(C) Verite News New Orleans This story was originally published by Verite News New Orleans and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The special genius of Courtney Bryan, and the ‘secret world’ of Black composers [1] ['Lue Palmer', 'More Lue Palmer', 'Verite News'] Date: 2024-02-19 On the first day of her “Creative Process” seminar in Tulane’s Dixon Hall this semester, the pianist and composer Courtney Bryan welcomed an eclectic group of students. Among them were a glass sculptor working with broken pieces, a potter making spike-covered teacups, a philosophical photographer and two traditional students of music. Bryan handed a copy of “The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies” around the circle of students as they looked eagerly back at her. The creative process itself is vulnerable, Bryan told them, and requires reaching far and wide for inspiration, as she pointed them toward academics and artists such as Carter Mathes and Big Chief Donald Harrison, whose work will be covered in the course. As she sat with relaxed confidence in her class, Bryan prompted her students to make abstract concepts concrete in their work: “What does freedom sound like?” she asked them. From her quiet demeanor, one might not guess at the exuberant nature of her work, where she marries classical music with judicial hearings, sermons and sounds from Black Lives Matter protests. To this musical experimentation, Bryan credits the influence of Black composers, mentors and her own origins attending Tremé’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, where she heard Anglican hymns combined with the rhythms of Congo Square, West Africa and Jamaica. The MacArthur Foundation took notice of Bryan’s original sound when it awarded her a coveted $800,000, no-strings-attached “genius grant” last fall. Winning the grant has given Bryan affirmation and encouragement. She said she is still in a “dreaming time” as she decides how to make use of the award money, which is parceled out over five years. Bryan’s creative inclination began in the historic Tremé where she was raised, and where she first climbed up to a piano and started plucking out melodies at age five. She did not know at the time that she was composing, but her mother, Xavier University English professor Violet Harrington Bryan, gave her a sense of importance in what she was doing by recording her very early work on cassette tapes, Bryan said. She was in the fourth grade when she fell in love with the work of king of ragtime Scott Joplin. She later grew enamored with Frederic Chopin. To this day, she carries the sheet music of both composers when she travels across the country for performances and presentations. “It just feels like home to me,” Bryan said of their music. Bryan attended the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts in high school, spending summers at the Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Jazz Camp. There, she met mentor Roger Dickerson — one of her musical “sages,” she said, and a guardian of the New Orleans music tradition whose pupils have grown into some of the most important composers in the country. Bryan continued to study orchestration with Dickerson after high school, later returning to teach at the Louis Armstrong Jazz Camp as an adult. “The thing about Courtney was that she knows how to discover stuff for herself,” Dickerson said. “She has a special, I have to say, genius.” It was Dickerson who first helped Bryan to understand that she was a part of a very long line of African American melodists, experimenters and musical creatives, she said. “He told me about this whole history of Black composers. He told me about William Grant Still and Florence Price,” two renowned 20th century African American composers, Bryan said. “Back then it felt like a whole secret world.” The idea that Black music could be contained to one form or sound is one that Bryan actively resists. Bryan nurtured this perspective when she attended Columbia University for a master’s degree in musical composition and later a doctorate in musical arts. At Columbia, she learned how to compose using computer software under the mentorship of George E. Lewis, a composer and fellow genius grantee who has been called “one of the most formidable figures in modern music.” His writings form the central text of Bryan’s class at Tulane. “She was one of the best loved people in our department,” Lewis said, recalling how Bryan eschewed competitiveness at Columbia and insisted on critiquing colleagues’ work in a way that built their confidence. “She changed the culture of the department to this day, with a focus on greater generosity of spirit among the students and the faculty.” Lewis also recalled Bryan’s use of a sampler when she was developing “Songs of Laughing, Smiling & Crying,” which she composed in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Her most ambitious work to date, “Yet Unheard,” an orchestral and solo soprano piece, took that subject even further. Bryan finished the piece in 2015, as protests erupted across the country in response to the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African American woman who was found deceased in police custody in Waller County, Texas. The piece, which Bryan dedicated to Bland, is a haunting combination of music and voice with lyrics written by the poet Sharan Strange, whose words make demands of the audience: “You are my ears. You are my witnesses,” sings soprano Helga Davis in a 2018 performance. “It’s often through music that I process,” Bryan said, noting how she has tried to create an outlet for her grief through her work, which has often touched on police brutality. Though so much of Bryan’s music is about loss, she also makes room for joy, paying homage to the extraordinary lineage of composers that have influenced her. Her work “House of Pianos” brings many of them together, pulling on the stylings of local legend Ellis Marsalis, mentor Roger Dickerson, Hazel Scott, Marie C. Williams, Nina Simone and enslaved composer Tom Wiggins, among others. Bryan creates a world of her own, in which these giants play cards together, smoke, talk and jam. She most recently performed the piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic with conductor Paolo Bortolameolli, and with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra with conductor Louis Langrée. With a genius grant in hand, Bryan, now 41, is still teaching and performing. Over the next several months at Tulane, she hopes to help her graduate students grow their curiosity and resist any notion of what their work could or should be, she said. She performed in Raleigh, North Carolina last weekend and is set to premiere new work in Jacksonville, Florida in March. But Bryan is also turning her eye to the next evolution in her work. She is composing for opera for the first time, taking on not one, but two of these projects. The first will be based on the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber’s novel “Myal,” which celebrates the shared spirituality of African Americans and African Jamaicans. The opera will draw from her father’s heritage in Jamaica and her mother’s academic work on Brodber. Her second opera is still a secret, a commissioned work that will also pull from literary inspirations, she said. “The music is still growing. It’s not the end. She’s young, and she’s gifted and Black,” Lewis said. “We’re going to see all these amazing things.” Related Stories Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. [END] --- [1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/02/19/courtney-bryan-composer-macarthur-genius-grant/ Published and (C) by Verite News New Orleans Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 US. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/veritenews/