And color my world Black Gold
August 29, 2016 3:19 AM Subscribe
"What we do best is through music," says violist Ashleigh Gordon, defending the approach to African-American experience of her multimedia collective Castle of our Skins. Can avant-garde composed music be the soundtrack for racial and feminist activism?
The bravest musical project of the not-so-new millennium is a Boston-area concert series called Castle Of Our Skins, founded by two New England Conservatory alumni: composer Anthony Green and violist Ashleigh Gordon. In concerts and presentations from the African-American neighborhood of Roxbury to Beacon Hill, COOS has brought visibility to neglected black poets and composers as well as issues facing the black community in the USA today.
This is African-American culture examined through a twenty-first century aesthetic lens: Green is a modernist American composer in the tradition of Charles Ives and Elliott Carter. Gordon also plays in a string trio ensemble called Sound Energy that specializes in new and experimental music. The music they choose for their programs ranges from avant-garde jazz composers like Ed Bland to contemporary academic composers like Jeffrey Mumford.
These concerts always deal with the African-American experience in a surprisingly secular and gender-neutral fashion. The musicians are mostly female (lending a saucy irony to Gordon's introducing them as "the COOS crew"), and the presentations never descend into religious sentiment.
At the African-American Meeting House on Beacon Hill on June 7, the series' third season culminated in Freedom Rising, a tour through the disturbing history of black confinement in America, from slavery to Attica to mass incarceration and beyond. The modern music accompanied narration that included poetry and letters from inmates throughout American history. (Part 1 of the concert here, part 2 here.)
Perhaps not surprisingly for activism as culturally and musically volatile as that of COOS, the gulf between Boston's new-music community and its African-American arts community has kept the concert project's visibility to a minimum. The only media coverage has been on the cable-access level, a situation that only indicates how necessary such a project is.
The bravest musical project of the not-so-new millennium is a Boston-area concert series called Castle Of Our Skins, founded by two New England Conservatory alumni: composer Anthony Green and violist Ashleigh Gordon. In concerts and presentations from the African-American neighborhood of Roxbury to Beacon Hill, COOS has brought visibility to neglected black poets and composers as well as issues facing the black community in the USA today.
This is African-American culture examined through a twenty-first century aesthetic lens: Green is a modernist American composer in the tradition of Charles Ives and Elliott Carter. Gordon also plays in a string trio ensemble called Sound Energy that specializes in new and experimental music. The music they choose for their programs ranges from avant-garde jazz composers like Ed Bland to contemporary academic composers like Jeffrey Mumford.
These concerts always deal with the African-American experience in a surprisingly secular and gender-neutral fashion. The musicians are mostly female (lending a saucy irony to Gordon's introducing them as "the COOS crew"), and the presentations never descend into religious sentiment.
At the African-American Meeting House on Beacon Hill on June 7, the series' third season culminated in Freedom Rising, a tour through the disturbing history of black confinement in America, from slavery to Attica to mass incarceration and beyond. The modern music accompanied narration that included poetry and letters from inmates throughout American history. (Part 1 of the concert here, part 2 here.)
Perhaps not surprisingly for activism as culturally and musically volatile as that of COOS, the gulf between Boston's new-music community and its African-American arts community has kept the concert project's visibility to a minimum. The only media coverage has been on the cable-access level, a situation that only indicates how necessary such a project is.
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posted by Fritz Langwedge at 5:59 AM on August 29, 2016