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When one looks beyond the jokes about “the fat lady” singing or baseless accusations of the form being boring, one can find operas sharing some of the most intriguing stories ever told. These tales present the full range of human emotion, from devastating loss to insuppressible joy. Often overlooked, however, are these works’ political overtones. Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) celebrates the collapse of aristocracy, while Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea (1643) and Handel’s Giulio Cesare (1724) share lessons learned from the Roman republic. But these messages are often ignored by contemporary audiences unaccustomed to the story or language used. The general homogeneity of compositional voices only further compounds the difficulties of audience appreciation. By and large, the best-known works have been by white European songwriters. This is not for want of trying by others. In reality, there is a rich history of Black American opera composers. One hopes the renewed interest in Anthony Davis’ works, and the recent recording of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (BMOP/sound, 2022) open up some of this history.

As early as the 1860s John Thomas Douglass composed Virginia’s Ball (1868). Although a work now lost to time, the fact a Black American penned an opera only a few short years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment is nothing short of astonishing. Three decades later, Harry Lawrence Freeman became the first African-American to have a successful opera production. In the early Twentieth Century, the father of Ragtime, Scott Joplin penned not one but two operas. By the 1940s, William Grant Still became the first African-American to have an opera performed by a major opera company and, later, the first to have an opera performed on national television. John Elwood Price, Robert Owens, Julia Perry, and Ulysses Kay are but a few African American opera composers who wrote during the post-war era up until the 1980s. But, despite all of this history, the popular press found a radicalism in Davis’ initial production of X by the New York City Opera in 1986. The concept of an opera – long seen by many concertgoers as a bastion of white European-based sentimentalities – seemed an unconventional platform for the life story of a then-polarizing civil rights leader. While X sold out its four performances, it quickly disappeared. 

Davis continued to write operas on other significant moments in history in the ensuing years, including the Amistad slave ship mutiny and the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, the latter earning Davis a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2020. The death of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and society writ large’s increased focus on racial justice presented the perfect opportunity for Davis to revisit X, adapting it for the times and improving it from its original rendition. Now, X is set to be the second African-American opera presented at the Metropolitan Opera in New York – the first being Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Up in My Bones” – and its recording recently nominated for a 2023 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording; Davis’ second nomination for the recognition.

X is a powerful work, not merely for its subject matter but in how Davis approaches the material. Across the work’s three acts, Davis depicts “Malcolm’s odyssey as a story of redemption . . . from a child filled with justifiable rage to a man with a transcendent view of the future” by tying that story arc to changes in music. The score takes cues from the Blues and Jazz to depict Malcolm’s upbringing and early years. The score frequently uses dissonance – something Davis is more comfortable approaching than most due to his experiences playing piano with avant-garde heavyweights including Wadada Leo Smith and fellow opera composer Anthony Braxton – to reflect violent surroundings. Complex rhythmic structures borrow from Davis’ interests in the music of different cultures around the world, including those of Bali and India. Concepts from Western classical music provide a core to the overall work, but it is more of a base than an effort to give those ideas some sort of preeminence over other musical ones. At its essence, X is an opera. But it is one far more expansive in scope and interest than most of its forebears. It pulls as much from the power of Wagner as it does from the gracefulness of Ellington. The vocalists, among the best in their field, are also given room to improvise and add a new level of vitality to the work.  

In this first part of our conversation with Davis, we discuss what draws him to opera and his compositional process. Our second part goes deeper into X and his work in progress on the Tulsa Race Massacre. 

PostGenre: Since X was your first opera, what initially interested you in opera, and do you feel that is the same thing that draws you to it today?

Anthony Davis: I think what initially drew me to opera was that it offered me a chance to engage with the issues of our time through music. I’ve always been very fascinated by politics and the political realm, even as a kid. Opera gives me a chance to think outside the traditional conception of music to illuminate issues and things that are part of who we are today.

PG: What is it about opera that you feel allows you to do that maybe other forms of music do not?

AD: Well, of course, there is the narrative nature of opera. Opera offers a direct emotional appeal through its use of voice in a way unlike how you can connect with other music. And then I can also bring the instrumental side of thinking into it as well. With opera, I can create a whole creative universe with a different musical world for each piece. That’s always been exciting to me, the idea that you can develop the music and take it into so many different places.  

