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A CAPELLA ACTIVISM, 2
ORCHESTRA, 4
MUSIC MAJOR, 6
LO-FI, 9
A capella groups strive for inclusivity.
Alumni discuss role in Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Life as a CFA student midpandemic.
How gaming music soothes anxiety.
Boston remains soundtracked by protest Jesús Marrero Suárez Senior Reporter Billie Holiday first recorded “Strange Fruit” in 1939 — adopting a 1937 poem by The Bronx teacher and civil rights activist Abel Meeropol. She was consequently denied a cabaret performer’s license and the song made her the target of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which ultimately led to her death in 1959. But in 1999, Time Magazine declared it the song of the century. “If you look at the history of music dating back for decades and decades, artists and art have always had a very powerful effect on enacting change, bringing to light certain subjects,” said Susan Cattaneo, associate professor of songwriting at Berklee College of Music. Cattaneo said prior to the 1960s, the industry fiercely pushed back against social issues in music, fueling the hostility Holiday faced.
“There were acceptable things that were allowed to be sung about and things that were not acceptable to sing about,” she said. Artists draw from their own experiences to fight for social issues, she said, while music played at protests themselves have a different, yet nonetheless important, role. The Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians is an organization composed of protest and activist bands around Boston. Kirk Israel, a regular performer and tuba player with BABAM, said the group is usually contacted by protest organizers. “We’re there to add this musical energy to events that are going on,” Israel said. Drawing inspiration from New Orleans street bands, Israel said the musicians work with the protesters to support and reverberate their message. “A bunch of people, plus a band, has more power than just a bunch of people,” Israel said. “We do what’s called ‘chant backing,’ which means we’ll mold the baseline and the drums and some ornamentation from other instruments to back up the voice of the people.” Israel said one of his personal tri-
umphs with BABAM was in 2017, when around four bands came together during a Black Lives Matter protest in Boston, countering an altright protest at the Boston Common. An estimated 40,000 people marched in a counter-protest from Roxbury to the Common, dwarfing a “Free Speech Rally” featuring prominent conservative figures. “Just the numbers and knowing that there’s so many people who really do understand the amount of racial inequality we have and that we were so able to swamp the alt-righters,” Israel said, “That was definitely one of the biggest and best memories.” Outside individual protests, HONK! is an annual festival of activist street bands that usually plays out over Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend, said Ken Field, a member of the festival’s organizing committee. Started in Boston in 2006, HONK! has since spawned 22 similar festivals around the world, Field said. From the outside it’s similar to Mardi Gras, he said, with its “boisterous music and outrageous costumes.” Internally, the activist and community-based bands from all parts of the globe join and bring with them the causes they are passionately advocat-
ing for. In the roughly 14 years he’s been in HONK!’s committee, Field said he’s been in HONK!’s committee, the festival has expanded rapidly. Originally 12 bands, it now boasts nearly 35 with some 600 musicians. Field, who also performs with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, said protest art and music play a “crucial” role. “Art and music express emotion,” Field said, “and protesting without emotion is not powerful.” Field said his experience in a performance outside Boston’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement House of Corrections is one of his most memorable. He said he and others believed the detainees were being held “for no good reason” and without the chance to receive representation. “Many hundreds of the musicians from all the bands went down there, we had buses taking people down and we played outside the detention center,” Field said, “basically just to let the people who were being held know that we knew they were there.” Robert Lagueux, associate vice president of academic affairs at Berklee College of Music, said music
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXIA NIZHNY
has always served as a way to subvert injustice and push for protest — a tradition that remains firm in the modern day. Such would be Janelle Monáe’s six-and-half minute song “Hell You Talmbout,” he said, in which she lists the names of 18 Black people killed by police and in other acts of hate. Monáe mentions Walter Scott, Eric Garner and Aiyana Jones, among others, repeating each four times. “Say her name, say her name, say her name,” Monae sings of Sharonda Singleton, one of the victims of the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Lagueux added that while not “overtly menacing” like Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In The Name,” the repetition of the names in Monáe’s 2015 song comes across with the same power. “It’s heartbreaking to hear the number over and over again,” Lagueux said, “and the constant admonition to not forget their names.”
Faculty musicians share challenges, upsides of a year without an audience Tanisha Bhat Senior Reporter A year after the initial onset of the pandemic, Boston University’s College of Fine Arts professors are finding new ways to perform despite ever-changing restrictions and conditions. From meeting in person to creating digital recordings, CFA faculty continue to motivate their students during unprecedented times. Terry Everson is an associate professor of music who has played trumpet with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra and tours with the Rodney Marsalis Philadelphia Big Brass. Everson said while he has been sustained by his full-time position at BU, this past year has been difficult for musicians whose income is solely performance-based. He last performed with the Boston Pops on New Year’s Eve in 2019 and with the Rodney Marsalis group in February 2020. “My wife and I just figured out our taxes for last year, and between the two of us, we found a difference in $30,000 in our income for this year,”
Everson said. “But we’re doing a lot better than a lot of our colleagues around town who are only making money by performing.” Using editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Everson put together a video of the BU Trumpet Ensemble performing last spring and posted it on YouTube, where it received more than 2,500 views. “I can’t say that any of us in the performance area is probably completely satisfied with what we’re doing compared to what we’d really like to do with our students,” he said. “However, we are trying to find our best ways of really helping our students navigate the future.” Brass and woodwind musicians in student ensembles were not allowed to perform in person following a decision made by BU at the beginning of the semester, which was later reversed. Everson said the one positive aspect of the online experience is that his students learned early on how to create a digital portfolio for future job applications, something Everson said he finds valuable and has emphasized more to his classes. Associate Professor of Viola Steven Ansell, who has been a profes-
sional musician for 46 years, is the principal violist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and co-founded the Muir String Quartet in 1979. Ansell said his quartet has not performed a concert in more than a year, and the BSO has been releasing live recordings for online listeners. “We’ve been recording performances, but there’s no people in the audience at all,” he said. “We’ve all been socially distanced when we’ve been playing and wearing masks and so forth. We sort of got used to it, but it’s not the greatest circumstance, shall we say.” Because students are living in different in time zones, quartet members use an app called Soundtrap to record tracks separately and compile them later. “They each record a track and then they put it together,” he said. “It’s a very poor substitute for even getting together as a group, just the four of them in the same room, and rehearsing and playing for me from that room. But that’s all we can do.” Rob Patterson, an assistant professor of clarinet, said he had recordings and premieres scheduled in Hong Kong last year that were canceled
COURTESY OF LELAND CLARK
College of Fine Arts Professor of the Practice Musicology and Ethnomusicology Leland Clarke performing in a 2017 concert. While CFA faculty musicians’ performance careers have been challenged by the pandemic, instructors are finding ways to assist their students virtually.
due to the pandemic. “Little by little, I think all the musicians saw just one after another after another,” Patterson said, “then all of a sudden, we were all left with totally blank calendars for performances.” In June 2020, Patterson launched a 10-week online program for clarinet players called The Clarinet Sessions. He brought in professional musicians from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic and other performance groups to give lessons on the instrument. “That’s been a really big part of
what I’ve been doing during the pandemic,” he said, “trying to create a sense of community, inspiration and give people something to hold on to during these difficult times.” However, Patterson said virtual performances and lectures have allowed people from all over the world to connect with each other via Zoom. “It’s been remarkably okay, and even a plus,” Patterson said. “This last weekend, we were able to have a guest artist from Helsinki, Finland Zoom in and give a master class for all the students. So, there are some advantages, shrinking the globe is certainly one of them.”