DAVIS INDUCTED INTO AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & LETTERS
San Diego composer honored less than a year after winning a Pulitzer
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and University of California San Diego music professor Anthony Davis will be inducted May 19 into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the nation’s most exclusive and prestigious cultural awards for sustained artistic excellence and innovation.
“It’s a great honor,” Davis told The San Diego Union-Tribune in a Monday phone interview. “PostCOVID, we will meet every year to help distribute awards that the academy gives to composers, so
I’m looking forward to participating.”
This year, other artists being honored by the New York-based academy range from authors TaNehisi Coates and Leslie Marmon Silko to poet Joy Harjo, painter Mark Bradford and architect Meejin Yoon. Among the other creative trailblazers newly elected into the academy are photographer and multimedia artist Lorna Simpson, who earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from UC San Diego in 1985, and UC San Diego professor emeritus Faith Ringgold.
A painter, writer and perform
ance artist who is best known for her narrative quilts, Ringgold taught at the La Jolla campus from 1987 until 2002 and lives in Englewood, N.J. Her latest exhibit is now showing at Maryland’s Glenstone Museum, just outside Washington, D.C. This year’s other newly elected members also include honorary inductees Spike Lee and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Davis’ induction into the academy comes a year after fellow San Diego composer Chinary Ung became the first faculty member in UC San Diego’s then-60-year history to be inducted.
“My friend, Chinary Ung, just got inducted, and Henry Threadgill and Wynton Marsalis are being inducted this year, so it’s wonderful to be in that company,” said Davis, who lives in University City with his wife, noted opera singer Cynthia Aaronson Davis.
Davis, 70, was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer for music last May for “The Central Park Five,” which debuted last June at Long Beach Opera. It was inspired by the racially and politically charged New York trial and conviction of a Latino teenager and four Black teens in the 1989 rape of a young White woman in Central Park. All five were later exonerated and freed. They incurred the wrath of real estate developer Donald J. Trump, who is one of the characters in “The Central Park Five.”
The subjects of Davis’ other operas have included the kidnapping and radicalization of heiress Patty Hearst (1992’s “Tania”), a pivotal slave rebellion (1997’s “Amistad”) and social injustices perpetrated against Native Americans (2007’s “Wakonda’s Dream”).
Davis’ upcoming works include an opera about the fatal 2015 shootings by Dylann Roof of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. He is also undertaking a musical adaptation of the children’s book “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale,” which is set at the U.S.-Mexico border and addresses current immigration issues.
A UC San Diego faculty member since 1998, Davis is likely the first composer ever elected into the academy who once turned down an invitation to join the Grateful Dead.
His first major work, “X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” debuted at New York City Opera in 1986. A new production of “X” will be launched in May 2022 by Michigan Opera, with a new recording to follow. Davis will be in Oklahoma for the May 1 and May 2 livestream performances of his aria “There Are Many Trails of Tears” from his upcoming new opera “Fire Across the Tracks: Tulsa 1921.”
Closer to home, Davis — as intensely imaginative a pianist and band leader as he is a composer — will perform a livestream benefit concert for Feeding San Diego at 7 p.m. Saturday with two longtime collaborators, contrabass innovator Mark Dresser, who also teaches at UC San Diego, and trombone and electronic music maverick Michael Dessen, who teaches at UC Irvine.
Their audience-free concert at Mission Valley’s Vision Center for Spiritual Living is being presented by the nonprofit group Bodhi Tree and will stream at bodhitreeconcerts.org. It will feature the world premieres of Davis’ “Then and Now,” Dessen’s “Amulet” and Dresser’s “9 11,” which Davis describes as being “about the relationship of 9 and 11 as rhythmic structures.”
“I’m really excited,” Davis said. “Mark, Michael and I have all been vaccinated. We’ve been playing together online since last year, but this will be the first time since the pandemic began that we’ll be performing together live in the same room.”
The academy’s membership is open only to inductees and has been strictly limited to 250 since its inception. This year, that limit has been increased to 288. Vacancies for induction occur only after the death of a member. New inductees must be nominated by a current member. That nomination must then be seconded by two other members, before being voted on by the academy’s full membership.
Interviewed separately Monday, Dresser was asked to comment on Davis being elected into the academy, which was founded in 1898 and once counted Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt among its members.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Dresser said. “I had dinner with Anthony and his wife a few days ago, and they didn’t mention anything about it. I’ve known Anthony since 1975, and it’s just been amazing to watch his trajectory as a major composer.
“It’s great that all these major awards are being given to him. But he’s been doing consistently groundbreaking work throughout his career and should have been honored sooner.”
Davis learned in February that he had been selected for election into the academy and that the online induction ceremony will take place May 19. But the March 5 announcement by the academy came and went so quietly that neither Davis nor his wife made any mention of it on their respective social media pages. Moreover, UC San Diego’s music department only learned of Davis’ honor on Monday.
“They told me that I was elected two months ago and that I couldn’t say anything about it until they made their announcement,” Davis said. “Then, I guess, they made an announcement, and I couldn’t find a link to it. So it sort of slipped under the radar.”
“I’ve known Anthony since 1975, and it’s just been amazing to watch his trajectory as a major composer.” Mark Dresser on composer Anthony Davis