I love the idea of being immersed in the narrative world of an opera. There is such a breadth of music that can come out of Malcolm X’s story because of the parallel of musical development during Malcolm’s life and how music changed, particularly in “jazz”, from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. The emergence of things like modal music and the avant-garde, in some ways, parallel Malcolm’s personal development and his coming to maturity as a leader, so I have worked that observation into X.  Of course, with my opera, Amistad (1997/revised 2008), we were looking at a very different era. As a result, we approached the compositions differently and brought more of a European influence into that work. And with The Central Park Five (2019), we were looking at an era where hip hop was beginning to enter the mainstream. Much of the story behind The Central Park Five is the result of a culture war. So I looked at the culture of that moment and put that into the music as well. It is fun to examine music in that way. 

PG: Presumably making your operas reflective of their cultural settings would require you to engage in significant research as part of the compositional process. 

AD: Yes, research is an important part of the process. 

For instance, Wakonda’s Dream (2007) was about the culture of the Ponca tribe. To make the story work musically, I had to do significant research into the tribe’s music and Native American music, more generally, which was fascinating. I also looked at their mythology and belief systems and worked hard to get immersed in tribal culture. That was very important for that particular piece.

PG: It would seem that even stories you may be more familiar with would require significant research to get the full story. 

AD: Yes. Although I was alive in 1989 and remember the underlying story, The Central Park Five required me to listen to many[Donald] Trump audio clips. Because Trump was such a big part of that story, I wanted to understand what drew some people to him. What was Trump’s appeal to some people? Why are some people so enamored with him? White fear and exploitation of the racial divide is something I became fascinated with and wanted to better understand. 

PG:  To what extent does the opera’s librettist, the one writing words for the vocal parts, also engage in your research?

AD: The librettist is certainly a part of that process. You are not alone in researching. That has especially been the case when I have worked with Thulani [Davis]. In addition to being my cousin, she is a great writer and librettist and was a central part of putting both X and Amistad together. 

PG: While in the abstract there seems to be a clear line between the roles of the composer – writing the score- and librettist – writing the lyrics- it seems those lines may be a bit more blurred in practice.

AD: Yes. When you’re realizing the words and music, sometimes, you know, there is an editing process that goes on. Having a good librettist is important because it gives you the freedom to make small changes so the overall work is a more viable form that works on both narrative and musical levels. 

Collaboration between the composer and the librettist is also important because the words inspire the music. Some of that is obvious, in terms of evoking certain emotions. But the lyrics also shape the music in less obvious ways, as in trying to make the structure and musicality of the language come out in the music, whether through metric written lines or free verse. How the language is structured may give you different ideas about how it could be interpreted in music. Anytime you are setting something to music, in a sense, you’re interpreting the words. By composing the music for such a project, you add your own take on what the words mean and their sentiment of it so that the music does not become just some kind of filler. The idea for making music that will last with the audience is to find ways to musically transform the text.

PG: Beyond research and collaborating with the librettist, what is your process for composing an opera?

AD: Well, I usually like to have as much of the words of the text done as ahead of composing as possible. But even during that process, I do generally have a general idea about the structure and form of the whole piece. As I go through the text, I start refining or adapting those ideas to find the music that fits each scene. I go scene by scene and consider the rhythm of the text in terms of stanzas or finding its climax. Ultimately, you develop a kind of arc to how you’re going to set the text and the particulars of the speech rhythm are so important to making a clear arc. 

PG: Analyzing speech rhythms seems to be an essential component of your process.  

AD: Yes, and I’m generally very particular about speech rhythms. Some of that I learned from listening to Billie Holiday. When she interpreted a text, she had the power to completely reinterpret the song. But she did so in a way that allowed her to always speak directly to the listener. That mindset is how I try to approach composing for text as well. 

PG: It seems an opera, to succeed on an artistic level, needs to be highly structured or it would not match speech rhythms. Before you first composed X, your background was more in the avant-garde realm, working with Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, and Leroy Jenkins, among others. Was it difficult to adjust from freer music to being in a more structured setting?

AD: No. Well, not really. Free jazz is kind of a misnomer because the music title instruction in the brackets is extremely structured. Free jazz uses structures, they are just more long-term song forms. I was able to use those forms to my advantage when composing an opera. In the compositional process, I can sometimes look at the vocal line as if it were something improvised and how I would build around it if it were. 

There’s a lot of going back and forth between my experience as a creative musician and as an opera composer. And I draw on that creative music background when it fits the opera I am composing. A good example would be in Act One, Scene Two of X, which uses a lot of structures that come out of the Blues. I don’t hesitate to use different kinds of songs, different forms if it fits the larger story and the character you are developing. 

PG: Do you see a connection between the narrative aspects of your operas and your instrumental work? For instance, you play piano in Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform, 2012), which is not a vocal work but, like your operas, tells compelling and important stories about essential figures in history.

