This is the last week of Black History Month in 2025. This week’s playlist is full of the works by black composers I enjoyed while listening this month and I can’t wait to listen and learn more. More than other weeks, I can’t wait to keep listening to the full albums featured on this playlist. Difficult Grace and American Counterpoints will be on repeat.
I give this playlist a Difficult Listening Hour rating of 6.5/10. If you can, I encourage you to listen in order.
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1. A City Called Heaven – 1 by Olly Wilson performed by Thamyris. Album: A City Called Heaven. Thanks to We Rise Classical for providing program notes “A City Called Heaven was commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva ensemble and given its world premiere in April 1989. The title of the composition is taken from a traditional Black American spiritual whose principal theme serves as the musical inspiration for the central slow movement of the piece. The chorus of this spiritual has the following text:
Sometimes I am tossed and driven — Lord / Sometimes don’t know where to roam — / I’ve heard of a city called heaven / I’m trying to make it my home.”
2. Rebounds by Jonathan Bailey Holland performed by Transient Canvas. Album: Right Now, in a Second. This piece is super fun but there are no notes I can find about the work! It is very literally two performers rebounding off of one another – I can say as a composer it is very difficult to craft a “one idea” piece that works.
3. African Sketches II. Dusk by Nkeiru Okoye performed by Isabel Dobarro. Album: Kaleidoscope. From the publisher: “AFRICAN SKETCHES is a four-movement suite inspired by the composer’s childhood years in Nigeria, her father’s homeland. … “Dusk” is a beautifully gentle memorial to Okoye’s first musical mentor…”. Nkeiru Okoye is a New York born and based composer with accolades in both composition and African Studies. I haven’t checked out her opera, Harriet Tubman, yet, but I will!
4-5. Life Sequences I & II by Shirley J. Thompson performed by Electric Voice Theatre. Album: The Franklin Effect. This whole album is a celebration of Rosalind Franklin, whose work revealed the double helix structure of DNA. For the past decade this ensemble has been commissioning works by women and celebrating women in STEM. Shirley J. Thompson is a prolific composer in the UK.
6. Markings – Remastered by Ulysses Simpson Kay performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Album: Black Composer’s Series Vol 3. Ulysses Simpson Kay was an Arizonan! Kay was primarily known for his operas and symphonic works. It looks like he had a solid career as a composer winning multiple awards including a Fulbright Scholarship and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
7. Lamentations, “Black/Folk Song Suite”: III. Calvary Ostinato by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson performed by Seth Parker Woods. Album: Difficult Grace.
8. We Who Seek by Curtis Stewart. Album: American Counterpoints. This piece is stunning, but what threw me the most is that via Curtis’ website you have full access to the score and performance notes! Access right up there with Jessie Montgomery and Pamela Z. 5 stars. No notes. “”We Who Seek” for solo violin, verse, strings and electronics.
“This work explores the “Remix” as electro-counterpoint. A paraphrase of the religious hymn “Ye Who Seek the Truth,” with samples of it’s Julia Perry/Jannina Norpoth arrangement, is obfuscated and reframed by samples of the concerto, Strut, and Prelude – using their mutual intervallic content for harmonic invention and variation. These tones and timbres set the table for verbal + personal interrogations on the idea of truth, representation, belonging, and history – they are imaginings on the personal fortitude of both Perry and Perkinson, in chaotic + determined pursuit of their “musical truths,” and woven into a future focused electro-symphonic kaleidoscope of sound and style.” -Curtis Stewart
9. For George Lewis by Tyshawn Sorey performed by Alarm Will Sound. Album: For George Lewis.