Deceptive Simplicity

An increasingly prominent presence in the new music world, Carlos Simon is a versatile composer who writes solo and chamber pieces, orchestral works, and music theater works with equal fluency. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of a family who encouraged his love of music as a way to participate in church services at the African American Pentecostal church founded by his father, who comes from a line of preachers stretching back several generations.

Much of Simon’s work conveys his conviction that art can serve as a powerful platform to bring attention to suppressed and marginalized voices. Elegy: A Cry from the Grave for string quartet (2015), one of his most-performed pieces, uses music to reflect on “those who have been murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power; namely Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.” Requiem for the Enslaved is a rap opera featuring spoken word and hip-hop artist Marco Pavé and appears on Simon’s debut album for the Decca label (released last summer); it was nominated for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in the 2023 Grammy Awards.

Now based in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at Georgetown University as a member of the performing arts faculty,

Simon was deeply moved when he attended a landmark exhibition devoted to the self-taught artist Bill Traylor (see sidebar on p. 80), which was presented from September 2018 to April 2019 by the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art. Titled Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, this comprehensive retrospective — the fruit of seven years of intense curation by Leslie Umberger — marked the first major exhibition devoted to an artist who had been born into slavery.

In 1939, at the age of 84, Traylor suddenly began to express himself in an outpouring of paintings and drawings. By the time of his death in 1949, he had produced a remarkable series of untitled works. Many were lost, but around 1,200 survived. They range from drawings of single human or animal figures to more complex compositions. Silhouette shapes or abstractions are characteristic of Traylor’s vocabulary and are painted using a palette often limited to brown and black, with an occasional eruption of red or deep blue.

The deceptively simple style cultivated by the entirely self-taught Traylor “has about it both something very old, like prehistoric cave paintings, and something spanking new,” wrote the late Peter Schjeldahl in a review of the Smithsonian exhibition. “Songlike rhythms, evoking the time’s jazz and blues, and a feel for scale, in how the forms relate to the space that contains them, give majestic presence to even the smallest images.”

Recognition by the white-dominated art establishment was belated, despite the efforts of fellow artist Charles Shannon, who befriended Traylor and attempted to champion his work. The reception history of Traylor is a textbook case of how curation in the visual arts, just as in music, can also be used to reinforce reductive, tone-policing labels and boundaries — or to dismantle them. Once the word about Traylor began to spread in the 1980s, when his work appeared as part of a larger show at the Corcoran Gallery, it tended to get categorized as “primitive” or “folk art.”

But we are now more attuned to the multifaceted implications of what Traylor created. His art truly exists between worlds. As the critic Alana Shilling-Janoff puts it, his images portray “nothing less than the predicament of a man caught between past enslavement he cannot forget and present liberty he struggles to accept.” In addition to his achievement as an artist, Traylor is “an eloquent annalist of a nation’s history: its brutality.”

Simon recalls that, before attending the exhibition, he had not been aware of

Bill Traylor

Traylor’s long life spanned close to a century, from the last decade of legalized slavery in the United States through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the Second World War. Born on a cotton plantation in central Alabama in 1853, he lived his early childhood as an enslaved person and continued working on the land until his mid-70s. No longer physically able to continue farming, Traylor moved to Montgomery, the state capital. He subsisted through a series of jobs but eventually became homeless. Most of his many children headed north in the Great Migration, and he was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. (Only recently was a headstone placed in the cemetery in tribute.)

Carlos Simon is a multi-faceted and highly sought-after composer whose music ranges from concert music for large and small ensembles to film scores with influences of jazz, gospel, and neo-Romanticism.

Currently Composer-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center, Simon has been commissioned by leading ensembles, orchestras, and opera companies, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Washington National Opera. Next February, the Oakland Symphony will premiere Here I Stand: Paul Robeson, Simon’s opera on the legendary singer, actor, and civil rights activist to a libretto by Dan Harder.

Simon earned his doctorate degree at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Michael Daugherty and Evan Chambers. He has also received degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College. He is an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Music Sinfonia Fraternity and a member of the National Association of Negro Musicians, Society of Composers International, and Pi Kappa Lambda Music Honor Society. He has served as a member of the music faculty at Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. Simon was also a winner of the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization to recognize extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians and was named a Sundance/Time Warner Composer Fellow for his work for film and moving image.

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Deceptive Simplicity

Traylor’s life or work. But the encounter caused him to feel an immediate sense of connection to Traylor. An eyewitness to the social and political turbulence of this crucial period in American history, Traylor fascinated Simon as a creative figure who moved between the worlds of slavery and freedom, wealth and poverty, rural and urban life, white and Black culture, the traditional and the modern.

Between Worlds originated as a series commissioned for the young artists of the Irving M. Klein International String Competition. Simon created a series of solo pieces — one each for violin, viola, cello, and double bass — that can be played separately or as a kind of suite. Each lasts about four minutes and is marked “sorrowful” at the beginning.

Simon moves between worlds stylistically to evoke the kind of music he imagines Traylor would have heard. He spans such vernacular idioms as the blues with phrasings reminiscent of Bach to cast new light on the “themes of mystical folklore, race, and religion [that] pervade Traylor’s work” — he doesn’t limit himself to interacting with a particular drawing or painting. “In many ways, the simplified forms in Traylor’s artwork tell of the complexity of his world, creativity, and inspiring bid for self-definition in a dehumanizing segregated culture,” explains Simon. “I imagine these solo pieces as a musical study, hopefully showing Traylor’s life between disparate worlds.”

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 50 minutes.

The Ojai Festival Women’s Committee (OFWC) is the largest donor to the internationally acclaimed Ojai Music Festival and its BRAVO Music Education and Community Program. Through their philanthropic and volunteer activities, the OFWC has raised more than one million dollars over the past 70 years!

An active 100+ member volunteer committee, the OFWC presents unique events throughout the year, including the annual Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace, Art & Music Trips, Concerts, Lectures, and fun Socials, all fostering lasting friendships and the continued gift of music to the community.

Join us!

For more info about the OFWC visit OjaiFestival.org/Support or call Anna Wagner at the festival office 805 646 2094.

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Hope Tschopik Schneider and with special support by the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee

There is no intermission during the concert

Visit Bart’s Books table to purchase your own copy of Build a House by Rhiannon Giddens

Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 4:00pm

Libbey Park Gazebo

FREE COMMUNITY EVENT: BUILD A HOUSE

Rhiannon Giddens vocals and banjo | Francesco Turrisi percussion