It has been roughly over 50 years – particularly, 52 years
since the time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a victim of a fatal hit on his
life while protesting and leading a strike with sanitation workers in Memphis,
Tennessee on April 4, 1968, by alleged mastermind, James Earl Ray.
King was known in the tapestry of American history for
trying to appease the civil upheavals, turmoils, riots, and overall anarchy as
he fought for civil rights and the eventual end of the Jim Crow segregation in
the South that actually sparked with Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of
a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama in her so-famous civil disobedience display,
getting her arrested in the process and helped King launch a massive city-wide
Montgomery Bus Boycott. King used his Christian leadership and Gandhi’s points
and tenets of using nonviolence to stop this so-called Goliath in American
sociology called segregation (where King, for instance, went into Chicago to
speak out against the discriminatory technique of red-lining in the slums of
that city to discourage Blacks from getting rental housing), and as a result of
that, we all African-Americans now enjoy the freedoms that were once limited.
There are no more “colored” bathrooms or “colored” hotels now. And the biggest achievement was that we had our first
African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama, in 2008.
Still, today, it is a bit sad that we have seen backlashes to
these achievements even in recent years, upending King’s need for us to be nonviolent,
years after he was gunned down in the aforementioned assassination. We had saw
that in the senseless police shootings and vigilante killings that made such innocent
Black people as Trayvon Williams die in the hands of a White vigilante with
that “stand your ground” excuse unneeded, or Michael Brown end up fatally shot
by a White police officer and caused explosive violence of rioting and
pillaging in Ferguson, MA in 2014 that created re-livings of the nationwide race
riots that happened after the Voting Rights Act happened in 1964, or Eric
Garner ending up being choked to death by another White officer in New York,
with his last words being “Can’t Breathe”, which caused me to feel his death
right in his heart, because you need air in order to survive. Even though I was glad not to face the Goliath of
racially-motivated police violence against me ever in my life, the risk that I
could end up like Williams, or Brown, or Garner in the future, even though I am
now 49 years young, motivated me to attend the Martin Luther King Concert at
the Symphony Center in Chicago IL.
A large crowd braved the rather bitter cold to go through
the music building's gates to see what they wanted to see inside the iconic
auditorium of red seats and ornate walls and the famous stage where the Chicago
Sinfonietta would be front-and-center for this concert. Mei-Ann Chen was at the
helm this year in 2020 as the main music director of the Sinfonietta. I saw this Chinese-American conductor before
in past MLK concerts with this orchestra (probably a few times) – and Mei-Ann was as inspirational and fiery
as before – probably a little bit more than that this year, because of two probable reasons – the ongoing Shen Yun spectacles in Chicago (To me, she is a little bit like a “Shen Yun” in his conducting style – wide-out, greatly
flowing, and really highly intricate in her baton work, just like a Shen Yun
Chinese dancer would do), and the fact that this is the start of Chinese New
Year – the Year of the Rat. I will never know if she is in the zodiac of the
rat; nevertheless, these two happenings meant good luck for this conductor
throughout the event – and the audience loved it.
I already mentioned some of the innocent Blacks who were killed,
and that was the basis for composer Joel Thompson to pay homage to a list of 6
African-Americans who were unjustly killed in the hands of police or vigilantes
due to their race, in the orchestral-choral version of Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, that marked the first part of the
concert. The premiere performance gave
me a quick mindset that this was inspired by “The Seven Last Words of Christ”,
an oratorio composed by Theodore DuBois, which featured an introduction and 7
movements for each “last word”. Of course, the Seven Last Words is depicted in
the Holy Bible’s Four Gospels that cover the account of Jesus’s crucifixion as
he was hung in Golgotha for hours to die a slow, but very painful death, dying with this final of the 7 words – “within my hands, I commend my Spirit.” So with this, as I saw the composer on stage speaking about this composition,
he mentions some of the Blacks who were killed and said that this Seven Last Words of the Unarmed was
something like an inspirational “meditation” on the oppression, racism, and
injustice related to the six Blacks who were killed unjustly. The music itself,
with help of guest Black conductor Kendrick Armstrong and the Adrian Dunn
Singers, is described as something as post-classical, with a mixture of a blend
of composers that I heard before: George Walker, Bela Bartok, Edgard Varese,
and even bits of Igor Stravinsky (who was known for the violent “Rite of Spring”
ballet). So with the final meditation – the 7th part involving the
paying homage to Eric Garner (already mentioned), the “can’t breathe” lyrics
were striking, as I hear an orchestral bass drum representing two musical
characteristic leading motives – the first one, with occasional rhythmic blows,
represented Garner’s last heartbeats as he was choked and crushed by senseless
NYPD officers to his death; the second one, even louder than the first,
represented the officer’s deadly chokehold on Garner.
