized by unique sonic effects that echo contemporary music production techniques, profoundly influenced by Black American music to create a vibrant and kaleidoscopic sonic palette. Thematically, her works are deeply rooted in the experiences of community, culture, and life, offering a rich and evocative musical narrative. Her artistic reflections on Black stories, music, and experience have led to works aligned with Afrofuturism, a movement that imagines alternate realities and a
liberated future viewed through the lens of Black cultures. She serves as resident artistic partner to the New Jersey Symphony for a term that began in September 2024.
Loggins-Hull co-founded the groundbreaking duo Flutronix and has performed as an accompanist to major pop acts including Lizzo and Frank Ocean. She has performed on multiple blockbuster film scores and composed the score for Bring Them Back, an award-winning documentary executive produced by Debbie Allen about the legendary dancer Maurice Hines. The 2024–25 season marks LogginsHull’s last of three years as the Lewis Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra, an engagement that culminates in three world premieres.
Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson Flute
Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson is principal flute of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as a distinguished international soloist and chamber musician. He was appointed to the post in 2015 by Riccardo Muti. Prior to joining the CSO, he served as principal flute of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra from 2008 to 2016. A native of Iceland, Höskuldsson has been praised by The New York Times for his agility and warmth of expression.
Höskuldsson has performed widely throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan under the skilled direction of Fabio Luisi, Valery Gergiev, Daniel Barenboim, Seiji Ozawa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Riccardo Muti. He has frequently performed at Carnegie Hall with the Met Orchestra and Chamber Ensemble, and in 2009, he was featured as a soloist in Pierre Boulez’s Mémoriale-Explosant Fixe. As a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Höskuldsson has received two Grammy awards in the category of Best Opera Recording for Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Thomas Ades’s The Tempest. He frequently performs as soloist with the CSO, most recently in March 2024 when Höskuldsson premiered Lowell Liebermann’s Flute Concerto no. 2 with the CSO, conducted by Susanna Mälkki. This concerto was written especially for Höskuldsson and was commissioned by the CSO. Stefán Höskuldsson holds the Erika and Dietrich M. Gross Principal Flute Chair.
Kedrick Armstrong Conductor
Kedrick Armstrong is the new music director of the Oakland Symphony, becoming the ninth music director in the orchestra’s almost
100-year history. He is also the creative partner and principal conductor of the Knox-Galesburg Symphony.
Armstrong’s recent highlights include his debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago to premiere the opera The Factotum by Will Liverman and K Rico. He also appeared at the Opera Theater of St. Louis as one of the festival’s assistant/cover conductors (Tosca and Susannah).
Armstrong uses his voice and platform as a Black conductor to advocate for classical music’s performance, publication, and preservation of minority voices. This advocacy has led to various speaking engagements and a research fellowship with the American Music Research Center (University of Colorado-Boulder) studying Black female composers within the Helen Walker-Hill archives.
Armstrong spent several seasons as the music mentor/supervisor for EmpowerYouth! Igniting Creativity through the Arts, a unique collaboration with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Urban League. He also enjoyed working with REACH*TEACH*PLAY at the Ravinia Festival, the Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative, and Chicago Sinfonietta’s Audience Matters. Kedrick is an alum of Chicago Sinfonietta’s Project Inclusion Freeman Conducting Fellow program, where he served as assistant conductor during the 2018–19 season.
