19: Numinous Crib Notes

photo Angela Davis at St. Cloud University From public domain, PhotoJournal.com

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2011
19 

“…we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
James Baldwin, from 
An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis

19 is inspired by two, seemly disparate sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke Op. 19 from 1911 and Angela Davis. The initial musical impetus was with the Schoenberg, specifically it was one of my "what if" questions, where I challenge myself with a compositional quandary. In this case, can I make Schoenberg funky? But the emotional timber of 19 is inspired by the activist Angela Davis, specifically her iconic status in Black culture of the 1970s. Particularly I was moved by James Baldwin's An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis from November 19, 1970, which while condemning the arrest of Angela Davis a few months before the letter, also goes on to describe, in biting and incisive commentary, the state of racial dynamics in the United States and paints Davis as a soldier in that on-going struggle for racial and social equality.

19 is one part of a larger, as of now untitled, mixed music composition that will be recorded next year.  

Numinous
Monday March 21, 2011 9 PM to 11 PM
$10 suggested donation
Tea Lounge
837 Union Street
Park Slope
Take the M, R Train to Union Street

 Check back as I'll post some more crib notes about the compositions we'll be performing.

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 9:07 AM