Charles Petzold

I decided to celebrate Black History Month this year by learning more about Black composers throughout the centuries. My primary strategy was to search what YouTube had to offer in performances of their music. I knew a bunch of names (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, Julius Eastman, Eleanor Alberga) and some of their music, but certainly not enough.

I began with the Wikipedia article List of Composers of African Descent, moved it into Excel, sorted it by birth year, and then began plugging names into YouTube in search of performances, which I prefer to studio recordings. I reduced the list to 28 composers and chose a composition from each. In this process of curation, I focused primarily on composers working within the European tradition who created notated music to be performed by others, rather than those composers more identified with jazz and blues. (No Mary Lou Williams here, I’m afraid, or Miles Davis, or John Coltrane, or Ornette Coleman.)

I then sorted that list by the date of the selected composition. I’m afraid that other work commitments precluded me from devoting my full time to this project such as I did with Beethoven, so I mostly used Wikipedia to write a little about each composer and their music. For living composers (of which there are quite a few), I was able to use the composers’ websites and interviews for more information. I posted the results on Facebook every day during the month of February, and because my list expanded to 31 composers, spilling into March as well.

Here’s what I posted. If you find yourself more interested in any of these composers, obviously much more information can be obtained from Wikipedia and other sources.

1. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1739–1799)

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges is the first person of African descent known to have composed within the European instrumental tradition. Born in Guadeloupe of a wealthy planter and his wife’s African slave, Saint-Georges was educated in France, played violin in an amateur orchestra in Paris, and later fought for the Republic in an all-Black regiment during the French Revolution.

Roughly contemporaneous with Haydn, Saint-Georges composed operas, symphonies, violin concertos, and chamber music. This string quartet was probably composed around 1770, the year that Beethoven was born. Haydn’s string quartets of this era generally had four movements, but the string quartets of Saint-Georges (at least the ones that I’ve heard) have only two movements, an Allegro and a Rondeau. The instrumentation is also different: Haydn used two violins, a viola, and cello. Here there’s only one violin, one viola, cello, and bass.

2. Francis Johnson (1792–1844)

Francis Johnson was born in Philadelphia. It is not known if his parents were enslaved, but his own status would have been determined by Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery of 1780, which provided partial freedom (and eventually full freedom) to anyone born after that date.

Francis Johnson played the bugle and violin, but most importantly, he was the first American-born composer of African descent to have his music published and performed by others. In 1837, he and some other Black musicians went to England to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria, but it is not known for sure whether he performed for the new queen. Although he wrote over 200 compositions, most of them have been lost.

Johnson’s first published composition seems to be A Collection of New Cotillions for piano, which was published in Philadelphia in 1818 and made Johnson famous. A cotillion is a type of French country dance. Music of this sort would have been played to accompany dancing in social settings.

3. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London to a white English woman named Alice Hare Martin and a Black man named Samuel Taylor, who was in London studying medicine. Samuel Taylor was descended from African American slaves who had been freed by the British at the end of the American Revolution and relocated in Sierre Leone. Alice Martin named her son Samuel Coleridge Taylor after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (The hyphen came later.) As a boy, he learned violin from musicians on his mother’s side, and when he was 15, he began attending the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition.

During Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s lifetime, his most famous composition was the cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898), which was followed by two more cantatas about Hiawatha to form The Song of Hiawatha. This work was performed at the Royal Albert Hall numerous times in the early 20th century with costumes and dancing. Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions have opus numbers up to 82, including orchestral suites with African and Native American themes, ballet scores, an opera, choral works, songs, and chamber music. When Coleridge-Taylor toured in the United States in the early 1900s, New York musicians called him the “African Mahler.”

YouTube features several performances of his Nonet (Op. 2) and Clarinet Quintet (Op. 10). This is Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade for orchestra, Op. 33, dating from 1898.

4. Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943)

Robert Nathaniel Dett was born in Ontario, a descendent of people who had escaped from slavery by travelling north to Canada. His family moved to America when he was 11, and Dett studied at Oberlin Conservatory of Music where he became familiar with the compositions of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the American-influenced music of Antonín Dvořák.

Throughout his life, Dett composed and taught music. In 1916 he married pianist and educator Helen Elise Smith, who was the first Black graduate of a music school that later evolved into Juilliard.

