AS I AM for Baritone saxophone and piano
Each of us has an undeniable spark of humanity within us which sets us apart from anyone that has ever lived or ever will. We each have the capacity to leave a lasting impact on the world through our relationships, creations, and ideas. In the world that we live in today, it is so easy to lose touch with the spark that is deep within our consciousness. We are set back by failure, fear, the everyday hustle of life, and so much more.
As I Am is inspired by my constant struggle to keep my spark from being dimmed and eventually put out entirely. The piece loosely follows my journey as an artist from times of genuine, deep, beautiful contentment, to times of anguish, frustration, and serious thoughts of giving up. I choose to end the work with a relentless ascent of hope that the spark within me will, in fact, carry me through a life of positivity and love.
My hope is that people with similar life experiences will find something to identify with in this piece. I don’t claim to have created a masterpiece or a miraculously intricate work. I just want to share a bit of myself with you, and this is the best way I know how! The work is dedicated to the master pianist and my musical hero, André Watts.
Duration: ~6
Cornell University Lab of Ornithology
(I spent a lot of time here while writing Come As You Are)
Come as you are for tenor saxophone and piano
For several years, I have wanted to write a piece that was dedicated to my immediate family (my mother and three sisters) and the influence of my upbringing on my understanding of music and life in general. When preparing the program for my Young Concert Artists debut recital, it dawned on me that there would be no better time than this to share a work that bears such personal significance.
It seemed obvious to me that this piece needed to take influence from African-American church music in some way. When I think back to my childhood, and especially the beginnings of my journey in music, the church is at the center of so much. We were regular church-goers, my grandfather was a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church, and the church provided us with an incredible community that was very important to my family in the good times and the bad. The church also taught me about the transformative and awesome power of music.
In an effort to honor both my family and the church, I decided to write a four-movement work in which each movement would be dedicated to a different family member and take inspiration from their favorite Negro spiritual or sacred song. My mother chose I Still Have Joy. My three sisters, Kharma, Jennifer, and Ashley, chose His Eye is On the Sparrow, My Lord, What a Morning, and Wade in the Water, respectively. Additionally, I chose to write this piece for tenor saxophone as it was the instrument that I specialized on for my first few years of playing. My church family will largely remember me as playing hymns on the tenor saxophone during our services.
At its core, Come As You Are is an expanded arrangement or setting of these four songs. As a more direct reference to the music played in the church that I grew up going to, the song Total Praise, which is typically sung by a choir, serves as a sort of connective tissue throughout the entire piece. The titles of each movement come from lyrics from Total Praise. The text of each song is vital in understanding the expressive nature of each movement. However, the form and melodic content of each song has been either been expanded, rearranged, or manipulated in a way that is meant to make the message clear when played on instruments that, obviously, can not convey the actual words. Below, I’ve listed the movement titles along with the song that they draw inspiration from.
Lift My Eyes (My Lord, What A Morning)
Times of the Storm (Wade in the Water)
Strength of My Life (His Eye is On the Sparrow)
Lift My Hands (I Still Have Joy)
When interpreted through the lens of classical music, these movements are configured in a way that is intended to align with a slightly deviant four-movement sonata form that composers like Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and many others used in several of their works. In this form, the first movement is an allegro, the second movement is a scherzo or dance, the third movement is an adagio, and the last movement is another fast one, perhaps with a dance feel or including a theme and variations. Come As You Are was conceived of with this in mind, but is not rigidly connected to it.
Through the lens of African-American sacred music, the first two movements, Lift My Eyes and Times of the Storm, are inspired by traditional Negro spirituals. It is important to note that spirituals often contained text that was Biblical on the surface, yet deeply personal or communicative in intention. My Lord, What A Morning and Wade in the Water are no exceptions to this tradition. In this spirit, I aimed to strike a balance between the surface level meaning of these spirituals and what they might have meant for the people that sang them. There may seem to be striking dichotomies in character that are reflective of these varied meanings. The second two movements, Strength of My Life and Lift My Hands, are inspired by songs that are more common in religious practices today. In these, I have tried to make a musical depiction of the lyrics in a way that conveys the message of each song from my perspective.
As I wrote this piece, I realized that one of its purposes was to bring together different facets of my own life experience. As a classical musician, the vast majority of my colleagues have little knowledge or understanding of Black culture or how it influences my music-making. As a Black man from North Carolina, many of my family and friends don’t have a true sense of what I do and love as a classical performer and composer. I have also spent an incredible amount of time and energy on keeping these worlds separate and trying to show up in each as if the other didn’t exist. This “two-ness” is akin to a concept called double consciousness that W.E.B. Dubois introduced at the turn of the 20th century in his book The Souls of Black Folk. He outlines this concept, roughly, as having two simultaneous identities. One of these might be described as uniquely American, while the other is uniquely Black.
This has been further complicated by the saxophone, an instrument that was invented to be a member of the symphony orchestra, but that now is almost singularly associated with jazz and popular music. Even within the classical saxophone community, there is a bit of a divide about whether to dedicate the instrument to experimental new music or to merge it with the mainstream world of concert music. I often find myself at the intersection of being “too ____ for ____ and too ______ for the opposite.”
In many ways, I have experienced all of these aspects of myself finally beginning to merge. As a composer, I strive to let my internal musical voice be “ok” and to follow it where it wanders, trusting that this amalgamation of experiences is leading me in a direction that is uniquely mine and informed by my various interests and identities. Come As You Are is a significant landmark on this journey to musical individuation.
Duration: 18’
Fantasy on recurring Daydreams for solo piano
I am generally fascinated with the natural processes of the mind. Of particular interest to me are the unusual and abstract images and stories that the freely-associative mind creates in the space between wakeful consciousness and subconscious states. They have always struck me as being very musical.
As a composer, I often find myself daydreaming about musical ideas or ways that music might potentially connect with the world around me. These ideas usually come back day after day for months, or even years at a time. Most of the musical ideas in Fantasy on Recurring Daydreams have been rattling around in my mind for several years.
Fantasy on Recurring Daydreams is a musical sketch that depicts the process of slipping into a daydream, being swept away by an abstract subconscious journey, and awakening to the beauty of waking life that is right in front of us if we choose to see it.
Commissioned by Zhu Wang and Young Concert Artists
Through my mother’s Eyes for unaccompanied violin
Through My Mother’s Eyes is a short encore piece for solo violin. It is inspired by and derived from a lullaby that my mother wrote and sang for me when I was very young. Musically speaking, lullabies and encores both lead an excited listener toward some sense of settledness or finality at the end of a shared experience. In an attempt to create the feeling of winding down, Through My Mother’s Eyes turns the popular “theme and variations” form on its head by beginning with playful, lighthearted, variation-like material and concluding with a simple, intimate statement of the lullaby “theme.” In the spirit of J.S. Bach, I decided to use ground bass technique to give the tune a foundation on which all of the musical material could be created.
Programmatically speaking, I used the composition process to imagine what it might have been like for my mother to calm me down when I had too much energy and didn’t want the day to be over. The first portion of the piece takes the perspective of a young child. There are a few climactic moments in which I imagine the parent and child are joyfully playing together. The end is intended to be from the viewpoint of a reflective parent after the child has finally fallen asleep.
Through My Mother’s Eyes was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for violinist Hilary Hahn.