Norfolk Festival goes online, expands partnership with Daniel Bernard Roumain

Daniel Bernard Roumain

In 2019, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival/Yale Summer School of Music, with the support of the Desai Family Foundation, commissioned composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) for a new chamber work, which was to have had its premiere in summer 2020. It will now be premiered at Norfolk in 2021. In the meantime, as part of the festival’s Musical Bridges program, “which commissions new works that place classical chamber music within a broader musical and cultural context,” DBR and the festival launched a series of conversations about the composer’s forthcoming work, Can We Talk About Why the Fires Burn? and the role of art in society. The first of those conversations, between DBR, Festival Director Melvin Chen, and Sphinx Organization President and Artistic Director Afa S. Dworkin, took place in October.

The 2020 festival itself was held online and featured broadcasts of performances from an otherwise empty Music Shed, videos of concerts recorded during previous summers, and conversations about the festival and its programming. The festival also partnered with WMNR, which broadcast concerts from 2018 and 2019, which the festival had started doing online in March, when the pandemic arrived.

As it looks to summer 2021, the festival continues to host conversations with DBR about his piece, which he’s said, “will seek to musically respond to the confrontations and conversations that have and are happening between Black men, people of color, law enforcement, and an undefined civic morality,” and the role art can play in exploring the systemic racism and police brutality that afflict Black communities and other communities of color. q

Learn more about Musical Bridges and the festival’s partnership with DBR here and read DBR’s May 28, 2020, Declaration & Affirmation of Love for Black People here.