- Classical music has a problem with diversity
because America has a problem with diversity.
(piano music)
Diversity is more a function of equity and power
than we sometimes allow ourselves to believe
if there're 10 people in a room and you know,
those 10 individuals will have 10 different experiences.
Those 10 individuals might come from 10,
very, very different cultural backgrounds
and yay we have diversity,
but only one of those individuals
might have any kind of agency.
(piano music)
And so if we don't match agency or equity, which is to say,
if we don't empower a diverse group of individuals
with pertinent stakes in a cultural enterprise,
in a business, in a town, in government.
If we don't do that then diversity is an empty shell.
(piano music)
The whole idea of cartography
is that we're mapping these incidents
and we're mapping possibility.
We're not really drawing a map, we're drawing dots.
A map tells you how to get between the dots
and it also tells you how to move beyond the dots.
And so the piece that I made was inspired
by that idea that somebody has to chart the course forward.
- On the whole project to me,
furthers the sustained narrative
that this country finally has,
and being from Louisville,
the whole all of Breonna Taylor and the like,
it's just, it's a very sensitive subject,
especially in the neighborhood where I grew up,
but I feel like this project is really going to help
further that sustained narrative.
And it's doing it with real stories
that socially impact us now.
- Institutional will starts with people,
institutions are made up of people, individuals.
And if someone has a good idea,
it takes other people to respond to that idea
and be willing to roll with it and to turn it into something
and thanks to, you know,
Marc Bamuthi Joseph's incredible idea we made it happen.
- We're tackling a subject matter.
that is of the Black American experience
with Black composers, Black subject matters.
- I wrote a piece called "The Road Ahead".
We had several commissions,
each commission was specific to a particular city.
And then my assignment was to write something
that wasn't necessarily geographically bound
or tied to the events of a specific transgression
against Black dignity,
but to write something that embraced,
maybe the national import of these tragedies,
and also have of the possibility of uplift.
- Marc Bamuthi Joseph came to me with the idea --
it's his brain child -- and I was so inspired.
- The first point of inspiration for me
was just the idea of the labor that starts in the dark
when no one is watching, the before sunrise labor.
And so the piece that I wrote is about a Black woman,
ready to make it happen,
ready to chart the course forward, the road ahead, you know,
the brilliant Carlos Simon is really dope
and just really fast.
I sent him the piece and I guess he took inspiration
and probably less than 48 hours later,
he came back with something.
- I think something that we're uniquely interested in,
somebody like Carlos Simon our new composer in residence,
having somebody who comes from the Black church,
who comes from a jazz background,
who comes from a gospel background,
who comes from kind of feeling things out.
And he comes with a cultural approach
that you can hear in his music.
- Well I grew up in Atlanta, Atlanta Georgia,
hotbed of the civil rights movement,
you know, in the sixties.
And so I grew up hearing these stories
and seeing a lot of the people
that marched in these protests.
People like Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King
and they were all in Atlanta.
So that affected me, you know, it resonated with me
as an African-American male.
That has in a way changed the way I use music as a platform
in understanding how, for instance,
like protest songs sparked protests and marches, you know,
and we still use these protests songs today,
but it came from somewhere.
I think place and time has a lot to do with my music
and understanding my place in the world.
- I think it's really beautiful, it's very spare
piano, cello and essentially two voices,
one operatic and one spoken.
I think the instrumentation is wise and elegant.
Has this feeling of movement and following
and rising and dropping.
It's more like wind than water.
It doesn't necessarily move in the same direction
and it kind of erupts and contracts.
It's just really beautiful I think.
