The Grey Land Reviews

​"Mr. Phillips can be heard rendering these varied cultural signals into a heterogenous work of art — but one that has a coherence the world often lacks. And this, in the end, seems like his latest understanding of 'the digging of everything.' Sometimes that digging may involve appreciation; at other points, it is simply a process of documentation, or of profitably trying to sort one’s own complex feelings."
​— Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times, "In the Wake of Ferguson, a Style-Blurring Album"
“...it begins with the monochrome blocks of a chorale, ‘The People Get Tired of Dying’, and ends with the cry of a black mother grieving her dead child. In between, Phillips and 28 members of his Numinous ensemble deal with the sad, lonely iniquities of her life. It would be devastating live-streamed. As it is, the closely produced recording captures the claustrophobia of her oppression and the highly charged intensity of the words...”
​—Laurence Vittes, Gramophone, April 2021
Joseph C. Phillips Jr.’s The Grey Land is a stirring, stylistically varied mono-opera that draws on its composer’s reflections on being Black in contemporary America.
​— Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times "The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020"
"The Grey Land...[Joseph C Phillips Jr's] most ambitious, and possibly most important work yet."​
​— John Schaefer, New Sounds, "Top 10 of 2020" (#4)
“The Grey Land is rich with allusions to tragedy, hope, and resistance…With his stirring meditation on racial injustice, Phillips confronts a classical tradition that has often been used to ennoble its white subjects to the exclusion of others.”
​— Oussama Zahr, The New Yorker
"Phillips conveys the sorrow, agony, rage and sheer exhaustion of the struggle while at the same time radiating a shared strength, beauty, and determination. Soprano Rebecca L Hargrove and narrator Kenneth Browning embody all of these as mother and son, deftly aided by Phillips's own 28-piece Numinous ensemble in giving voice to a collective cry for justice that echoes through the years...the composer's 'mixed music' idiom lends sociopolitical thrust to a post-minimalism that suffuses the work with added poignancy in light of the historic neglect of Julius Eastman, his minimalist precursor."
— Steph Power, BBC Music Magazine​ (4 out of 5 stars)
"Shorn of the safety net of historical distance that enables us to shake our heads, weep, and then walk away from the tragedies of yore, The Grey Land plants us resolutely in the present. It's seeds...lie deep in the soil of American experience...
As much as the libretto addresses the core of the issue, it's Phillips's score that defines the pain as universal...his restless, churning, and strangely beautiful music forges a path straight to the heart."
— Jason Victor Serinus, Stereophile ​(4 out of 5 stars)
"That the album arrives at yet another flashpoint in U.S. history elevates The Grey Land from a breakthrough piece to a necessary statement."— Steve Smith, Night After Night
"...the overall arc of [The Grey Land] is well-conceived and promises to be a stunning and complex multimedia portrait of Black America when it is able to be fully realized."
— Amanda Cook, I Care If You Listen,
​"Editor's Picks: 2020 Contemporary Classical Albums"
“By the time ‘Streets of Sighs’ [the last scene from The Grey Land] concludes I’m exhausted. Not only because of the…great examples of Black Liberation Music I have taken in, but the reflections I am forced to reckon with…and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t super emotional by the end of the listening…”
— Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn, The Wire Magazine
"As we’ve seen in the last year, there is something tremendously out of tune with the state of our humanity, and Phillips has made a bold effort at immersion therapy in [The Grey Land]: this hour of space pushes us with the brute, blunt force of a political statement and simultaneously delivers the shivers and sacred space of a requiem.”
--American Record Guide, July/August 2021
"Overall, The Grey Land depicts a dramatic and tragic story of modern Black America well, with glimmers of hope and Afrofuturism sprinkled about. The composition as a whole is brassy and triumphal; solemn and evocative; expressive and harmonious…The Grey Land not only sits in sorrow and unpacks injustice, but also provides a lens into what Blackness looks like without oppression and the constant threat of death." 
— Jasmine Ivanna Espy, I Care If You Listen,
"The Grey Land: Joseph C. Phillips Jr. Captures the Essence of Modern Black America"
“[The Grey Land], of course, draws attention to Phillips’ incredible music and the performances by Numinous and [Rebecca L] Hargrove, who are a perfect blend of precision and emotion. The opera is a dense work of ideas and emotion, and the accompanying liner notes help clarify references and reward multiple listenings. Overall, the album is highly recommended…”
— Grey McCandless, Black Grooves
"The Grey Land... is one man, with an extraordinary grasp of history and the present, attempting to make sense of the world in which he lives and expressing it a kaleidoscope of emotions and sound."
​— Rick Perdian, ​​Seen and Heard International
"...the sympathy and sincerity of Joe Phillips's haunting The Grey Land..."
—George Grella, The Brooklyn Rail, "Opera in Our New World"
"The Grey Land's tone is, variously angry, wistful, haunted, and hallucinogenic. It's an agonizing journey but, somehow one that holds out the promise of a better world." —Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound (4.5 of 5 stars)
"[The Grey Land's] impact is considerable and does not evaporate once the basic statement has been made, for a creative structure has been married to a committed message."​—James Manheim, All Music
"This is Joe Phillips time. He’s a singular composer who uses beauty and suggestions of the pleasure of pop music to surreptitiously and incontrovertibly reveal the essential Africa-American roots underlying everything we love in American culture. Eight years in gestation, The Grey Land is a multimedia mono-drama... and is the story of one Black mother’s experiences making her way through American society across 'the intractable triumvirate of race, class, and power.'"
​—George Grella, The Brooklyn Rail

The Grey Land Interviews & Features

"In the Wake of Ferguson, a Style-Blurring Album"
interview/feature with Seth Colter Walls for The New York Times​
New York Times
​"The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020"
5 Questions
interview for I Care If You Listen & American Composers Forum
BBC Magazine
​"Meet the Composer" Feature Interview​
Mikeypod
Podcast interview with Michael Harren​
WRUU
Contemporary Classics
Interview with Dave Lake
Second Street Dreams
​Classical Music in Color
Podcast Interview with Judlyne Lilly Gibson
New Sounds
Program #4446
​WNYC
Top 10 of 2020
#4
New Sounds
​Program #4431
WNYC
​ Three Musical Tales
For Press inquiries please contact:
Amanda Sweet
Amanda [at] bucklesweet.com
347. 564. 3371