For immediate release—October 24, 2022—Beth Morrison Projects and Harlem Stage present Song Cycles, featuring visionary women and non-binary composers and musicians Tamar-kali, Yaz Lancaster, and Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa-Nzou Mambanoeach. Each artist will premiere a new song cycle, shaped from eclectic musical languages—electro-acoustic, rock-infused, and Zimbabwean folk inspired. Performances take place October 28 and 29 at 7:30pm at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (150 Convent Avenue, New York, NY, 10031).

Tamar-kali: Melanc’Holy Ghosts and Other Mothers

World Soundtrack Academy award winning musician and composer Tamar-kali’s Melanc'Holy Ghosts and Other Mothers features a collection of poems published between 1920 and 1926, reflecting a range of contemplation and emotion not commonly associated with the so-called ‘fairer sex’ during this time period. These works by Gwendolyn Bennet, Jessie Redmond Fauset, and Lola Ridge stand out in their stark beauty. Fierce, deep, and full of dark complexities, they seed fertile ground for Tamar-kali’s post-punk and contemporary classical-intertwining compositional style. Melanc’Holy Ghosts and Other Mothers, composed for drums, bass, guitar, and string quartet, sits, as Tamar-kali describes, “very firmly in the sweet spot of [her] penchant for melancholy melody, heavy riffs, and brooding romantic string arrangements.”

Earlier in 2022, Tamar-kali debuted We Hold These Truths, a digital opera short, with LA Opera. The piece surrounded and responded to text by poets from the early Civil Rights movement, from the late 1800s into the early 1900s, and the Harlem Renaissance. This led to her introduction to the work of influential yet historically overlooked poet, author, essayist, and artist Gwendolyn Bennet. Tamar-kali explains, “I became interested in familiarizing myself with contributors to the Harlem Renaissance whom I had never heard of who happened to be women. When approached by Beth Morrison Projects, it was a natural segue to consider poetry in the public domain during this time period in America.  I stumbled upon Ms. Bennet’s poem ‘Hatred’ and it set the tone. I decided on a trio of devastatingly dark and beautiful pieces by women poets that would seed inspiration in setting the text to music to create a song cycle hopefully worthy of their brilliance.”

Brooklyn born and bred artist Tamar-kali is a second-generation musician with roots in the coastal Sea Islands of South Carolina. As a composer, Tamar-kali has defied boundaries to craft her own unique alternative sound. 2017 marked her debut as a film score composer. Her score for Dee Rees’ Oscar-nominated Mudbound garnered her the World Soundtrack Academy’s 2018 Discovery of the Year Award and has been classified by Indiewire as one of the 25 Best Film Scores of the 21st Century. 2019 was a hallmark year for her work as a composer. In addition to debuting her first symphonic commission, she scored four films total; three which were featured at the Sundance Film Festival 2020. They include Dee Ree’s The Last Thing He Wanted, Kitty Green’s The Assistant and Josephine Decker’s psychological drama Shirley; the latter whose soundtrack was named The Guardian’s Contemporary Album of the Month in June 2020. The fourth film was the documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble.

Yaz Lancaster: Ouroboros

Violinist, vocalist, steel pannist, and composer Yaz Lancaster presents Ouroboros, a song cycle that evokes the soundscapes and soundtracks of various horror films as it explores themes of recurrence and cosmic return. Distinct movements within the cycle conjure era-defining tropes—many serving as snapshots of societal anxieties of their times. Using electronics, strings, guitar, three high voices (including experimental musician Eliza Bagg with improvised solo vocals), and a collection of horror-inflected poems by Laura Henriksen supplemented with Lancaster’s own words, the composer creates a wholly aural tapestry of cinematic horrors.

Though each movement is strikingly different—one referencing the 80s synth soundtracks of slasher movies; another capturing the shadowscapes of gothic haunted house films; another extracting an electronic pop sensibility from contemporary horror; and another exploding in a death and black metal-derived climax—the piece coalesces around Lancaster’s textured referencing. Ouroboros’ title alludes to this play on recurring themes as it cycles through repeating terrors.

