Bright Shiny Things Releases Ensemble Pi's Reparations NOW, Inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi

BRIGHT SHINY THINGS RELEASES ENSEMBLE PI’S REPARATIONS NOW, INSPIRED BY TA-NEHISI COATES AND IBRAM X. KENDI 

Album includes eight commissions and music of Ange´lica Negro´n, Courtney Bryan, Allison Loggins-Hull, Trevor Weston and Damian Norfleet

NEW YORK, NY–April 28, 2023, Bright Shiny Things releases Reparations NOW [BSTD-1083/Digital Only], Ensemble Pi’s newest album inspired by the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi that supports and calls for reparations for the African American community. This album of all world premiere recordings features eight commissions, with music by composers Ange´lica Negro´n, Allison Loggins-Hull, Trevor Weston, and Courtney Bryan. Ensemble Pi's resident vocalist Damien Norfleet joins forces on Weston’s Pinkster Kings and Norfleet’s vocal solo composition Kendi’s Secret.  Reparations NOW is available for pre-order: https://www.brightshiny.ninja/reparations-now

TRACK NOTES:
Conversatión a distancia (2020), by Puerto Rican-born composer/multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón, is inspired by Conversación, a danza by her fellow Puerto Rican composer Juan Morel Campos (1857-1896). With one layer comprising field recordings from Ponce, where Campos was born, Negrón says the music was also “motivated by the composer’s personal realization of the erasure of Afro-latinx in Puerto Rico, Latin America and the diaspora, and the histories lost along the way.” (Commission & World Premiere Recording.) 

Courtney Bryan’s Piano Etudes (2003) were inspired by Gyo¨rgy Ligeti’s Piano Etudes, as well as by various forms of percussion from West Africa and Brazil. Her Elegy (2018), which closes out the album, was written as a response to Abel Meeropol’s composition Strange Fruit, a protest song – best known from the 1939 recording by Billie Holiday – that symbolically depicts the practice of lynching in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Bryan’s Elegy, with three sections titled “A lament,” “spirit journey,” and “the ascent,” seeks to honor the spirits of past victims, as well as present ones, through imagining the transition of the spirit from the body to the beyond. (Piano Etudes: World Premiere Recording; Elegy: Commission & World Premiere Recording.) 

Composer/flutist Allison Loggins-Hull’s The Pattern (2020) features texts from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow projected through video. The composition focuses on white supremacy’s toxic pattern of blocking Black Americans from progress since the end of the Civil War through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and Black Lives Matter. The music contrasts the hope and optimism felt by Black Americans with looming and inevitable violence against those values. (Commission & World Premiere Recording.)

Trevor Weston’s Pinkster Kings (2020) delves into the little-known Afro-Dutch traditions in New York and New Jersey in the 17th-19th centuries. During the colonial period, the Dutch celebration of Pentecost led to a week-long Black celebration, which included a procession of the king and dancing. Using historical texts with music, Weston simulates an imagined celebration of Pinkster (Anglicization of the Dutch word for Pentecost) to illuminate the important contributions of Africans to the formation of New York. At the same time, the accompanying texts, read by Damian Norfleet, throw into stark relief the underlying business culture in which slaves were simply numbers on a balance sheet. (Commission & World Premiere Recording.)

Damian Norfleet’s vocal solo Kendi’s Secret was inspired by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s memoir How to Be an Antiracist. In his words: “I found Kendi’s most salient sentiments to be those addressing the stunted relationship between America’s Black and White bodies politic. With a focus on fricative and plosive consonants and a mindfulness of syllabic stress, I arranged words in a manner to evoke the sound of cadences played by marching band drumlines…further highlighting the repetitive relationship pattern that exists between Black and White America.” (Commission & World Premiere Recording.)

Trevor Weston’s Shape Shifter (The Angry Bluesman) (2011) for solo cello is a tour de force of emotion that came from a curiously detached inspiration. Weston explains: “I began working on Shape Shifter with the intention of writing a piece for solo cello from a machine’s point of view. … My guiding belief was that machines could not create subtle changes in expression like humans so their expressivity would come from the juxtaposition of contrasting musical ideas.” Weston found that as the piece evolved he was increasingly drawn to flatted thirds and fifths in the melodic vocabulary, “inflections of the blues,” a layer that then became intertwined with the “machine music” concept. He does not say what drew him to the subject, but his machine trying to be what it is not suggests, on this album at least, the repressed anger of a human treated like nothing but a machine. (World Premiere Recording.)

All works commissioned by Ensemble Pi are supported by The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, New Music USA’s Organizational Development Fund, and private donors.

TRACK LIST:

Ange´lica Negro´n
1. Conversacio´n a distancia 5:35 

Courtney Bryan
Piano Etudes: Carnival for Unity
2. Etude I: Unity Amongst Youth of the Diaspora 3:21
3. Etude II: Secondline for Black Love 2:13 

Allison Loggins-Hull
4. The Pattern 7:06 

Trevor Weston
Pinkster Kings
5. I. Pinkster Procession I: Ommegang 2:44
6. II. Introduction and the King’s Letter 4:05
7. III. Greed 5:07
8. IV. Half Free and Recessional 4:38 

Damian Norfleet
9. Kendi’s Secret 1:54 

Trevor Weston 
10. Shape Shifter (The Angry Bluesman) 10:52 

Courtney Bryan
11. Elegy 8:52 

Total running time: 56:25 

Ensemble Pi is
Raquel Acevedo Klein, conductor (4-8)
Airi Yoshioka, violin (1, 4-8, 11)
Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello (1, 4-8, 10, 11)
Catherine Gregory, flute (4)
Moran Katz, clarinet (1, 4-8, 11)
Idith Meshulam Korman, piano (1-8, 11)
Gregory Landes, percussion (1, 4-8)
Damian Norfleet, voice (6-9

ABOUT THE ENSEMBLE: 
Ensemble Pi is a socially conscious new music group founded in 2002. For the last twenty years, Ensemble Pi has presented a Peace Project – an annual multi-media event. Ensemble Pi has championed the work of contemporary composers by premiering and commissioning works by living composers. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Argosy Fund for Contemporary Music, Meet the Composer, Open Meadow Foundation, American Music Center, Det Norske Componistfond, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and New Music USA’s Organizational Development Fund have provided major support for these efforts.