Joy
by Langston Hughes
I went to look for Joy,
Slim, dancing Joy,
Gay, laughing Joy,
Bright-eyed Joy–
And I found her
Driving the butcher’s cart
In the arms of the butcher boy!
Such company, such company,
As keeps this young nymph, Joy!
In case you haven’t read the last two posts, I’m in the thick of prepping for a concert performance next week on Jan 16th with Thursday Musical. It is a wonderful opportunity to present some texts by Langston Hughes and to open up a conversation of contemporary voices in music. When I was first offered this opportunity millions of questions crossed my mind, but as time went on I realized, maybe just maybe, this is the start to a project that may become a dissertation or a performance feat or both or so many other things. I want to find the biracial voice in music. For now this is specific to myself as a biracial performing artist in a diverse community (Minneapolis), but also in a wider field where persons of color often do not receive equal representation. As a biracial person I find that more often than not I’m asked to identify with one part of myself or the other, are you black or are you white? I have always refused to choose because while I present as white, my voice does not match, it is colored and impossibly bright, and that, too, is me.
And it has been fairly recently that I have put those two together. This year I have 4 new private students and one of them asked me how I got my voice to feel like myself. It was an interesting question because I’ve never had a student as me that before and over recent years I have considered my voice to be an instrument that is separate from me, something that wasn’t quite able to be contained and so I pushed it to the right. It is wild, it is free, and undeniably different. As I’ve researched and found recordings for this upcoming concert I’ve found that I identify much more with the voices Harolyn Blackwell and Kathleen Battle and Audra McDonald than I do with Barbara Booney or Renee Flemming and this is likely because my voice is far more similar to the former list than the latter. This realization has brought me so much joy I am no longer bound by trying to sound like I look, HOW FREEING.
Anyway, the poem listed above is also one of the songs in Genius Child by Ricky Ian Gordon. It is the last one and he says he wrote it because it was how he always saw Blackwell, whom he wrote the cycle for. It is a lively, loving, sparkling piece and allows for the voice to bloom happily. You can check out my dance moves to the interlude on my instagram (linked at the bottom of this page) and hear it at the concert or via recording once I release those after the concert!