John Edgar Wideman: The Seat Not Taken

from The New York Times

Op-Ed Contributor

The Seat Not Taken
By John Edgar Wideman

AT least twice a week I ride Amtrak’s high-speed Acela train from my home in New York City to my teaching job in Providence, R.I. The route passes through a region of the country populated by, statistics tell us, a significant segment of its most educated, affluent, sophisticated and enlightened citizens.

Over the last four years, excluding summers, I have conducted a casual sociological experiment in which I am both participant and observer. It’s a survey I began not because I had some specific point to prove by gathering data to support it, but because I couldn’t avoid becoming aware of an obvious, disquieting truth.

Almost invariably, after I have hustled aboard early and occupied one half of a vacant double seat in the usually crowded quiet car, the empty place next to me will remain empty for the entire trip.

I’m a man of color, one of the few on the train and often the only one in the quiet car, and I’ve concluded that color explains a lot about my experience. Unless the car is nearly full, color will determine, even if it doesn’t exactly clarify, why 9 times out of 10 people will shun a free seat if it means sitting beside me.

Giving them and myself the benefit of the doubt, I can rule out excessive body odor or bad breath; a hateful, intimidating scowl; hip-hop clothing; or a hideous deformity as possible objections to my person. Considering also the cost of an Acela ticket, the fact that I display no visible indications of religious preference and, finally, the numerous external signs of middle-class membership I share with the majority of the passengers, color appears to be a sufficient reason for the behavior I have recorded.

Of course, I’m not registering a complaint about the privilege, conferred upon me by color, to enjoy the luxury of an extra seat to myself. I relish the opportunity to spread out, savor the privacy and quiet and work or gaze at the scenic New England woods and coast. It’s a particularly appealing perk if I compare the train to air travel or any other mode of transportation, besides walking or bicycling, for negotiating the mercilessly congested Northeast Corridor. Still, in the year 2010, with an African-descended, brown president in the White House and a nation confidently asserting its passage into a postracial era, it strikes me as odd to ride beside a vacant seat, just about every time I embark on a three-hour journey each way, from home to work and back.

I admit I look forward to the moment when other passengers, searching for a good seat, or any seat at all on the busiest days, stop anxiously prowling the quiet-car aisle, the moment when they have all settled elsewhere, including the ones who willfully blinded themselves to the open seat beside me or were unconvinced of its availability when they passed by. I savor that precise moment when the train sighs and begins to glide away from Penn or Providence Station, and I’m able to say to myself, with relative assurance, that the vacant place beside me is free, free at last, or at least free until the next station. I can relax, prop open my briefcase or rest papers, snacks or my arm in the unoccupied seat.

But the very pleasing moment of anticipation casts a shadow, because I can’t accept the bounty of an extra seat without remembering why it’s empty, without wondering if its emptiness isn’t something quite sad. And quite dangerous, also, if left unexamined. Posters in the train, the station, the subway warn: if you see something, say something.

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John Edgar Wideman is a professor of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown and the author, most recently, of “Briefs.”

Songs for the Soul: New Recording Celebrates Black Classical Composers

Cover Art by Maya Freelon Asante

Songs for the Soul:

New Recording Celebrates Black Classical Composers

by Mark Anthony Neal

In a country in which the most well known classical composers are the proverbial “dead white men,” the idea that there are generations of Black classical composers might strike some as strange. The recent release of Songs for the Soul, a recording of chamber music by African-American composers performed by the Mallarme Chamber Players is an attempt to counter such beliefs. Released on the Videmus label, a label devoted explicitly to music by African-American, women and underrepresented composers, Songs for the Soul features music composed by Undine Smith Moore, Thomas Jefferson Anderson, William C. Banfield and Anthony Kelley.

The disc opens with Undine Smith Moore’s “Afro American Suite” (1969), initially written for flutist D. Antoinette Handy. Generally referred to as the “Dean of Black Women Composers” Moore was born in 1904 and began playing piano at age seven. Educated at Fisk University, Moore was the first Fisk student awarded a scholarship from the Julliard School of Music. In 1927, Moore began her 45-year career teaching at HBCU Virginia State University, where the legendary jazz pianist Billy Taylor (“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”) and the opera singer Camilla Williams, who debuted with the New York City Opera in 1946, were among her students. Moore’s best known piece is Scene from the Life of a Martyr (1980), written in memory of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was nominated for a Pulitzer Award. Moore died in 1989.

According to cellist Timothy Holley, the “Afro-American Suite” references several spirituals and folk songs including “Brothers Will You Pray for Me,” “I Heard the Preaching of the Elder, Preaching the Word of God,” “Who is That Yonder,” and “I Got Shoes, You Got Shoes, All God’s Chillun Got Shoes.” As such Moore’s compositional strategy, mirrors popular and practical African-American aesthetic practices that re-contextualized existing compositions for the purpose of making them relevant to their audiences. This was as much the case with Moore’s compositions, as it was with be-bop musicians quoting from Tin Pan Alley songs and the sampling practices of contemporary hip-hop producers.

T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) Anderson is part of the generation of Black composers that came after Undine Smith Moore. Coming of age in their era just before the Civil Rights Movement, Anderson was able to take advantage of opportunities that Moore and William Grant Still before her, do not have access to. Jefferson earned a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Iowa in 1958 and took various positions at HBCU’s before becoming the Chair of the music department at Tufts University in 1972, where he has been emeritus since 1990. Though no longer teaching, Anderson continues to compose. “Spirit Songs,” his contribution to Songs for the Soul was commissioned by Yo Yo Ma 1993. As Anderson says of the piece, “the work is improvisational in character; however, the music is organized around collective thoughts and notations.” Anderson’s music has been described as “audaciously modern” and he continues to listen to and engage contemporary composers and musicians, as was the case with his recent public conversation with Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky. Now in his eighties, Anderson continues to be generous with his time, his wit and his expertise, much the way Moore was for the generation of composers that came after her.

“Grist for the Mill,” Duke University Professor Anthony Kelley’s contribution to Songs for the Soul was inspired after breaking bread with Anderson and his wife Louise. Kelley’s music has been performed by the symphony orchestras in Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland and San Antonio. Heavily influenced by Jazz, Kelley predicts that 21st century music will be more eclectic, an element that can be heard in “Grist for the Mill.” Indeed the piece’s title becomes a metaphor for Kelley’s belief that future composers will incorporate popular music with their own cultural influences.

The centerpiece of Songs for the Soul is William Banfield’s opera Soul Gone Home, which is based on Langston Hughes one-act play of the same title. The play features two characters, a grieving mother and her just dead son. The opera was initially commissioned by the Mallarme Chamber Players and premiered in 2002. Banfield, who is a jazz guitarist and author, as well as a professor at the Berklee College of Music, recalled reading Hughes’s play back in 1988 and immediately thinking “this would be a great opera.” When Mallarme commissioned the opera he immediately thought of his friend, six-time Grammy Award nominated jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, to sing both roles. The resulting product, like the CD Songs for the Soul, is a timeless tour-de-force that illuminates the rich legacy of African-American music and composition.