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Press Releases
Bright Shiny Things Releases Forgiveness, by Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and Marc Bamuthi Joseph
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE |
Media Contact: Paula Mlyn, A440 Arts |
BRIGHT SHINY THINGS RELEASES FORGIVENESS, BY DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN (DBR) AND FORMER KENNEDY CENTER VICE PRESIDENT OF SOCIAL IMPACT MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH
Featuring multi-Grammy® Award-winning conductor David Alan Miller
& the Albany Symphony, Forgiveness addresses urgent question:
Can democracy survive without forgiveness?
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“Roumain’s genre-bending score … was a thing of intense power and pathos. Embracing a kaleidoscope of sonic worlds, opera to jazz, hiphop to Haitian, the whole is nonetheless convincingly integrated, and appealingly funky.” “[Joseph’s] delivery – which oscillated between a brilliantly inflected speech cadence and flurries of propulsive freestyle rhythms – demonstrated his well-cultured sense of pacing and phrasing.” |
NEW YORK, NY–On August 29, 2025, Bright Shiny Things releases Forgiveness [BSTC-0225], a spoken-word concerto by composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph–who also performs his own text – that passes through four stages: Redemption, Reconciliation, Discernment, and Grace. The wide-ranging meditation on both personal and political forgiveness through the lenses of race, justice, and democracy also features two-time Grammy® winner David Alan Miller leading the Albany Symphony. Forgiveness is available for pre-order here.
Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and spoken word artist and librettist Bamuthi have been making work together for more than 15 years, often focusing on protest, social justice, morality, and freedom. Forgiveness was initially catalyzed in 2015, when a white supremacist murdered nine people at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and within days several relatives of the victims publicly forgave the gunman. That act of forgiveness struck Bamuthi as something that he himself would not have done, and perhaps as something that the families of the murdered should not have done. Yet the increased divisiveness of the country in the intervening years brought him to an acute and urgent question: can our democracy survive if we cannot forgive?
Forgiveness is the culmination of a three-year journey undertaken to explore that question. As an artist in residence with the Albany Symphony, Bamuthi spent two years visiting churches, high school classrooms, artist co-ops, and symphony rehearsals, leading conversations around this one topic. After speaking with hundreds of people, he crafted a libretto examining forgiveness from religious, political, and self-critical perspectives. Albany Symphony commissioned Bamuthi’s longtime friend and collaborative partner, award-winning composer DBR to build a score that uniquely asks its own questions about forgiveness, while centering Bamuthi’s language and performance.
Roumain comments:
“As friends, fathers, and Black artists, we’ve long considered the power and responsibility of expressing ourselves fully. This piece explores forgiveness as a shared journey, one shaped by age, race, and rage, and framed through Bamuthi’s four-part meditation. … My music responds to his words as commentary, crowd, and chorus, engaging with the orchestra as a collective voice and a quiet listener. In one of my favorite moments, as the music fades, Marc offers, ‘Steps to grace…Face the hurt…Unthread the truth…Choose mercy.’ As a Black male composer, carrying both privilege and precarity, I move toward forgiveness through my work, hoping this piece affirms the breadth, complexity, and boundless spirit of Black classical music.”
Forgiveness has been performed three times to date, and the depth of its relevance continues to evolve. After premiering in spring 2023, it had a second set of recorded live performances by Albany Symphony in January 2025 on the weekend before Donald Trump’s second inauguration. This past March, the Oakland Symphony performed the West Coast premiere with Bamuthi, just days after Bamuthi was fired by the Trump Administration from his six-year role as Vice President of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center. Bamuthi says:
“As a child of immigrants, I have a deep respect for the lengths a human will go in order to be free. My American journey is rooted in the pursuit of an equitable cultural horizon, and the pathway to get there is undergirded by a road paved with the promise of democracy. Can that democracy survive, if we cannot forgive? This suite asks that question at symphonic scale in a way that honors both the progenitors and the inheritors of the American promise.”
TRACK LIST
Albany Symphony, conducted by David Alan Miller
I. Redemption
II. Reconciliation
III. Discernment
IV. Grace
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR, composer) is a Black, Haitian-American composer who sees composing as collaboration with artists, organizations and communities within the farming and framing of ideas. He is a prolific and endlessly collaborative composer, performer, educator, and social entrepreneur. “About as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets” (New York Times), Roumain has worked with artists from J’Nai Bridges, Lady Gaga and Philip Glass to Bill T. Jones, Marin Alsop and Anna Deavere Smith.
Known for his signature violin sounds infused with myriad electronic and African-American music influences, Roumain takes his genre-bending music beyond the proscenium. He is a composer of solo, chamber, orchestral, and operatic works, and has composed an array of film, theater, and dance scores. He has composed music for the acclaimed film Ailey (Sundance official selection); was the first Music Director and Principal Composer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; released and appeared on 30 album recordings; and has published over 300 works. He has appeared on CBS, ESPN, FOX, NBC, NPR, and PBS; and has been presented and collaborated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Kennedy Center, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Sydney Opera House. He was Artist-in-Residence and Creative Chair at the Flynn in Burlington, Vermont. Currently, he is the first Artistic Ambassador with Firstworks; the first Artist Activist-in-Residence at Longy School of Music; and the first Resident Artistic Catalyst with the New Jersey Symphony.