♪ Hmm ♪
♪ Ahh ♪
♪ It is still dark at the bleeding edge ♪
♪ Of the only island she's ever known ♪
♪ Black coffee, back to the as yet risen day ♪
♪ Today, she'll leap the waters ♪
♪ Land on coral asphalt ♪
♪ Red knife and a moral compass in her pocket ♪
♪ Directionless ♪
♪ She notice a slick of rain-soaked oil ♪
♪ Think of it as a trail of crying soft shelled candy ♪
♪ She'll walk towards the running colors ♪
♪ To console them, a seeker ♪
♪ She can't control her legs ♪
♪ This is a daydream of some near later ♪
♪ Happening presently in her head ♪
♪ At present she's on the island ♪
♪ The sun below won't rise for another hour ♪
♪ And someone's son is newly dead ♪
♪ She toasts the day with coffee ♪
♪ Dark and bitter as an innocent suspect ♪
♪ She's supposed to make the leap today, ♪
♪ Today her job is to map the road to progress ♪
♪ She knows this road backward ♪
♪ But the road forward is hard to comprehend ♪
♪ It's twisted, sharp turns ahead ♪
♪ The woman has two trades ♪
♪ Map making and magic ♪
♪ She's gotten it in her head ♪
♪ That she wants to chart the road to progress ♪
♪ Cartographic art to mark the arc of justice ♪
♪ The road forward requires a bridge over troubled water ♪
♪ From an island of floating history ♪
♪ To a mainland made material ♪
♪ By apology and recompense ♪
♪ Her first task is to build a bridge ♪
♪ From past to present ♪
♪ The road forward doesn't begin in the middle ♪
♪ The path forward ♪
♪ Doesn't start at the end ♪
♪ She maps the path from a near beginning ♪
♪ Puts down her cup of black coffee ♪
♪ Picks up a pen of black dignity, a parchment ♪
♪ Light as the giggles of an 11 year-old ♪
♪ In the park some papyrus ♪
♪ Dark like the dreams of a woman ♪
♪ In her own bed asleep ♪
♪ Drags a smoke from a loose square blows hard ♪
♪ Parts the dust so her canvas can breathe ♪
♪ Map making and magic ♪
♪ Black girl lost in thought ♪
♪ Wrappin her head around the direct line ♪
♪ From a police stop in traffic ♪
♪ To something tragic ♪
♪ Daybreak on a floating man-made island ♪
♪ A mass of history set apart ♪
♪ From the manifest destiny of cultural equity ♪
♪ Somebody gotta chart the course ♪
♪ Build a bridge composed of the brick ♪
♪ Of Black dignity and Black sacrifice ♪
♪ Map it to scale ♪
♪ Legend easy to understand ♪
♪ A guide for travelers ♪
♪ Who believe we all should walk upright ♪
♪ Upright, as human beings ♪
♪ Somebody gotta map the pass accurately in music ♪
♪ Art makes sense of insensible things ♪
♪ The woman is hardly all seeing ♪
♪ But she ain't blind ♪
♪ She knows the road she has in mind ♪
♪ Could snap like an untethered young man's spine ♪
♪ The road ahead could be reed thin could ♪
♪ Dive down like a depression ♪
♪ Like an angry hand on a soft bow string ♪
♪ In her head she builds a bridge to what lies ahead ♪
♪ Taut and redemptive as confession ♪
♪ This is a daydream of some near later ♪
♪ Happening presently in her head ♪
♪ At present she's on the island ♪
♪ The sun below won't last for another hour ♪
♪ And someone's daughter is newly gone ♪
♪ Someone map the world ♪
♪ Where her name is never left unsaid ♪
♪ A Black woman, a mother ♪
♪ Back to the as yet risen day ♪
♪ Every day gets asked to map the way ♪
♪ To racial justice ♪
♪ Chart a course of some tomorrow ♪
♪ Full of anti-racists back to the future ♪
♪ She faces the ancestors past ♪
♪ She says their names ♪
♪ She builds a road ♪
♪ Cardinal directions; ♪
♪ Truth. Dimension. Humanity. ♪
♪ Access. Latitudes of public imagination ♪
♪ Longitudinal public policy, XYZ axis ♪
♪ Access the ancestors ♪
♪ Call their names ♪
♪ Map the future, Black dignity ♪
♪ The moral compass ♪
♪ Access the road ♪
♪ Forward ♪
♪ Walk the walk ♪
(piano music)