Dett’s eminently enjoyable piano composition In the Bottoms dates from 1913. This suite of five movements depicts life among Black Americans living along riverbanks (called “bottoms”) in the American South, and mixes African American folk music with influences of European romantic composers. The last movement depicts a Juba dance, a type of dance incorporating clapping and body slapping that was brought from Africa and spread among enslaved people.

In the Bottoms was performed numerous times in the early 20th century, including at an “All Colored Composers’ Concert” in Chicago in 1914.

5. Amanda Christina Elizabeth Aldridge (Montague Ring) (1866–1956)

Amanda Aldridge was born in London. Her father was African American actor Ira Aldridge, who emigrated to England and achieved fame on the London stage in several roles, including (of course) Othello.

Amanda Aldridge was a concert singer and opera singer until her throat was permanently damaged by laryngitis at about the age of 40. She then took to composing under the name Montague Ring, writing dances for wind bands and parlor songs, including some with titles of the sort popular during the early decades of the 20th century, such as “Little Missie Cakewalk” and “When the Coloured Lady Saunters Down the Street”.

Amanda Aldridge’s 1927 piano composition Four Moorish Pictures: An Eastern Suite is known mostly for its haunting first movement, “Prayer Before Battle,” here performed in a transcription for harp.

6. Amadeo Roldán (1900–1939)

Amadeo Roldán was born in Paris and was introduced to music by his mother, a mixed-race Cuban. He studied at the Madrid Conservatory and then moved to Havana to perform and compose. He was a major figure in the Afrocubanismo movement that introduced African influences into orchestral music, and particularly the use of percussion.

Part’s 5 and 6 of Roldán’s 1930 composition Ritmicas (Spanish for “rhythmic”) are for a percussion ensemble. This is one of the earliest compositions for percussion only, preceding the premiere of Edgard Varèse’s famous Ionisation by three years.

7. William Grant Still (1895–1978)

William Grant Still was born in Mississippi but grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He attended Wilberforce University, a landmark historically black university in Ohio, and Oberlin Conservatory of Music, part of Oberlin College, which admitted African-American students even prior to the Civil War.

Still was once known as the “Dean of Afro American composers” for his many accomplishments. With his opera Troubled Island (composed 1939; produced 1949) about the Haiti Revolution, he became the first American to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera. His opera A Bayou Legend was the first opera by an African American to be broadcast on television. He composed seven other operas, five symphonies, and many chamber and choral works.

Still composed his first symphony, called the Afro-American Symphony, in 1930. For about two decades thereafter, it was one of most widely performed pieces of symphonic music by any American. Each of the four movements has an epigraph from a poem by African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and in his notebooks Still titled the movements “Longing,” “Sorrow,” “Humor,” and “Aspiration.” He wrote

I seek in the “Afro-American Symphony” to portray not the higher type of colored American, but the sons of the soil, who still retain so many of the traits peculiar to their African forebears; who have not responded completely to the transforming effect of progress.

Right from his opening measures, the Afro-American Symphony incorporates blues harmonies and rhythms. We hear the suggestions of spirituals in the second movement, popular jazz-like music in the lively third movement, while the last movement has some hymn-like sections.

8. Florence Price (1887–1953)

Florence Beatrice Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and educated at the New England Conservatory of Music. Although she taught music briefly in Little Rock and at an HBCU in Atlanta, her career did not blossom until she and her husband escaped the South and moved to Chicago, where she continued to study music and began composing.

In 1932, Florence Price completed her first symphony, which was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This accomplishment made Florence Price the Black woman to have a composition played by a major American orchestra. The first movement is reminiscent of Dvořák’s Symphony for the New World (1893), which used Native American melodies and was influential in demonstrating to many early African American composers that it was possible to incorporate American music within the European symphonic tradition. The third movement of Price’s Symphony No. 1 is a Juba Dance — such as Robert Nathaniel Dett pioneered in his In the Bottoms suite (Day 4) — but also including African drums and a slide whistle.

Florence Price created an impressive body of work, including four symphonies, violin and piano concertos, orchestral suites (several with Black themes), chamber music (including two string quartets), piano music, organ music, choral music, songs, and arrangements of spirituals, some of which were performed by Marian Anderson.

There has been increasing interest in Florence Price’s music in recent years, with a corresponding increase in performances. The Philadelphia Orchestra will be playing her Symphony No. 1 tomorrow evening at Carnegie Hall, and I’ll be there.

