{"id":273169,"date":"2023-11-03T14:40:22","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T20:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/?p=273169"},"modified":"2023-11-10T12:20:47","modified_gmt":"2023-11-10T19:20:47","slug":"after-premiere-joel-thompson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/after-premiere-joel-thompson\/","title":{"rendered":"After the World Premiere: Joel Thompson\u2019s To Awaken the Sleeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Story by Kyle MacMillan<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Composer Joel Thompson had been primarily known for his vocal, choral, and operatic music, but all that changed in 2020 when the Colorado Music Festival led the commissioning of a 20-minute work for orchestra and narrator titled To Awaken the Sleeper<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nine American orchestras signed on as co-commissioners, and an array of other symphonies, including such notables as Atlanta and London, have performed it since the Festival premiered the piece in August 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Composer Joel Thompson<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a dream come true,\u201d Thompson said from Texas, where he is composer-in-residence at the Houston Grand Opera. \u201cThe orchestral world is now familiar with my music, and I couldn\u2019t ask for anything more. Getting to write for these esteemed ensembles and still be centered on my focus on our humanity and the world around us \u2013 I am very content.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The 34-year-old Atlanta native, a member of an informal composers group known playfully as \u201cThe Blacknificent Seven,\u201d is perhaps most widely recognized for his elegy for choir and orchestra, <\/span>Seven Last Words of the Unarmed<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The work, which sets the final words of seven Black men who were killed by police and other authority figures, including Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, and Trayvon Martin, debuted in 2015 and won the 2018 American Prize for Choral Composition.<\/span><\/p>\n

For more than 40 years, Festival Music Director Peter Oundjian has served as a visiting professor at Yale University, where he got to know Thompson when the composer was doing coursework there for a still in-progress doctorate. During the pandemic, the conductor approached the composer with the idea of writing a piece for the Festival.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oundjian, a fan of James Baldwin, had heard Thompson\u2019s <\/span>My Dungeon Shook<\/span><\/i> (2020), which was inspired by the words of the celebrated author and civil rights activist who died in 1987. He asked if the compo<\/span>ser might be willing to tackle another Baldwin-related work, and Thompson, still in the author\u2019s thrall, jumped at the chance.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Peter Oundjian (left), Joel Thompson (center), Eddie Glaude, Jr. (right)<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

For help in choosing suitable Baldwin texts for the commission, Thompson turned to Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., who wrote a best-selling 2020 book titled <\/span>Begin Again: James Baldwin\u2019s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI knew the emotional trajectory that I wanted the piece to take,\u201d Thompson said, \u201cand [Glaude] was essential to find the text, because he just has an encyclopedic knowledge of all of Baldwin\u2019s output, so he helped me find the pieces of puzzles to put together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Prior to the Festival premiere, which featured Glaude as the narrator, Thompson was concerned that the piece, which is similar in structure to Aaron Copland\u2019s <\/span>Lincoln Portrait<\/span><\/i>, would come across as a \u201cbit preachy.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBut people went along for the ride,\u201d he said of the audience reaction in Boulder. \u201cI think they realized that the piece was rooted in a similar philosophy that Baldwin and I share, where we really love this country, and because of that, we want to hold it to account. We want to make it more equitable for everyone.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That same spirit of openness has extended to other cities where <\/span>To Awaken the Sleeper<\/span><\/i> has been performed, especially in Connecticut, where Thompson served as composer-in-residence with New Haven Symphony in 2022-23. He was invited there to speak about it at a local library, and the orchestra sponsored an exhibition in which local artists responded to the music. \u201cI love that the piece invites the community to engage with it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt invites response. It\u2019s been great to see that.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Interest in the prospective new work was so strong that the Festival was able to assemble an unusually large group of co-commissioners, including the Baltimore Symphony, Kansas City (Mo.) Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thompson\u2019s hometown orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, presented <\/span>To Awaken the Sleeper<\/span><\/i> on its opening sets of concerts of the 2022-23 season. Writing for the website ArtsATL, music critic Pierre Ruhe had considerable praise for the new work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThompson\u2019s music is alive and inquisitive, in constant dialogue with itself and the text,\u201d Ruhe wrote. \u201cHe pays close attention to compositional craft, without wasted effort. There\u2019s still a trace of the student in his writing \u2013 an overuse of cymbals rolled by soft mallets, like a slow-motion metallic splash, for example \u2013 but so much originality and lucid energy and stylistic confidence. He\u2019s an important voice to follow.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So taken was the Atlanta Symphony with To Awaken the Sleeper<\/em> that it joined the New York Philharmonic and Aspen (Colo.) Music Festival in commissioning another work \u2013 this time purely instrumental \u2013 by the composer that is scheduled to be premiered in March 2024. \u201cI feel like they got familiar with my compositional voice, and wanted to collaborate again,\u201d Thompson said. The Colorado Music Festival feels the same way; fans of Thompson\u2019s work will have another chance to hear new music by the composer very soon, as the Festival has commissioned a piano concerto to be premiered in its 2026 season.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, Thompson can bask in the afterglow of what has become one of the most-performed new compositions of the past three years. \u201cThat piece is hugely successful,\u201d Oundjian said, \u201cand very, very powerful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

_________<\/p>\n

Have you enjoyed hearing new music at the Colorado Music Festival by Joan Tower<\/a>, Joel Thompson, Wang Jie, and many other contemporary composers?\u00a0Donate today so we can commission new works like this in the future<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSo long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.\u201d
\n\u2014Aaron Copland<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2021, the Festival gave the first performance of Joel Thompson’s “To Awaken the Sleeper,” inspired by the work of James Baldwin. Read about the life that powerful music has enjoyed after its world premiere. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":270368,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[445,382],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-after-the-world-premiere","category-blog"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}