“I listened for a year to everything horror related—movie soundtracks, video games—searching for the most terrifying sounds I could find,” says Lancaster. “When I’m watching a horror movie, the sound is the most compelling thing. If I turn off the sound and watch a horror movie it becomes funny—it takes away from the whole experience. So I wanted to create an experience that inverses this, that turns off the visual.”

In conjunction with this world premiere, Lancaster presents an earlier work, Articulated Objects, which they co-wrote with poet Bailey Cohen-Vera. Articulated Objects meditates on themes of anti-US immigration policy, youthfulness, and complacency in a highly complicated period of American and global history.

Yaz Lancaster (they/them) is a Black transdisciplinary artist who performs in a wide variety of settings from DIY and popular music to chamber ensembles, and whose music is most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics and the everyday; fragments and collage; and liberatory politics. Their work is presented in many different mediums and collaborative projects. It often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of identity and liberation, to natural phenomena and poetics. Yaz has had the privilege and opportunity to create with artists like A Far Cry, ContaQt (with Evan Ziporyn), Contemporaneous, Donia Jarrar, JACK Quartet, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Skiffle Steel Orchestra, and Wadada Leo Smith. They are in post-genre duo laydøwn with guitarist-producer Andrew Noseworthy; write for ICIYL; and are the visual editor at Peach Mag. Yaz holds degrees in violin and poetry from NYU; and they love chess, horror movies, and bubble tea.

Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa-Nzou Mambano: Marimuka

Zimbabwean gwenyambira, scholar, composer, and singer Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa-Nzou Mambano, whose creative practice centers African healing and self-liberation, will perform Marimuka. Titled after the Zimbabwean word for the wilderness, this four-part song cycle is dedicated to the approximately 5 million Zimbabweans who have left their motherland to work in the diaspora, who are responsible for the livelihoods of their families; to any who have ever been denied a visa to see a loved one or called an Alien in a foreign land.

Marimuka began gestating as a response to a family member’s struggle to get a visa to visit during a critical moment—with the composer drawing on 14 years of experiences as an immigrant in the United States to build a song cycle evoking a forbidden wilderness. “The image of marimuka,” she describes, “can be like a forest or a desert, a vast plane where once you enter it, you leave the protective grounds of your domain, your home, your family, your prayers. And once you are in marimuka, anything can happen. At the same time, in order to go through your rite of passage, you must journey through marimuka. That is where you will know yourself, where you will be tested, where you will know your skills, your grounding. It’s where you will fall and hopefully get up again, but not everybody makes it through. I think of being here in the United States as a journey through marimuka.”

In Marimuka, Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa-Nzou Mambano performs vocals and mbira. Though she performs this world premiere composition solo, when working with other musicians, Tawengwa-Nzou Mambano tasks them to learn her compositions by ear, emphasizing that this music—like the ethereal, spirit-communicating, non-rational fractals that occur when the metal keys of the mbira are struck—cannot be translated with a Western notational score. “I am really adamant about trying to protect and share the essence of the music, as authentically as possible without putting it through these processes that then assign assumptions to how it operates,” she says. “The score is one of the most detrimental processes to Indigenous music, so instead I ask people playing this music to use their ears, to use their bodies, to simply listen—because in listening, that’s where the music comes alive.”

Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa-Nzou Mambano’s music is grounded in the ancestral, Chivanhu canon taught to her by the generations of Svikiro (spirit mediums) and N’anga (healers) in her bloodline. Her internationally performed opera The Dawn of the Rooster tells of the stories of her family during Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle of 1965-1980 and features Mbira dzaVadzimu, a sacred Zimbabwean instrument used in mapira ceremonies to commune with the ancestors. Tanyaradzwa is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and has held residencies as a Toulmin Creator with National Sawdust and as the inaugural Creative-in-Residence with Castle of Our Skins.

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