The video is Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement (1932–34), which does indeed consist of one continuous movement, but it is divided internally into several sections with a rather traditional dramatic arc: a slow introduction leading to an expansive first movement, a central slow movement, and concluding with a rollicking Juba dance.

9. William L. Dawson (1899–1990)

William L. Dawson was born in Anniston, Alabama, and ran away from home to study at the Tuskegee Institute, making money by playing various instruments and singing in choirs. He continued to study at various colleges and music schools, including two schools in Chicago.

Dawson began composing at a young age. His works include orchestral pieces, chamber music, and choral music. In particular, his settings of African American spirituals are highly regarded.

Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony was premiered in 1934 by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It consists of three movements: The Bond of Africa, Hope in the Night, and O Let Me Shine! Dawson revised the score in 1952 after he visited West Africa and became familiar with rhythmic structures of indigenous African music.

10. Julia Amanda Perry (1924–1979)

Julia Perry was born in Lexington, Kentucky and grew up in Akron, Ohio. She studied music at several schools, including Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood and Juilliard. She later taught in Tallahassee and Atlanta.

Julia Perry’s compositions are not widely known or performed, but she wrote several operas (including operas based on Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and Wilde’s The Selfish Giant), 12 symphonies, and works for choruses. She experimented with harmony and a technique she called “pantonal” that used all the notes of the octave without settling into a particular key.

Julia Perry composed her Short Piece for Orchestra in 1952 and was much elevated in visibility in 1965 when it was performed and recorded by the New York Philharmonic. Although not overtly based on the rhythms of African music or jazz, it has a startling rhythmic intensity that grabs you by the shoulders but occasionally recedes to reveal an engaging chromatic lyricism.

The Stabat Mater (literally “mother standing”) is a 13th century hymn that portrays the mother of Christ standing at the Cross. Many composers have set it to music. Julia Perry’s setting for contralto and string orchestra is sometimes said to have been composed in 1947, sometimes 1951.

11. Margaret Allison Bonds (1913–1972)

Margaret Bonds was born in Chicago. Her father was a physician and civil rights activist who wrote a book entitled Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities. Her mother was a church musician who was Margaret’s first music teacher.

Beginning in high school, Margaret studied piano and composition with Florence Price and William Dawson. She later earned Masters degrees in music and composition at Northwestern University, and then studied at Juilliard. In 1933 she became to first Black person to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She met Langston Hughes in 1936 and they became close friends. Many of her songs are settings of his poetry.

Margaret Bonds’ compositions include works for orchestra, chorus, theatre, voice, and piano. Her lovely Spiritual Suite for piano from 1967 has three movements: The Valley of the Bones, The Bells, and Troubled Water.

12. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932–2004)

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was presciently named by his musician mother after African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Day 3). Although he was possibly born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he grew up in New York City, attending the High School of Music and Arts, and New York University. In 1965 he cofounded the Symphony of the New World, which was the first racially integrated orchestra in the United States.

Besides composing orchestral and chamber works, Coleridge Perkinson also wrote a ballet score for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Beginning in 1970, Perkinson composed film scores for several blaxploitation movies such as The Education of Sonny Carson, as well as the romantic drama A Warm December directed and starring Sidney Poitier, and the documentary Montgomery to Memphis about Martin Luther King Jr.

Coleridge Perkinson’s lively String Quartet No. 1 “Calvary” dates from 1956.

13. Ulysses Simpson Kay (1917–1995)

Ulysses Kay was born into a musical family in Tucson, and began learning piano and violin at an early age, continuing at the University of Arizona, the Eastman School of Music, Yale, and Columbia.

Besides orchestral, choral, and chamber works, Kay composed five operas: His opera Jubilee (1976) was based on a novel by Chicago Black Renaissance author and poet Margaret Walker (1915–1998) and his final opera Frederick Douglass (1979–85) was performed by the New Jersey State Opera in 1991.

Kay’s earlier works were neoclassical in style, but by the 1960s, he was exploring more modernist tonal languages. His Scherzi Musicali from 1968 uses twelve-tone techniques to build a scintillatingly dissonant work in five movements with often sparse and finely textured chromatic lyricism.

14. Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989)

Undine Smith Moore was the granddaughter of slaves but became known as the “Dean of Black Woman Composers.” She grew up in an area of Virginia with a large African-American population. She sang at the neighborhood Baptist church and began piano lessons at the age of 7. Her college education started at Fisk (an historically black college), after which she got a scholarship to Juilliard, and later attended Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music.