Roumain is an Atlantic Center Master Artist, a Creative Capital Grantee, and a Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellow. He has won the American Academy in Rome Goddard Lieberson Fellowship; a Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship Award; two regional Emmy Awards for The New Look of Classical Music: Boston Pops Orchestra and Art is Essential: New Jersey Symphony; National Sawdust Disruptor Award; and the Sphinx Organization Arthur L. Johnson Award. He has been featured as a keynote speaker at universities, colleges, conservatories and technology conferences, and was the first ASU GAMMAGE Residency Artist. He has lectured at Yale and Princeton University and was a Roth Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. For over 20 years, he served as a board member for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, most recently as Vice Chair; currently is a board member for the League of American Orchestras and National Sawdust; and is a voting member for the Recording Academy GRAMMY® awards.
A student of William Albright, Leslie Bassett, and William Bolcom, Roumain graduated from Vanderbilt University and earned his doctorate in music composition from the University of Michigan. He is currently a tenured Associate and Institute Professor at Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a TED Global Fellow, an Emerson Collective Dial Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In the Spring of 2022, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An internationally renowned cultural strategist, Bamuthi is the co-creator of the paradigm-shifting allyship training HEALING FORWARD™. He has lectured in 25 different countries and his TED talk “You Have The Rite” has been viewed more than five million times.
Bamuthi has most recently completed commissions for Yale University, Albany Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, and Washington National Opera. His opera "Watch Night" with music by Tamar-kali and direction by Bill T. Jones premiered at PAC NYC in 2023, and his collaboration with NYC Ballet Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan "Carnival of the Animals" premiered at Meany Center, Seattle in 2024. His orchestral work “Good News Mass” with music by Carlos Simon premiered with the LA Philharmonic in April 2025. Bamuthi is a long-time collaborator with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), and "Forgiveness" is one of several pieces they have co-written. Select works by Bamuthi are available for purchase and rental on SozoMart.com.
An emergent on screen talent, he is among the featured performers in HBO’s screen adaptation of “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He served as the Vice President of Social Impact at The Kennedy Center from 2019-25. A proud alumnus of Morehouse College, Bamuthi received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts in the Spring of 2022 and was the recipient of a second Honorary Doctorate from Middlebury College in the Spring of 2023.
The Albany Symphony celebrates our living musical heritage through its adventurous programming, commissioning, and recording of new work, and broad community engagement beyond the concert hall.
Recognized as one of America’s most innovative and creative orchestras, the two-time GRAMMY® Award-winning Albany Symphony is renowned for virtuosic performances featuring classic orchestral favorites, lesser-heard masterworks, and a diverse array of new music from leading and emerging voices of today. The Symphony, founded in 1930, has received more ASCAP Awards than any other orchestra in America, as well as several GRAMMY® nominations, including the orchestra’s most recent win in 2021.
Led by Music Director David Alan Miller, the Symphony presents a core classical series throughout the region, each featuring a world-premiere or recent composition; a multi-day American Music Festival that celebrates established and emerging living composers; performances by its cutting-edge new music chamber ensemble, the Dogs of Desire; and a family series and holiday concerts in collaboration with youth performing arts groups. The Albany Symphony’s award-winning education programs include Symphony in Our Schools, which brings musicians into classrooms for interactive music education.
Music Director of the Albany Symphony since 1992, Miller, the artistic mastermind behind the American Music Festival, has proven himself a creative and compelling orchestra builder. Through exploration of bold repertoire, educational programming, community engagement, and recording initiatives, he has reaffirmed the Albany Symphony's reputation as the nation's leading champion of American symphonic music and one of its most innovative orchestras.
A native of Los Angeles, Miller holds a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree in orchestral conducting from the Juilliard School. From 1988 until 1992, he was Associate Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. From 1982 to 1988, he was Music Director of the New York Youth Symphony, earning considerable acclaim for his work with that ensemble. Frequently in demand as a guest conductor, Miller has worked with most of America’s major orchestras, including the orchestras of Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco, as well as the New World Symphony, the Boston Pops, and the New York City Ballet. In addition, he has appeared frequently throughout Europe, the UK, Australia, and the Far East as guest conductor. Miller serves as Artistic Advisor to the Little Orchestra Society in New York City and has served as Artistic Advisor to the Sarasota Orchestra and, from 2006 to 2012, served as Artistic Director of “New Paths in Music,” a festival of new music from around the world, also in New York City.
Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and Marc Bamuthi Joseph are represented by SOZO Impact: sozomedia.com
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