An interview with Will Liverman

What was the starting point for this project?

I wanted to start commissioning and telling new stories; I’d worked with Shawn Okpebholo before, so Two Black Churches was sort of the genesis of it. I got him to set ‘Ballad of Birmingham’ and then he had the idea to do a parallel with the Charleston shooting. I’m an advocate of featuring living composers and normalising their repertoire.

Of the other works, which did you regard as essential?

I wanted to find pieces to surround that theme of the

Black experience in America. So Margaret Bonds’s Three Dream Portraits was the first thing that I immediately thought of. I just had to feature her for being a prominent female black composer. Five Songs of Laurence Hope by Harry Burleigh is a song cycle that I absolutely love singing, so I really wanted that, and Ride Into Town is a nod to my late high school teacher. He was like my musical father and it was one of the first songs that I learned at high school. Were the words as important as the music in making your choices for the album?

Yes, they’re so important. I like to take the text away and just read through it without the music. I find it makes so much sense when I then put it together with the music and see what the composer has done with it. It gives me more insight into how I can sing it. I didn’t do it purposefully, but I realised that a lot of the songs are Langston Hughes settings. It speaks to the power of his words; he was able to say things in a way that really reach you, and his contribution was undeniable.