Undine Smith Moore was part of the Harlem Renaissance and a strong supporter of the emerging Civil Rights movement. She later wrote:

One of the most evil effects of racism in my time was the limits it placed upon the aspirations of blacks, so that though I have been “making up” and creating music all my life, in my childhood or even in college I would not have thought of calling myself a composer or aspiring to be one.

Undine Smith Moore wrote mostly choral music and music for voice and piano, but also solo piano music and chamber music. Her 1981 choral and orchestral composition Scenes from the Life of a Martyr about Martin Luther King was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Undine Smith Moore’s Afro-American Suite from 1969 is a gorgeous four-movement work for flute, cello, and piano that incorporates several African-American spirituals, beginning with the well-known “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” It is performed here by musicians from Serbia, Poland, and Japan.

15. Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004)

Zenobia Powell was born in Oklahoma in a middle-class home. Her father was a physician. One of her grandfathers had been enslaved, and he was still alive when she was young. It was from him that she first heard traditional African-American spirituals. Besides singing, Zenobia Powell learned piano and violin. She studied privately with Robert Nathaniel Dett (Day 4) and at the Tuskegee Institute with William L. Dawson (Day 8).

Perry spent most of her life teaching music and only came to composition later. Her 1985 opera Tawawa House is set in 1852 at a real-life hotel that became a stop on the underground railroad and was later the site of Wilberforce College, the first black-owned college in the United States.

One of Zenobia Powell Perry’s most performed compositions is Threnody (1969 to 1972), a song cycle of five settings of poems by the rather obscure Harlem Renaissance poet Donald Jeffrey Hayes (1904–1991). Here are their texts:

“Threnody”

Let happy throats be mute;
Only the tortured reed
Is made a flute!

Only the broken heart can sing
And make of song
A breathless and lovely thing!

Only the sad-only the tortured throat
Contrives of sound
A strangely thrilling note!

Only the tortured throat can fling
Beauty against the sky-
Only the broken heart can sing
Not asking why!!!

“Alien”

Do not stifle me with the strange scent
Of low growing mountain lilies—
Do not confuse me
With the salubrious odor of honeysuckle!

I cannot separate in my mind
Sweetness from sweetness—
Mimosa from wild white violets;
Magnolia from Cape jasmine!

I am from north tide country,
I can understand only the scent of seaweed;
Salt marsh and scrub pine
Riding on the breath of an amorous fog!

O do not confuse me
With sweetness upon sweetness;
Let me escape safely from this gentle madness—
Let me go back to the salt of sanity
In the scent of the sea . . . !

“Benediction”

Not with my hands
But with my heart I bless you:
May peace forever dwell
Within your breast!

May Truth’s white light
Move with you and possess you—
And may your thoughts and words
Wear her bright crest!

May Time move down
Its endless path of beauty
Conscious of you
And better for your being!

Spring after Spring
Array itself in splendor
Seeking the favor
Of your sentient seeing!

May hills lean toward you
Hills and windswept mountains
And trees be happy
That have seen you pass—

Your eyes dark kinsmen
To the stars above you—
Your feet remembered
By the blades of grass. . . . !

“Poet”

No rock along the road but knows
The inquisition of his toes;
No journey’s end but what can say:
He paused and rested here a day!
No joy is there that you may meet
But what will say: His kiss was sweet!
No sorrow but will sob to you:
He knew me intimately too. . . . !

“Pastourelle”

Walk this mile in silence —-
Let no sound intrude
Upon the vibrant stillness
Of this solitude!

Let no thought be spoken
Nor syllable be heard
Lest the spell be broken
By the thunder of a word!

Here, such matchless wonder is
As might tear apart —-
Should the lip give tone

To the fullness of the heart…!

16. Julius Eastman (1940–1990)

Julius Eastman was born in New York City and grew up in Ithaca. He studied at Ithaca College and then the Curtis Institute of Music, graduating in 1963 with a degree in composition.

Beginning in 1971, Eastman composed and performed as part of the avant-garde S.E.M Ensemble, and also performed in more “uptown” music venues. (I’m pretty sure that I saw Eastman in 1976 when he sang Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King conducted by Pierre Boulez. He also recorded that piece.) Some of Eastman’s performances were informed by his role as a Black and gay activist, and his compositions sometimes have starkly provocative titles.

In the 1980s, as Eastman’s employment opportunities declined, he developed a dependence on drugs. A turning point in his life came when he was evicted from his East Village apartment, and he lived for a period in Tompkins Square Park. He died of cardiac arrest in a hospital in Buffalo at the age of 49.

