ERIKA SWITZER & MARTHA GUTH | Beyond Genre: Song and Storytelling
Sparks & Wiry Cries co-directors Erika Switzer and Martha Guth introduce the Songs in Flight project.
Songs in Flight began as a chance encounter with the Freedom on the Move database in late 2019. Dr. Edward Baptist, lead database historian, notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Conversations with advisory board member and soprano Karen Slack, composer Shawn Okpebholo, and poet/curator Tsitsi Ella Jaji, over the next year evolved into a determination to tell stories that contextualized elements of the database, and brought them into the 21st century, blending them with current events. The heartbreaking and violent murders of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 and Trayvon Martin in 2012, along with the imprint of too many others to name, are embedded within the fabric of Songs in Flight.
A powerhouse of artist-storytellers – Will Liverman, Reginald Mobley, Karen Slack, Howard Watkins, Tsitsi Jaji, Shawn Okpebholo, and Kimille Howard – have built a memorial to the stories contained within Freedom on the Move. Musically, they tie the Western European tradition of art song to forms that are distinctly American, especially those of formerly enslaved African peoples. The addition of Rhiannon Giddens, with her deep history in many musical languages, opens a dialogue between folk and classical styles. The inclusion of her opening set provides an artistic interpretation of music which springs directly from the generations of people enshrined in the Freedom on the Move database.
While it may seem that the genres of the classical and folk music traditions are divergent, this music has often been tied together throughout history: classical composers and singer-songwriters emerging from oral traditions have always borrowed one from the other. In recent decades, they have been kept apart by the rise of amplified techniques, segregationist tendencies in the recording industry, and a sense that classical music was reserved for the elite, while folk music was ‘for the people.’ And yet the poetry, the melodies, the rich harmonic underpinnings of each are not that different: certainly the goals of collaboration and storytelling remain the same.
We are excited and grateful to welcome these artists living in their full artistic power, standing at the intersection of poetry and music, expressing stories through the genres that speak to them. We are grateful to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society for believing in our vision early in the creative process, and for their partnership commissioning this song cycle. We are grateful to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for their partnership for the world premiere performance, and to Cornell Univeristy, Ithaca College, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sorel Organization for additional funding and support. Most of all, we are thankful to Shawn Okpebholo, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, and Ed Baptist, without whom this project could never have been realized.
November 9, 2022