AD: Yeah. I greatly enjoy working on Ten Freedom Summers. Wadada has been working on that project for twenty or thirty years. I’m proud of my work with him on it. I think that project is another way to engage in storytelling. And it seems to be modeled off of Duke Ellington’s suites.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn are significant influences on me as well. Especially their extended works and suites, particularly “Black, Brown and Beige” and “Harlem Suite.” I think my music is a logical extension of what they did in those works because my works and things like “Black, Brown and Beige” both try to provide dramatic vehicles that also interact with a different kind of storytelling. You can see that in Wadada’s work also. 

PG: A little earlier, you mentioned improvisation. There is some improvisation built into your opera scores, including in X. Was it difficult finding opera singers who could improvise? It seems it would be outside the skillset of most opera singers.

AD: Well, I have a core group of improvisers. In this newest version of X, I have nine musicians who are improvisers. In the original recording, there were ten. Because so much of X comes from a Blues sensibility, I encourage the singers to take liberty and improvise and make the music their own. In the original version of X, Thomas Young brought a certain style and aesthetic to the music, while in the more recent version, Victor Roberts had his own take on it. Because the two take very different approaches to music, they both have very different interpretations. I encouraged them to make the music their own, so it is not just what’s on the page.

PG: Do you generally see a significant distinction between improvisation and composition? Some composers refuse to use the term improvisation as they see it as not wholly different from pre-composition.

AD: I don’t like to get hung up on terminology. However, I don’t look at composition and improvisation as all that different. You could say that improvisation is composition in the moment. Or composition is improvisation over time. To me, whether the music comes from one prolonged process or in the moment, the moment is what it’s about. I think it is best to give performers the freedom to express something original in that moment and bring their thoughts on what they feel are natural and appropriate compositional choices. 

PG: In George Lewis’ excellent book, A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago, 2007), you are quoted as saying that tradition is “a means of maintaining the status quo, of limiting your own personal connection.” Do you feel that part of what drew you to the opera, such an essential part of the history of Western classical music, was the idea of changing its traditional form by incorporating ideas like improvisation?

AD: Oh, sure. I wanted to revolutionize opera. My operas are all about that revolutionary idea. My thoughts on this go back to [Friedrich] Nietzsche’s view of Apollonian and Dionysian as opposing tensions within art. I look at bringing in improvisational and other elements as bringing the spirit of revolution in the music community to the idea of these stories. When Nietzsche described in The Birth of Tragedy (E. W. Fritzsch, 1872), I think he was speaking to the potential of a new kind of drama. He saw that potential in Wagner’s music but I think what Nietzsche was describing was actually the potential of American music, not German. The idea of bringing the tradition of the African diaspora together with the Western European tradition to make unique music that draws on everything.

But at the same time, we can also look back and consider history. Historically, opera has had some improvisation. Traditionally, singers would add some improvised embellishments. For example, most of Mozart’s cadenzas were improvised. But that tradition has kind of been lost in the classical world. I think myself and some others are revitalizing that tradition but through the African-American tradition. We are making something that is not only uniquely American but distinctly African-American.

PG: It seems more composers from the “jazz” background are moving towards composing for operas. Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019) and Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding’s Iphigenia (2021) are the two most prominent examples. Why do you think more opera compositions are coming from those with a “jazz” background?

AD: Well, I think the potential to reach from jazz to opera has always been there. Even back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Duke Ellington was planning to write an opera named Bula which would have been about the voyage from Africa to America. Most of it became “Black, Brown and Beige” but the original intention was to write an opera. There is a rich history there that most people never learn. I am excited that now is the time for the history of African-American opera composers to be revisited. I mean, I wrote X thirty-seven years ago, and amazingly, it has now been rediscovered and revived. It’s even going to be presented at the Met[ropolitan Opera], which is incredibly exciting. Hopefully, other works by African-American composers will also be given that kind of recognition.   

PG: Do you feel there has been a growth in African-American opera composers or is it simply that more people are paying attention? At least as far back as the late Nineteenth Century, Harry Lawrence Freeman was dubbed “the Black Wagner” for his operas, but as you suggest, that history remains largely unknown by most people.

AD: I do think there has been a rediscovery of African-American opera composers recently. Even Scott Joplin, who is a little better known, composed an opera, Treemonisha (1911), which remained largely ignored until several decades after his death. But I think that with the death of George Floyd, there has been a kind of cultural awakening toward appreciating Black art. The doors have been at least momentarily opened. I don’t know how long those doors will stay open. History tells us they won’t be open forever. We need to take advantage of this time to present, reveal, and explore substantial works of both the past and present.

Click here for the second part of our conversation with Anthony Davis where we will go deeper into X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera’s recording of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X can be purchased on Bandcamp.

Photo credit: Erik Jepsen