In recent years, Eastman’s music has undergone a revival. He is now regarded as an important proto-minimalist, although certainly a unique one, as he often combines aleatoric and improvised elements with more rigid repetitive structures.

Performing Julius Eastman’s music presents several difficulties. Often the scores that he left behind are quite sketchy and in some cases, scores have to be recreated from old performance recordings. But progress has been made. On February 3, I saw the New York Philharmonic perform Eastman’s lovely Symphony No. II — The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved, the handwritten score of which Eastman gave to his former lover R. Nemo Hill in 1983 and which was not performed until 2018.

I’ve selected one of several performances available on YouTube of Julius Eastman’s oddly spelled Femenine from 1974, an entrancing minimalist work of haunting beauty.

Julius Eastman’s Stay On It is quite often performed as my blog entry Julius Eastman’s “Stay On It” Incessantly demonstrates.

17. Roque Cordero (1917–2008)

Roque Cordero was born in Panama City and studied both composition and conducting in the United States. He conducted the National Symphony of Panama, was assistant director of the Latin American Music Center, and later taught composition at Indiana University and Illinois State University.

Roque Cordero’s music became better known when his spectacular 1962 composition Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was included in Columbia Records’ Black Composers Series (nine LPs released between 1974 and 1978). But Cordero preferred being regarded as a Panamanian composer rather than a Black composer or even an Afro-Panamanian composer. He would sign his correspondence “Roque Cordero, Panamanian Composer.” In an interview, he said:

I am a composer from Panama. When you read about me, you will find that I am the only composer from Panama, and because I am the only one, I am called the best. If there were two, I wouldn’t be the best, and I have to be the best.

Roque Cordero’s music combines modernist twelve-tone techniques with Panamanian folk elements. His compositions include works for orchestra, a variety of chamber ensembles, and piano. This is his Elegy for Strings dating from 1979. It is performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Association of Dominican Classical Artists, based in New York City.

18. David Baker (1931–2016)

David Baker was born in Indianapolis and studied music at Indiana University in Bloomington. He later taught at IU and in 1968 he introduced the first academic program for Jazz Studies in an American college. He chaired that Jazz Studies department at Indiana University until 2013.

David Baker combined performance, composition, and pedagogy. He performed and recorded widely as a jazz musician and is credited on 65 recordings. He wrote some 70 books about jazz and 400 articles on the subject. Besides jazz, Baker also composed orchestral music, chamber music, and film scores. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for music and won an Emmy award for a TV documentary score.

A sense of humor is sometimes an element of David Baker’s music. In 2006, the Chicago Sinfonietta premiered his Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra, which invited the audience to trigger the ring tones on their cell phones at prescribed times during the performance.

Humor is also a part of the Baker composition that I’ve chosen for today.

Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices for Solo Violin (1802–17) have provided fodder for numerous composers who have written variations on the tunes. In particular, the familiar final caprice attracted the attention of Brahms, Liszt, Lutoslawski, Ysaÿe, George Rochberg, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the Russian heavy metal band Aria.

David Baker’s wittily entitled Ethnic Variations on Paganini’s 24th Caprice (1982) explores the potential for integrating blues and jazz idioms (and beyond) into Paganini’s tune while remaining (mostly) true to the original.

19. Anthony Davis (b. 1951)

Anthony Davis was born in Patterson, New Jersey, and educated at Yale. His music encompasses jazz, compositions inspired by Balinese gamelan music, and works for piano, chamber ensembles, and orchestra.

Some of Davis’s works have political or historical themes: In October 2021, I saw the New York Philharmonic perform Anthony Davis’s concerto for clarinet and orchestra entitled You Have the Right to Remain Silent, inspired by Davis and his wife being stopped by the police on their way to a concert where he was performing because he supposedly resembled a robbery suspect. At times, members of the orchestra chant the words of the famous Miranda warning.

Anthony Davis is best known for his pioneering work integrating African-American history into opera. His first opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X with a libretto by Thulani Davis, premiered at the New York City Opera in 1986, and is now scheduled to have its Metropolitan Opera premiere in November 2023.

Davis’s most recent opera is The Central Park Five, about the five young men improperly arrested and convicted for a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park in 1989. This work won Anthony Davis a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2020.

