THE MUSIC OF RESISTANCE

HOW CELEBRATED JAZZ PIANIST AND PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING COMPOSER ANTHONY DAVIS ’69 IS CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

By Sarah Pruitt ’95

On a late afternoon in mid-January, The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance is quiet as Anthony Davis ’69 gets his first look around the building, which opened in 2018.

Soft-spoken, with curly gray hair and wireframed glasses, he smiles easily as he admires the lighting and flexible seating options in the intimate performance space known as the Actors Lab. Times have changed, Davis acknowledges, since he took to Exeter’s stage as a senior in a production of The Threepenny Opera. “I don’t even remember where we performed that,” he says.

A search of Exonian archives reveals the 1969 production was performed in the old Dramat House, a renovated parish building behind Dunbar Hall. When Fisher Theater, the Goel Center’s predecessor, opened in 1972, Dramat House was renamed 3-D Hall; it was used to house drama and art classes until it was torn down in the early 1980s. Davis can be forgiven for not keeping track of Academy renovations over the years. He made this trip — his first back to Exeter’s campus since he graduated nearly 54 years ago — to deliver the keynote address for the school’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemoration.

A celebrated jazz pianist and composer, Davis has taught music at the University of California San Diego since 1996. His distinctive fusion of traditional operatic forms with more modern genres — particularly jazz — and his willingness to confront political and societal issues in his work propelled him to new heights in 2020, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for music for The Central Park Five. This fall, a revamped version of his first major opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.