But before Joel’s work, two mainstay songs opened the
concert. The first one was Up To The
Mountain, a folk song that was originally by Patty J. Griffin. With the help of
the assistant conductor of the Sinfonietta, Jonathan Rush, and singer Kimberli
Joye, the arrangement of the song by Michelle Issac, was in a style reminiscent
of the laid-back 12/8-meter soul ballads commonly seen from some of the songs
by Ray Charles or Sam Cooke (known for his rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come”).
It was first released in the year 2006 and the height of the song was when the
Boston Children’s Chorus took up the song and did their arrangement in 2013.
Following that number, came another number – a famous spiritual, Deep River, in an arrangement by Carrie
Lane Giselle, in the key of Eb major. The song first came out in 1876 and made
more famous in 1916, when Harry T. Burleigh made probably the first music
publication arrangement of the piece for piano and voice. However, in that Deep River number by the Sinfonietta - There
were no voices or chorus in that number – it was for strings only, which was
good enough. There were some slight alterations in the arrangement musically,
but the rest of that number was as straightforward as you hear it so many
times for years.
To close out the first half of the concert, conductor
Armstrong did a version of Glory from
the 2014 soundtrack of the movie, Selma.
This movie re-enacted one of the major civil rights events in Selma, Alabama,
where over 500-plus Black marchers, led by now-congressman Joe Lewis, went
across the Rolund Pettis Bridge in their fight against segregation, planning to
go through the bridge en route to
Montgomery, Alabama, home of the aforementioned bus boycott and the Rosa
Parks incident. Their first march attempt was ruined by a big wall White
officers at the other end of the bridge who first told them to turn back, but
as the marchers decided not to disperse and not fight back in the name of
nonviolence, they were hounded upon and jumped upon by officers with tear gas, billy
clubs, and even bullwhips, leaving scores of marchers injured and a few killed.
This led to the 2nd attempt of the march where the troops did
retreat but the marchers retreated in turn in confusion, and then finally, with
the help of Martin Luther King and Lyndon Baines Johnson, most of the marchers
on the 3rd attempt did go past the end of that bridge without
incident, all the way to Montgomery, Alabama, the endpoint of the march, and MLK
did his rallying speech there afterward.
So for this Glory,
the music was by John Legend, with the added rap of Common, and regrettably,
probably because of copyright issues or other music contractual issues (only
speculating), the so-called rap that I was supposed to hear in the middle of the
song – and all of you – did not happen. I did not hear the “hip-hop” drums or
the hip-hop rap, which was a bit disappointing, because I was expecting it
because I heard that original song with the choral singers and the rap by
Common a few years prior, in 2014, as soon as the movie was released. So there
was no guest rapper doing the song with Sinfonietta, which disappointed me, as
well as the audience members. The only solo voice that did come in the song was
Kymberli Joye, an African-American singer who was a great contestant in “The
Voice”, who did the lead-in words that looped and looped, saying in the lyrics “The
war is not over…victory is won… we will fight to the finish, when all is said
and done.” The Adrian Dunn Singers helped with the choral lines which worked
well with Kymberli’s solo works and improvs, and every time I heard them sing
out “Glory” en masse as they iterated, I can remember that John Legend used a
part of James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Ev’ry
Voice and Sing hymn, the African-American National Anthem that ends on the
words “Let us march on, till victory is won”. Moreover, Legend’s “the war is not
over” is correct, because of some of the racial oppressions that Martin Luther
King Jr. supposed to stop that plighted Blacks for over 500 years are still
continuing, even though old Jim Crow seemed to have ended.