Several works by Anthony Davis were inspired by “Middle Passage,” a complex poem by African-American poet Robert Hayden (1913–1980) first published in 1945 and revised in 1962. The term “middle passage” refers to the middle leg of the triangular slave trade that forcibly transported Africans to the Americas. Hayden’s goal was to enrich African-American history by spreading the story of the 1839 revolt on the Spanish slave ship La Amistad — at the time, an event not well known.

Anthony Davis used lines from Robert Hayden’s poem in his 1991 choral work Voyage through Death to Life upon These Shores, and expanded greatly on the themes in his opera Amistad, which was premiered by the Lyric Opera of Chicago in November 1997, a month before the opening of Steven Spielberg’s film with the same title.

But Anthony Davis’s first response to Hayden’s poem was the piano composition Middle Passage, composed in 1983.

20. Eleanor Alberga (b. 1949)

Eleanor Alberga is from Kingston, Jamaica, and decided at the age of 5 that she wanted to become a concert pianist. She began her music education in Jamaica and was introduced to the rich panorama of Jamaican music, including ska and reggae, and she performed with a Jamaican folk ensemble.

Eleanor Alberga also began composing at an early age. The catalogue of works on her website includes a one-minute piano piece from 1959 entitled Andy about her dog. In an interview, she said that at about the age of 12, she discovered the music of Béla Bartók, which she has said was “the first composer I really fell madly in love with.” She later continued studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and became involved with playing and improvising piano for a modern dance company. She continues to live in England.

Eleanor Alberga has composed two operas, and music for orchestras, choruses, piano, and chamber ensembles. While some of her music shows Caribbean influences, most of her compositions are in modernist European style. This is true of her three string quartets, the first of which dates from 1993.

I saw a performance of Eleanor Alberga’s String Quartet No. 1 by the Aizuri Quartet in November 2021, and described it in a blog entry like this:

The music begins ferociously with an aggressive unrelenting energy. There’s a rhythmically jagged forcefulness here that makes you want to bang out the beats, no matter how irregular they may be. When the music does calm down briefly, the tension and dense textures remain.

This is the first movement of Jamaican composer Eleanor Alberga’s String Quartet No. 1 from 1993, and despite the modernist harmonic and rhythmic language, it is traditionally structured in three fast-slow-fast movements…. The second slow movement has an austere magical beauty, while the third returns to the intensity of the first but with little tunes breaking out. At one point the cello becomes a walking bass, and a little later, all four instruments engage in a wonderful extended pizzicato section.

Eleanor Alberga has said that she based this quartet on extramusical ideas. Here’s her own description of the work:

In the case of the first quartet I was propelled into an intense burst of creativity by a lecture on physics. The details of this lecture — who gave it, where it was given, and so on — are now lost to my memory, but what grabbed me was the realization that all matter — including our physical bodies — is made of the same stuff: star dust. So the first movement might be called “a fugue without a subject,” as particles of this stardust swirl around each other, go their separate ways, collide, or merge. The second movement might be described as “stargazing from outer space,” while the finale re-establishes gravity and earthbound energy.

And here is Eleanor Alberga’s String Quartet No. 2 from 1994, which the composer has said has no extra-musical inspiration!

21. Errollyn Wallen (b. 1958)

Errollyn Wallen was born in Belize but moved with her family to London when she was two. When her father and mother moved to New York City, she was raised by her aunt and uncle. Her Belizean uncle instilled in her a love of literature, poetry, and music. She originally wanted to be a dancer but eventually focused on music. She studied at several schools, including Cambridge.

Errollyn Wallen’s eclectic approach to music is summed up in the motto of the Ensemble X that she founded: “We don’t break down barriers in music… We don’t see any.” She has written an opera The Silent Twins (2007), modernist music for traditional ensembles, as well as songs with a pop flavor that she sings and plays herself. Her 2017 work A Mighty River was composed to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in England.

Errollyn Wallen’s most popular work is probably her unrelentingly lyrical Cello Concerto from 2007. This 2020 video is a performance by student musicians at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. It with begins with a 14-minute interview with the composer, and then a couple minutes of additional introduction. The music begins at about 16:00.

Errollyn Wallen’s Triple Concerto (also known as the Concerto for Kosmos and Orchestra) was composed in 2018 for the Kosmos trio which consists of the unusual combination of violin, viola, and accordion. The type of accordion being played in this video does not have keys. It is a chromatic button accordion, probably a Russian bayan.

