I started on this blogpost nearly two months ago, but could just as well have written most of it two days ago…
I sit bleary-eyed at home finally having taken one more step into the future...as the New York Times Magazine article of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, "The Worth of Black Men, From Slavery to Ferguson" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/magazine/the-worth-of-black-men-from-slavery-to-ferguson.html exacts itself with predominant force upon my muted emotions. The article begins with a discussion of the Tyre Glen Papers (housed in the Rubenstein Library at Duke University), an annotated document listing the monetary valuation of black male slaves purchased by Glen, who was a walking parade of paradoxes--slavetrader, tobacco planter, abolitionist and antisecessionist!!
The article shifts from the revelation of the value of male slaves in North Carolina and Virginia in c.1850--to the killing of black men in the United States in 2014 with "similar paradoxical discursive etiquette", that smooth and abrupt motion of attempted reconciliation to two terrible transformations: the valuation of human lives in terms of finite mediums of exchange, and its polar opposite--sanctioned killing in the name of supposed "order".
This evening (12 October 2014) I am to perform a solo recital of music for solo violoncello works of African-American composers--George Perle*, Tania Leon, James Lee III and Adolphus Hailstork (*Perle is not African-American but of Jewish ancestry; his name and work is given associative honorific inclusion on this program without need of further explanation.) Perhaps it is the fatigue of having performed last night or the added activity of hosting my girlfriend from Atlanta on this [that] crowded weekend of musical activity, but having read this article casts my impending performance into an even newer, more profound and still yet more disturbing light and perspective. The title of the program, "Mors janua vitae: Music of Progress and Process, Memory Projected Into The Future".
It is a program whose works and earliest performance is connected to both personal loss (of my friend and longtime colleague, former St. Aug's and NCCU choral director Richard Banks) and premiere of two new works: "Abraham's Sons: in Memoriam Trayvon Martin" (2013) by James Lee III, and "Sonata for Cello" (2012) by Adolphus Hailstork.
The program's works move swiftly and briefly (save the Lee and Hailstork) between meditative contemplations of the brevity of life and the length of memory in terms of sound, silence, and whatever else is transacted within the mind and heart of the listener. It is in the Lee work that the force of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts' article meets the content of my performance: while the shooting of Trayvon Martin and trial of George Zimmermann and unprecedented publicization of the shooting via social media is now more than two years' past, the immediacy of the Lee work provides a somber soundtrack to a familiar African-American tenor (not in the musical sense here...further irony notwithstanding): the value of black male life in American history appears to ebb and flow, or "crest and trough" from high value...to no value.
The fortunate guise of James Lee's (III) work is that it focuses on the universal HUMAN tragedy of the Trayvon Martin shooting, and it received presidential commentary and "familial endorsement"...
From two months in retrospect, we now move to mass nonviolent demonstrations on the interstate freeways and thoroughfares of our major cities and on social media networks, where the mantra is chanted "I Can't Breathe"!! My choice of the above program was to pay quiet homage to Trayvon Martin, but while I was preparing both notes, rhythms and "musical expressions", Eric Garner and Michael Brown would leave this world under violent and racially motivated circumstances. The quiet and sad irony which descended upon me during the late summer months led me to post this introspective question: "How far removed am I...from Trayvon, Eric, Michael, Emmett, Medgar, Harry Moore and other names both famous and obscure but too numerous to count and list?? (even though they should be…'maybe that's the next "QUILT Project" which contains its own resident irony, as a project, that is).
I have learned through my love of reading and speaking with "the elders" about history and its lessons...that acts of race violence committed in the past usually tended to cause the black community to galvanize and garrison for additional attacks. Of course, that was at a time when the sense of fear and ignorance was strongly tied to the legacies of slavery and postwar violence…that is, the Civil War. 150 years have nearly passed since then...and there is incontrovertible evidence that "change has come", but in this present time the forces once regarded as "evil" in the 1860s (slaveholders, planters and businessmen who openly profited off of slave labor and production) have been replaced by forces who are replications--not of the "Old South" depicted in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Gone With The Wind", but of the vilest slice of Wall Street and the privatized "corrections" system…who obviously are collaborating with the police and district attorneys at the local, county, state and national levels.
Now...half of that previous sentence doesn't smack me in the face each morning. But it does for hundreds of thousands of black men who look like me, (sometimes) act like me, (maybe) dress like me, laugh like me, love like me, cry like me, sacrifice like me (although the media dare not let you see that on primetime television!!), and like me, one day at a time...try to keep from unnecessarily dying.
As I ponder what next to do musically with "Abraham's Sons: in memoriam Trayvon Martin" of James Lee III, my questions become thankfully simple. Who ARE---"Abraham's Sons"? In the present-day sense, we all are through the Biblical (and original Hebrew) covenant made with Abraham which extended to humanity "in the numbers of grains of sand on the seashore". The Abrahamic covenant extends to the other Old and New Testament covenants which followed it through Moses, David and culminate in the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth. But my American question is more difficult to ask and answer, and I am convinced that its difficulty lies in how obviously clear the lines of conflict have twice again been drawn when we consider the tragedies of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Another obvious irony: allegedly illegal tobacco products served as the means, motive and law enforcement "opportunity" to continue the tradition of black male profiling, and for the arresting officer to overreact in ignorant fear followed by lies and administration deception, leading to a "no indictment", slapping the families and the public coldly in the face.
Yes, "America needs some air"…I will try and once again make the music of Tania Leon, James Lee III, Adolphus Hailstork and others provide some sort of "air passage" for the emotions that still await a potential encounter of expression.
Get some air the best way you know how, America…"by any (positive, faithful, beneficial) means necessary"…
Peace…
Tim
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