Social ills probed with sonic elegance
Julia Bullock’s S.F. Symphony program addresses race, art, freedom in America
It’s one thing to sing with grace, beauty and expressive depth, and it’s another thing to design an evening’s program that puts those musical gifts into an urgently meaningful context. Soprano Julia Bullock can do both. “History’s Persistent Voice,” the dazzlingly multifarious recital program that Bullock unveiled on Tuesday, May 17, with the San Francisco Symphony, marshaled new works composed by five Black women to present a taut musical symposium on an array of subjects: race, freedom, art, language, motherhood and more.
And with her husband and collaborator, German conductor Christian Reif, leading members of the Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall in the performance, Bullock brought an almost unearthly measure of eloquence to the proceedings. This was music operating simultaneously as probing social commentary and pure sensual delight.
Which is to say that Bullock, the American artist who is one of the eight Collaborative Partners that Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen has gathered around him to revitalize and rethink the possibilities of a symphony orchestra in the 21st century, is very much on the job. There was nothing about this 90-minute intermission-free program that felt like business as usual.
Two thematic strands infused the program. One was the historical continuity of the Black experience in America, a malevolent thread running without interruption from the institution of slavery — an ostensible relic that is neither forgotten nor gone — through the horrors of Jim Crow to the reality of mass incarceration in our own day and age.
For this first segment, Bullock and composer Jessie Montgomery drew on “Slave Songs of the United States,” an anthology released in 1867 that documented the lyrics and melodies with which enslaved African Americans sought solace — spirituals, work songs, hymns of hope and desolation.
Montgomery’s magnificent cycle “Five Freedom Songs” takes five of those historical curios and creates a web of edgy, evocative musical ornamentation around each one. The basic melodies and rhythms are recognizably intact, but Montgomery’s creative commentary breathes potent new life into each one.
In the heartbreaking “I Want to Go Home,” for example, she sustains a dull, throbbing harmonic dissonance throughout, with chords that teeter constantly on the edge of resolving but never do — not even at the song’s end.
“Lay This Body Down” enrobes a noble melody in delicate, spectral emanations, while in “My Father, How Long?,” Montgomery isolates the song’s forceful herky-jerky rhythms.
Bullock interwove these songs with readings of poetic excerpts from contemporary prison inmates, Craig Anthony Ross and Joe Sullivan, both
of whom spent decades on death row (one in San Quentin State Prison, the other in a Florida prison after being sentenced to death at 13). Only a dullard could have failed to feel the unbroken link between these two forms of physical and spiritual bondage.
The remainder of the program was devoted to music inspired by the visual art of Black creators, most of them women. If the relationship between these two segments was never clear — the evening registered more as two separate undertakings than a single integrated whole — the musical rewards were no less resplendent.
They included “I Came Up the Hard Way,” California composer Carolyn Yarnell’s hard-driving vocal treatment of a reminiscence by the artist and quilt maker Sue Willie Seltzer, and an extended setting by Cuban-born American composer Tania León of an interview with the American painter Thornton Dial. In “Mama’s Little Precious Thing,” New Jersey composer Allison LogginsHull rewrote Brahms’ Lullaby into a bluesy, melancholic version that tugged at a listener’s emotions.
Most potent of all, though, was “Quilt,” by the dexterous San Francisco composer and performer Pamela Z. Using sound samples from the film “While I Yet Live,” a documentary about the quilters of the predominantly Black community of Gee’s Bend, Ala., the piece transmutes the cadences of spoken language into delicate, irresistible melodic arabesques. Bullock’s delivery, here and throughout, was at once evocative and richly sweet.
Along with the musical and spoken components, “History’s Persistent Voice” also featured video projections by Los Angeles set designer Hana S. Kim, an assortment of largely abstract colors and patterns that didn’t distract from the proceedings but didn’t add much either. (Musicians keep insisting that visuals are a helpful addition to their art, but they never seem to be able to make the case.)
In a particularly raw and impactful moment, Bullock noted that the practices of discrimination and racial oppression extend everywhere, including the history of the San Francisco Symphony itself. Reckoning with that history is an urgent task for all artistic organizations, and “History’s Persistent Voice” marks a step in that direction.