22. Michael Abels (b. 1962)

Michael Abels was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up on a farm in South Dakota. After showing interest in playing the family piano, he was given lessons, and he began composing music at the age of 8. His works have been performed by several major symphony orchestras.

In recent years, Michael Abels has been writing movie scores, most notably for three films written and directed by Jordan Peele: Get Out, Us, and the forthcoming Nope. Apparently, Jordan Peele approached Abels about scoring Get Out after seeing this YouTube video of Abels’ Urban Legends a 2010 concerto for string quartet and orchestra performed by the Harlem Quartet and the Sphinx Symphony:

Here’s a more recent video of the rip-roaring Urban Legends performed by the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles:

23. George Lewis (b. 1952)

George Lewis was born in Chicago. He graduated with a degree in Philosophy from Yale in 1974 and two years later released his first recording, The Solo Trombone Record, an album of experimental trombone music available on Spotify.

George Lewis is a performer, educator, and composer. He has appeared on numerous jazz recordings, and has composed music for orchestras, chamber ensembles, electronics, and an interactive computer accompaniment that he developed. He is currently a Professor of American Music at Columbia University.

George Lewis’s 2013 composition Assemblage is for piano, harp, violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, saxophone, and percussion. The work launches out of the gate at full force, and it’s somewhat difficult to get a handle on immediately, but the music soon slows down to explore a variety of instrumental textures and interactions. Lewis has said of the work: “What I’m looking for are quick, recursive reversals that generate a feeling of being far from equilibrium, encouraging listeners to do what we do best — stay in the moment and be ready for anything.” A few listenings might be required to get accustomed to its structure and sonic panorama.

On February 17, 2022, I saw a performance of “Assemblage” by Axiom, a Juilliard-based new-music ensemble. This performance is by the Contemporary Chamber Players of Stony Brook University on Long Island.

24. Nkeiru Okoye (b. 1972)

Nkeiru Okoye [in KEAR roo oh KOY yeh] was born in New York to an African-American mother and a Nigerian father, and she has spent time in Nigeria as well as the United States. She began learning piano at the age of 8 and started composing at 13. She attended the Manhattan School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rutgers University, where she earned a doctorate in Music Theory and Composition.

Nkeiru Okoye is best known for her 2014 folk opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom. This is a video of a complete stage performance in Brooklyn of the chamber version of the opera with the orchestra reduced to piano and a string quintet performed by the Harlem Chamber Players. It was recorded under less-than-ideal conditions, but the video has been posted on YouTube by the composer.

At about 1:15:30 is a thigh-slapping Juba dance, continuing a tradition from the early 20th century in compositions by Nathaniel Dett and Florence Price.

25. Jeffrey Mumford (b. 1955)

Jeffrey Mumford was born in Washington, D. C. He studied at the University of California, and was a student of Elliott Carter, in whose honor he has written several compositions. Mumford has taught at the Washington Conservatory of Music and the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.

Jeffrey Mumford has written for piano; solo violin, viola, cello, guitar, flute, alto sax, and harp; chamber works for a variety of ensembles; voice with accompaniment; choruses; and orchestras.

The titles of Mumford’s compositions are usually in lowercase. The beautifully textured becoming… (2015) is for piano, flute, horn, marimbas, vibraphone, harp, 2 violins, viola, cello, and bass, and is here performed by students at the Cleveland Institute of Music. At the end, the composer appears on stage to shake the performers’ hands.

26. Tomeka Reid (b. 1977)

Tomeka Reid grew up outside of Washington D.C. and started playing cello in the 4th grade. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Maryland in 2000, received a Master of Music at DePaul University in Chicago, and a doctorate in jazz studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017.

Tomeka Reid’s website identifies her as “Cellist, Composer, Educator.” She was introduced to jazz while an undergraduate, and later discovered the rich jazz scene in Chicago. That is the world in which she has made her greatest musical impact. She has played on some 30 jazz albums along with artists such as Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, and in 2015 she founded the Tomeka Reid Quartet, which combines her cello with drums, bass, and guitar.

In an interview she has said

I still love classical music. When I go back to it, it’s easier to play. Maybe because jazz relaxes you, makes you more loose. I encourage people to improvise. When we strive for perfection constantly, it can make us so tense.

