Only The Midnight Sky And Silent Stars
My new orchestral work, Only The Midnight Sky And Silent Stars was made possible by the Emerging Black Composers Project. I was one of four winning composer finalists in 2022. The work was premiered by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra in February 2023 under the direction of conductor Edwin Outwater at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The music is inspired by a poem called ‘Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman’ by the brilliant, Philadelphia poet laureate, Sonia Sanchez. I love the way this poem brings Harriet Tubman to life, you can feel her spirit, strength and courage. There is a fierceness and clarity of image and rhythm in the poem which I tried to capture in the music. I could literally see her running and emerging from a southern country road with the morning mist in her hair. I based each movement on three stanza’s that were most evocative for me.
Movement I. Running (0-1’00”) II. Picture Her (1’00-2’04”) III. Turning South ( 2’05-5:05)
Sketch At Seven
I wrote these works as a Theme and Variations, based off an original solo piano work. The inspiration for the piece was a sketch book of drawings and musical journals that I made when I was very young that was sent back to me after some forty years. When I opened the sketchbook it was like a doorway into the past and future, mysterious and profound, a reconnection of love from the past and into the future.
Full Circle
In August of 2012, Sumi was one of 38 Jazz composers chosen from a National pool of applicants to attend the Jazz Composers Orchestra Intensive (JCOI) at Columbia University. The selected composers were in various stages of their composing careers, working in jazz, improvised music, and creative music and their work had to demonstrate excellent musicianship, originality, and potential for future growth in orchestral composition.
The week after attending the JCOI, I had a dream about trying to orchestrate the curve in the yin and yang sign. I laughed it off at first, but then I started to wonder what that would actually sound like. Thinking about this led me to explore the ideas in Full Circle.
In this work I wanted to deal musically with the idea of opposing life dynamics, life and death, love and hate, joy and suffering, the sweet and the sour, the yin and the yang.
I wanted to create the feeling of spirals out of circles, experiment with contrasting textures, smooth, linear and legato with jagged, rough and staccato. I imagined the rhythm to have a feeling of unpredictability and surprise, with a sense of flow and various tempos accelerating and slowing down. I heard the harmony as floating with a restless quality. Many of the musical ideas in the piece were built on improvisations.
The program was organized in two phases. The first phase, a study intensive, included many topics such as the culture of working with a symphony, dealing with a conductor as a collaborator, and techniques for structuring improvisation within the orchestral context.
Upon completion of the Intensive, each participant was eligible to apply for inclusion in the Institute’s second phase, the JCOI New Music Readings, which was held in April to September 2013. Up to 18 composers were selected for participation in this second phase and composed an original work for orchestra during the intervening months between the two phases. I count myself fortunate and I am honored to have received a reading of my first orchestral work, Full Circle, by the American Composers Orchestra in NYC in June of 2013.
Out From The Silence
I composed Out From The Silence in an attempt to express and try to come to terms with the experience of my mother and 110,000 others, who because of their Japanese ancestry, were put behind barbed wire and imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II.
The piece premiered December 17th, 1993 at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York City. and featured Fusako Yoshida (koto), Ronnie “Nyogetsu” Seldin (shakuhachi), Stanton Davis (trumpet), Robin Eubanks (trombone), Bob Kenmotsu (tenor sax), John Blake (violin), Kyoshi Kitagawa (bass), Akira Tana (drums), and Yukio Tsugi (percussion).
It consists of three movements plus an interlude:
I. The Arrest
(shakuhachi, koto, voice)
Based on The Arrest by Sojin Takei
The time has come
For my arrest,
This dark rainy night
I calm myself and listen
To the sound of the shoes
II. Out From The Silence
(koto, shakuhachi, trumpet, tenor sax, trombone,violin, drums, bass, piano, percussion)
Prose taken from an autobiographical work by my mother, Emiko Tonooka
I looked around me; the army had not forgotten any of us Japanese. An unexpected audience gathered to witness the involuntary exodus.My head pounded, my stomach churned, my sense of reality slipped and shifted like a kaleidoscope. I thought about the rumours of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. In desperation I told myself to pray. If I were a Christian, a God might listen, if I were a Buddhist like my parents this upheaval could be faced with calm. The only belief that might possibly sustain me was the dream of a mystical democracy, nurtured by the patriotic fervor of World War II, and a life long yearning for reconciliation of my two worlds. But moment to moment, unbeknownst to me then, the actual events of my life were stripping away the illusions I cherished. When mother said we were going to a concentration camp, I argued with her until that day when I saw Seattle for the last time.
Interlude: Ancient Feathers
(shakuhachi, koto, bass drums and percussion)
III. Susumu
You are entitled to overhear—
Susumu, my name means prosperity in Japanese,
The progress of prosperity and good fortune.
The dust that seeped through makeshift barracks in Arizona
Wet my parents’ taste for the American Dream.
But my luck will have to be different
I want my wheels to skim like the blades of the wind
Across all ruts.
I want my wheels to spin so fast
That we stand still.
Are you with me?
Then we can say in the summer breeze,
Susumu.