SYZYGY: The Pulsation of Rebellion
By Victoria Thomas
Classical music is rarely the currency of activism. We generally turn to less patrician, more hard-edged forms to voice protest and dissent against fascism, tyranny, racial violence, and other sociopolitical ills.
But SYZYGY, a new three-movement concerto composed by Courtney Bryan celebrating three visual artists — all women, all women of color — defies this expectation. Bryan's 18-minute composition makes its world premiere on The American Concerto, Volume One, performed by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Timothy Weiss, available on Cedille Records (CDR 90000 244).
Bryan's concerto illuminates three diverse legacies: the art of Alma Thomas (The Eclipse), Frida Kahlo (Tree of Hope, Keep Firm), and Maya Ying Lin (Eclipsed Time), with references to the Greek-derived term "syzygy" — flagged by Word Daily on September 2 as the word of the day. The word is common to poetry-making and Jungian cosmology as well as biology and astronomy, referencing a complementary pairing of opposites (Eros/Logos, Yin/Yang, Anima/Animus) as well as the literal alignment of three or more celestial bodies in a gravitational system, which we may observe during solar and lunar eclipses.
We recently spoke with composer Bryan by telephone in New Orleans, where she is currently the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Although she does not claim to experience full-body synesthesia, Bryan talks about her strong association with visual art.
"When I received this commission, I intuitively, intentionally decided to look into contemporary art created by women. These three women from very different backgrounds made themselves known," she says.
The motif of planetary eclipses was not her initial focus. "I began by really looking at the art," she says. "In the beginning, I didn't want to worry about how the women might be connected. It came about on its own. I wanted to create music that you feel in your body, just like you feel the visual art from these three women in your heartbeat and your breath."
Alma Thomas inspired Bryan in several ways, starting with the fact that Thomas did not turn to painting until the age of 69, following her career as a teacher at a segregated all-Black junior high school in Washington, D.C. Bryan says "First of all, my sister's name is Alma, and she's a visual artist. The circles and cycles in the paintings of Alma Thomas, those bright rings around the sun, feel really powerful. I started her section by developing harmonies that felt radiant, vibrations and waves of warmth and light. She redefined what success is, what shape it may take, especially for a Black woman born in 1891, and who endured what she did." Today, Thomas' paintings hang in the Smithsonian, the Whitney, and in the White House, among other esteemed venues.
The Vietnam War Memorial and its accompanying controversy immediately spring to mind at the mention of Lin, but in fact a sculptural work no longer on view is the actual inspiration for her segment in the concerto. Bryan shares the memory of Maya Ying Lin's Eclipsed Time installation while living and commuting in New York. She says, "I walked under it all the time, until I barely noticed it. I wrote the piece for Maya to express the uplifting sensation of flying out to the sun."
Lin's large-scale, site-specific mechanical clock was installed in the ceiling of the Long Island Rail Road concourse at New York's Penn Station in 1994. In place of standard clock hands, the installation consisted of a solid aluminum disc that traveled from east to west across a 14-foot-wide frosted, illuminated glass face during a 24-hour cycle. At exactly midnight, the two discs overlapped to suggest an eclipse, which Lin described as an experience of "absence and ephemerality." The indoor sundial, neglected, immobilized by years of pigeon poop and general Gotham grime, was disassembled and removed from Penn Station in 2019 to accommodate a $600 million concourse expansion and new entrance renovation. By the time Bryan crossed its path, the mechanism had lost its swing, fully eclipsed.
The flaming, bleeding, sword-stabbed heart of the concerto, however, is the section devoted to Frida Kahlo. Kahlo's painting Tree of Hope, Keep Firm depicts both sun and moon as aspects of her legendary duality. Bryan explains that she wrote this section first, although it appears second in the recorded queue. In her letters and interviews, Kahlo often described the sacred, pre-contact Mexican tradition of portraying sun and moon as creator-protectors, and mused somewhat bitterly about her own lunar role, often positioned by art critics of her time as merely reflecting husband Diego Rivera's macho solar dominance.
While both Thomas and Lin refused to surrender to despair, Kahlo navigated the darkest depths of the human soul, enduring betrayal from every corner, including the excruciatingly documented betrayals by her own diseased, shattered, tortured body. These shadow-forces move through Bryan's work, like the tenderness felt by an old scar, but in musical terms, shadow and scar are ultimately overcome by warrior-worthy surges of hope and joy.
Concerning Frida, Bryan says "I was inspired by the beautiful old Mexican ranchera song, Paloma Negra. Those lyrics are about toxic passion, like Frida's marriage to Rivera. And many of her paintings carry planetary themes, so the foundation for the eclipse motif was formed."
Few if any visual artists can rival Kahlo's cult of pain, recorded in such violently grisly terms. But her canonized suffering is not central to Bryan's experience of the artist. She explains: "I feel her quiet strength, and her nostalgia maybe. I had a lot of feelings when writing for Frida. For example, there is a central passage where we downshift from D major to D minor. And yeah, sometimes I cried. Because of her lifetime of chronic pain, terrible surgeries, her inability to carry a pregnancy to term, illness and marriage woes, and because even her grief could not stop her." Listening to SYZYGY, we are ultimately lifted by feelings of triumph over every heartbreak.
Grammy Award-winning classical violinist Jennifer Koh, who performs as soloist on the album, is the driver of the landmark The American Concerto series. In addition to her career as a virtuoso performer, Koh is hailed as a builder of bridges through the work of her nonprofit ARCO Collaborative, which commissioned the series with a dedicated focus upon featuring underrepresented voices. Koh's multi-season commissioning project fiercely "reimagines the violin concerto format for the 21st century and explores a range of socio-cultural topics relevant to American life," according to the Cedille press kit.
During a recent telephone conversation with the New York-based artist and entrepreneur, Koh commented: "The melodic material might seem just 'pretty.' But when you listen again closely, you notice that the instruments are not quite on the beat. Initially, you think it's all bright colors and solid footing. But this work also intimates something deeper underground, under our feet." Asked what that something is, Koh quickly responds: "It's the pulsation of rebellion."
Regarding the translation of visual art into music, Koh says "I see everyone as artists. I feel like there's no barrier when it comes to medium, or genre. It's all art."
The glossy, deep magenta interior of the CD jewel case bears the following quotation: "'I got in trouble. It was good trouble. It was necessary trouble.' — Congressman John Lewis on the practice of civil disobedience." Koh, who was born in this country, explains that her mother was a refugee from North Korea who arrived in the United States with just a few dollars in her pocket. Koh says, "It's only because of the civil rights movement and changes in immigration policy that I was allowed to be here."
She calls Bryan's composition for Frida Kahlo "bittersweet with longing." She adds that the Alma Thomas piece audibly recreates the measured rhythms and brilliant chroma saturation of Thomas's signature work, notably Resurrection, which currently hangs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
As a regular commuter on the A train, Koh says she feels lucky that she got to witness Lin's Eclipsed Time in its working days. She expresses sadness over its removal from Penn Station, while noting that Bryan's composition now serves as a permanent memorial to all three artists' transformative legacies.
SYZYGY: The American Concerto, Volume One Courtney Bryan, composer Jennifer Koh, violin Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Timothy Weiss, conductor Cedille Records (CDR 90000 244) cedillerecords.org courtneybryan.com jenniferkoh.com
Victoria Thomas writes about pop culture and social justice. @miss_vickums