As might be expected of a cellist, Tomeka Reid has an affinity for composing for the strings. She wrote her 2016 string quartet “Prospective Dwellers” for the Spektral Quartet as part of a project involving interviews with residents in the Dorchester Projects on Chicago’s South Side. The piece begins with creepy rhythmic pizzicato and violin harmonics. As texture gets denser, it never becomes quite jazz, but it certainly does swing:

Here is a more recent performance by members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra:

27. Courtney Bryan (b. 1982)

Courtney Bryan was born in New Orleans. She obtained a Bachelor of Music from Oberlin, a Master of Music from Rutgers, and a Doctor of Musical Arts from Columbia. Her compositions integrate jazz and modernist idioms (including electronic music) with influences from gospel and spirituals. She currently teaches at Tulane.

Courtney Bryan’s music has been increasingly informed by activism. Such is the case with Yet Unheard from 2016, which is a response to the death of Sandra Bland, the woman who was found hung in a jail cell in Texas after three days in police custody following an arrest during a traffic stop. This is a powerful and unnerving composition for orchestra and chorus based on a text by activist poet Sharan Strange delivered by the extraordinary vocalist Helga Davis.

The performance features teenage musicians from the Kaufman Music Center:

This video of a performance by the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus includes subtitles.

28. Anthony Braxton (b. 1945)

Anthony Braxton was born on the South Side of Chicago. He achieved recognition early on for his album “For Alto” highlighting his solo work on the alto saxophone. He has since appeared on well over a hundred albums over the past half century.

Braxton is a towering figure in both the avant-garde jazz worlds and the new-music compositional worlds, although not fitting quite comfortably in either. He prefers to navigate his own “trans-idiomatic” path.

Braxton’s compositions are often assigned numbers. This is Composition No. 409 dating from 2017. If this is jazz (as the presence of the saxophone and trumpet might suggest), then it is certainly the most unorthodox of jazz ensembles: There is no rhythm section and no piano. Instead, there are two harps, cello, accordion, and tuba. To a certain extent, the music is notated. The musicians can be seen consulting scores, but there also seems to be considerable improvisation.

The composer is to the far left, initially on saxophone. That’s Tomeka Reid (Day 26) in the front, left of center, on cello.

29. Pamela Z (b. 1956)

Pamela Z was born Pamela Ruth Brooks in Buffalo and raised near Denver. She studied voice and received a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Colorado. She was a singer/songwriter in her earlier years before becoming interested in electronic manipulation of sound, and then moving to San Francisco.

On her website, Pamela Z’s describes herself and her music:

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures.

This 2017 video is a little sampler of her solo work:

Other videos can be found on her website. Beginning at about 50:20 in this video are two very different works that she performs with the Del Sol Quartet:

30. Tania León (b. 1943)

Tania León was born in Havana of mixed French, Spanish, Chinese, African, and Cuban heritage. She studied piano at an early age and continued her music studies at New York University after she emigrated to the United States in 1967.

Tania León generally composes in a European modernist idiom, but with much lyricism and often a strong rhythmic drive. She sometimes integrates folk melodies and rhythms from her native country. She has composed piano music, vocal music, numerous chamber works, and several pieces for orchestra.

Her composition Stride celebrates Susan B. Anthony. It was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in February 2020 right before the Covid lockdown, and won León the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2021. This is her 2019 composition Rítmicas, inspired by the 1930 work by fellow Cuban composer Amadeo Roldán (Day 6).

Much other Tania León music is available on YouTube as well as interviews. Here is her 2008 orchestra composition Ácana inspired by a poem by Cuban Laureate Poet Nicolás Guillén:

This is Axon for violin and electronics:

31. Valerie Coleman (b. 1970)

Valerie Coleman was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in the West End inner-city neighborhood that gave rise to Muhammed Ali. She was fascinated with music at an early age and had composed three symphonies by the age of 14. She earned two bachelor’s degrees from Boston University and a master’s degree in flute performance from the Mannes School of Music, where she currently teaches.

Valerie Coleman lives with her family in New York City. She founded the ensemble Imani Winds (from the Swahili word for “faith"), with which she plays flute. Here they are performing her composition Umoja:

Her 2020 work entitled Seven O’Clock Shout, alludes to people hanging from their apartment windows celebrating frontline workers during the Covid pandemic:

She has said about this work,

To me, Seven O’Clock Shout is a declaration of our survival. It is something that allows us our agency to take back the kindness that is in our hearts and the emotions that cause us such turmoil. … We cheer on the essential workers with a primal and fierce urgency to let them know that we stand with them and each other.”