In the Wake of Ferguson, a Style-Blurring Album
While Mr. Phillips was finalizing plans for “Changing Same,” in 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, was shot in Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer.
As a Black man, Mr. Phillips was unsurprised. But as a soon-to-be father, he was newly disturbed. “There’s this beautiful thing, waiting for this change to happen,” he recalled in a current interview. “Then, when you hear about what was going on with Ferguson, and Michael Brown, it’s like, what are we bringing this child into?”
The depth of the protests that adopted the capturing prompted Mr. Phillips, 53, who teaches music to kindergartners in Brooklyn as his day job, to think about work that spoke on to the second: a new opera for a single soprano, joined by the members of his ensemble, Numinous. The outcomes might be heard on “The Grey Land,” which was launched this week on the New Amsterdam label. On it, you’ll be able to hear Mr. Phillips’s newly expanded method to “the digging of everything.”
At varied factors, this mono-opera (with Rebecca L. Hargrove on the recording and Kenneth Browning as narrator) nods to Samuel Barber and to Kendrick Lamar. One of the monitor titles comes from a line of dialogue in Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Kill Bill.” In “Legion of Boom,” a reference to the Seattle Seahawks’s highly effective defensive backfield, the early music of Philip Glass is straightforward to identify as an affect.
The longest motion of this operatic work is “Ferguson: Summer of 2014.” While the 19-minute piece consists of breaking-news-style recitation of the occasions surrounding the capturing, it isn’t singularly centered on rebroadcasting beforehand reported information. Crucially, these news-ticker sections alternate with a world of personal pleasures (and personal nervousness) skilled by a couple anticipating a little one amid the blasts of reportage.
The libretto for “Ferguson,” by the author Isaac Butler, begins with a citation from the James Agee textual content Barber utilized in “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” — “It has become that time of evening” — earlier than relating the story of a couple with a little one on the method. This part is, largely, winningly melodic, even when harmonies sometimes counsel troubling vistas simply over the horizon.
When the breaking information hits, in the tenth minute of the monitor, what has been a largely acoustic sound world is interrupted by dramatic and distorted electrical guitar riffing. Yet the distinction proposed by this sonic shift — from pleasure to anguish, from chamber-music privateness to a loudly amplified public area — isn’t utterly binary. In that passage of harried guitar, you can too hear acoustic, Minimalist-style writing, serving to join the new music to some of the textures earlier in the piece.
Later in the monitor, these Minimalist traces come again, in a totally different guise. When the couple imagines leaving their telephones and computer systems unplugged, and thus remaining disconnected from the information, the repeating figures reappear. This time, the motifs are delivered by way of closely processed digital tones. It’s as if digital indicators from the world are hovering round the couple, ready for them to log again on and face the newest grim information from Ferguson.
But you don’t should be an expectant guardian to understand the impact; many Americans are possible accustomed to breaking information intruding on personal joys. Without sacrificing the specificity of Mr. Phillips’s life and reactions, his piece has a capaciousness that may generally elude politically impressed works. This music dramatizes the effort concerned in searching for and safeguarding particular person satisfactions, with out closing your self off to the exterior world.
The position of moms takes on a steadily extra outstanding position as the “The Grey Land” proceeds. Mr. Phillips samples public feedback made by ladies whose youngsters have been killed by police (“One Side Losing Slowly”). At different factors, the character of the Black mom turns into extra common — as on “Don’t,” its lyrics by Mr. Phillips. Here, in list-poem format, we hear a sequence of cautions: “Don’t sit on the stoop, don’t play with toy guns, don’t listen to loud music.”
The music rebels in opposition to such well-intended limitations with a guitar half that Mr. Phillips compares to the ecstatic rhythms of Mr. Lamar’s lyrics for “Alright,” a track which was claimed as a protest anthem, after Ferguson. Sly humor can also be on provide, as in “Agnus Bey,” a portmanteau of “Agnus Dei” from the Catholic Mass and a nickname bestowed on Beyoncé; Mr. Phillips is cheekily highlighting the catechisms of modern pop idolatry. His lyrics, rendered in Latin, translate this fashion: “Behold the Lamb of Bey. Behold the One, who slays the world. Blessed are thee, that receives the word of Bey.”
Throughout the album, Mr. Phillips might be heard rendering these different cultural indicators into a heterogenous work of artwork — however one which has a coherence the world typically lacks. And this, in the finish, looks as if his newest understanding of “the digging of everything.” Sometimes that digging might contain appreciation; at different factors, it’s merely a course of of documentation, or of profitably attempting to kind one’s personal advanced emotions.
“New Black Music is expression,” Baraka as soon as wrote, “and expression of reflection as well.” A piece like “The Grey Land” serves as modern proof.
