I caught my first glimpse of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series as a teenager, when my
mother brought me to the Museum of Modern Art. During the first decades of the
20th century, millions of African-Americans in the rural South had boarded trains
headed northward, resulting in massive demographic shifts across the U.S. The
Great Migration had been ignored in my school history books and was absent from
classroom discussion, so Lawrence’s paintings were my first exposure to this
important historical movement. But it was his personal artistic interpretation
– his bold and urgent rendering of the story – that made such a singular
impression and would keep me returning to his work over subsequent decades.
Through a confluence of technique and form, Lawrence responded
to a major historical event in a way that was distanced yet highly stylized. The figures he drew danced, the gesture and posture of the bodies paramount,
imbued with poise and attitude. Faces were nearly devoid of detail, but the
shapes were crisp and the colors bright and blunt in shades ranging from burnt
umber to cadmium orange. The paintings called and responded to one another
– hues, angles, kinetic energy assembling disparate scenes into one narrative. By dint of this economy of means Lawrence fashioned a language, a rhythm, a
perspective that focused the viewer’s attention like a laser.
Below each painting was displayed a short caption, largely
informational in nature, e.g. “In the North the Negro had better educational
facilities.” Some were chillingly direct: “It was found that where there had
been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left
immediately after this.” But though the language could be severe, it was not
preachy but rather descriptive, simple, and often understated, mirroring the
directness of the paintings in The
Migration Series.
In 2004 my dear friend Sheron Wray introduced my
music to the brilliant trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis. Soon thereafter Wynton requested a
piece for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra that would combine the forces of
jazz band and orchestra. The
instrumentation resembled that of his own composition All Rise, a striking oratorio that makes use of both ensembles plus
chorus. I decided that the form of my piece would comprise five movements
linked by three interludes, exploring various aspects of improvisation, drawing
together and recombining melodic and harmonic motives, themes, and textures. I
chose to cast the jazz band as “group soloist” subsumed within the larger sonic
palette of the orchestra, a sort of concerto for big band. For inspiration and guidance
I turned to the work of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Gunther
Schuller, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Bob Brookmeyer, and others. As I composed, I found
that the interwoven form was recalling Lawrence’s The Migration Series, so my piece became a tribute to his epic
work. I adorned the movements with titles that illustrated my impressions of
overarching themes in the paintings: “Landscapes”, “After a Lynching”, “A
Rumor”, “Riots and Moon Shine”, “Still Arriving”.
There’s a great deal I could, and should, document about the
exhilarating and overwhelming experience of the premiere. It was a unique opportunity
to work with brilliant musicians versed in different musical traditions; in the
process I learned a great deal about the advantages and perils of melding the
two ensembles. Often I found
myself navigating a hazy boundary between two distinct genres, formulating a
kind of Venn diagram where the languages overlapped. But documenting in detail
those anecdotes of epiphany would require a separate essay; what I want to
relate now alludes to a darker side of human nature.
In the years since the premiere in autumn 2006, Migration Series has been programmed by
half a dozen orchestras and jazz bands around the country. This good fortune
has allowed me to hunker down post-performance with the score, striving to make
the work stronger, tighter, and clearer. As I’ve written about before,
I’m a chronic reviser and a fervent believer that composers can glean a great
deal from the musicians who make the music come alive. So during the revision
process I consult not only the conductor’s score, but also the individual
musicians’ parts, to seek out valuable info marked in the margins.
On one of these occasions I was perusing the violin parts,
and I noticed some unusual penciled-in indications. Next to the title of the
second movement, “After a Lynching”, appeared a crudely drawn, smiling stick
figure with a rope around its neck.
Following a section marked “Heavy Swing” was written ‘from a noose’. The
title of the third movement, “A Rumor” carried an addendum: ‘That He Wrote a
Very Pretty Movement About a Lynching’. Likewise in the fourth movement,
following the tempo indication “Madly swung” was scrawled ‘by his neck’. The
title of the fifth movement, “Still Arriving”, had been altered; ‘arriving’ was
crossed out and replaced with ‘dead’.
I gawked at the drawings in disbelief. I felt disembodied,
almost violated. What startled and disturbed me most immediately was the
context and source. What motive had spurred an orchestral musician to deface
their violin part? Was it an attempt at humor, fueled by a dislike of the
piece, or a more general resentment? Was it a protest, a sort of anti-graffiti
with intent to delegitimize the narrative of my – and perhaps, by extension,
Lawrence’s – narrative? Could it be interpreted as an ironic commentary on my
music, or was it simply an act of naked racism?
I tried to project my awareness backwards in time, to
envision a 23-year-old Jacob Lawrence sitting down to mix colors in his Harlem
Studio in 1940. What unspeakable indignities had he suffered at his young age? What ‘commentary’, not to mention other strange fruit, had already been hurled
in his direction? What inner demons was he summoning, what burden was he casting
off as he painted The Migration Series? And by what means was he able to resist both bitterness and humiliation and
create a work so liberated from proselytizing and from cynicism?
Perhaps Lawrence was simply enthralled by the notion of
documenting an untold story much larger than his own. Painting The Migration Series may have been the
most incisive way for him to affirm that those unacknowledged lives
mattered. “All artists are constantly looking for something,” he mused in an
interview, “and they don’t always know what.” Hiding beneath the frugality of
his lines, hues, and shapes, lurking behind the spare, elegant depictions of
his subjects’ everyday lives, is the timelessness of the narrative, its
continual rebirth; as his final caption proclaims, “And the migrants kept
coming.”
I’ve kept the defaced violin part on my desk, and the
hangmen continue to grin derisively at me. I had imagined that confronting
their unsettling gaze on a daily basis might reveal some profound truth upon
which I might expound in an enlightened discourse. But it’s hard to find truth
in murkiness and innuendo, and therefore I feel compelled to relate this
troubling episode, if only to add my voice to a vast and churning dialogue
about the complexity of race in America. I decided against displaying the
images here, as they could easily be appropriated in unpredictable ways. But
consider encountering Lawrence’s Migration Series, which opens at the Phillips Collection next week – an American
masterpiece whose theme is largely still absent from school textbooks
seventy-five years later. As Wynton Marsalis once affirmed, “Art engages you in
the world, not just the world around you…but the bigger world of ideas and
concepts and feelings of history and humanity.”
with Sheron Wray and Wynton Marsalis, after the premiere of Migration Series