After intermission, I saw that the orchestra had the biggest
forces since I had witnessed when I saw a past Sinfonietta concert involving
the Tschaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in a past MLK Concert. But they weren’t doing
Tschaikovsky. They were doing a part of Gustav Mahler’s biggest magnum opus
orchestral work in his musical career, as soprano Summer Hassan, and
mezzo-soprano Leah Dexter, along with the North Central College Concert Choir,
and the much larger personnel number of Sinfonietta under conductor Chen
(including a larger brass section and larger battery personnel) performed the
iconic last movement of his Auferstehungssymphonie
(or “Resurrection Symphony” in German)—Mahler’s Symphony no. 2. I can remember seeing a past Sinfonietta
concert where they performed the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven with the famous
chorus-finale. Mahler’s “Resurrection” finale movement – as I found out – would
be much different than Beethoven’s in musicality, expression, and style. The
opening notes, punctuated by a bass drum explosion and cymbal crashes, reminded
me of chaos and doom, and then as the movement progresses, after the mood of
chaos goes into the inner spirit. I hear a C major key center with new motives that
I recognize – focusing on feelings of a passage of redemption – probably one of the
most important parts of the symphony that I experienced years ago through
hearing it in television commercials and a few television documentaries. Then
as the piece continues, I am thrown into forced guessing of the accelerandos,
slowdowns, and wide use of pitches and angular jumps and scalar motives –
guessing I am recalling bits of Richard Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” (Hero’s life,
one of his tone poems) and Don Juan (another of Strauss’s tone poems). It
sounded like a tone poem that is worthy of what Richard Wagner would do in his
mature operas. Then, as the solos started their “Aufersteh’n” (or “rise up”), I
was taken into a whirlwind journey of a conflict between good and bad, and as
the chorus picked up later on as the piece wreaked out its last of Mahler’s
orchestral unpredictabilities into the rousing, majestic Eb major section, the
chorus and solos announce a sort of what I call in German a “Gesamtverklaerung”,
or a total transformation, that one would feel after the human life departs. And
even if the audience never even understood a word of German in the text by
Freidrich Gottlieb Klopstock (likely he was something like a secondary Heinrich
Schiller) because there were no supertitles to translate above the orchestra
and chorus and singers, I was on my own to bask into Mahler’s unique
post-Romantic music. As the Eb chord in the tutti orchestra that concluded the
movement chimed in something like the ending to Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, it seemed to me that my
transformation was complete. Our transformation to help us deal with the Black
oppressions that you thought were gone in the past – but still, regrettably,
happen to people like me, today. Mahler wasn’t exactly like Beethoven, but
since I had played some Mahler works as a piano accompanist, I realized I had
to respect this modern romantic orchestrator – and he was with that part of
that symphony. The crowd liked it with big applause. And after some doubt, I had
to stand up and applaud to those musical forces who conquered a part of the
Goliath called the Resurrection Symphony
finale.
And you think the concert was over after we got our musical
bite of a big Mahler orchestral work? – no – not yet. Conductor Mei-Ann decided
to mark, like in past MLK Sinfonietta concerts, a post-concert tradition that
was set by Paul Freedman, who was the first conductor of the Chicago
Sinfonietta. He invited the audience to first do a “passing of the peace in
place” like a lot of United Methodist Churches do in their services, and then,
the big mainstay musical finale that was a tradition – using the most traditional
of songs that was used a lot during the King era – “We Shall Overcome”. She asked the audience to hold hands
(something like in the style of the “Hands Across America” events), and as the “We
Shall Overcome” song blared with the help of the Sinfonietta Orchestra and the
guest singers and the two guest choruses, I saw that there were a sea of hands
and arms, that swayed left and right like you see boats do on bodies of water.
So when it was all over, in review, we got what we wanted in
honoring King with a symphonic concert. There was a mixture of the old and the
new; there was a little bit of a “pops orchestra” thing with the Up To The Mountain, and the mighty
symphonic forces of a bit of Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony”. I walked out of
Symphony Hall proud, as well as a 2,000-plus audience, and I think if Paul
Freedman, the architect of the Sinfonietta – were to be here tonight for
this occasion – he would have loved every minute of that concert as well.
