Behind the Score: 'Soul of Remembrance' by Mary D. Watkins
Musicologist and Classical IPR Music Director Dr. Amanda Sewell contextualizes the second work of the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra's side-by-side performance with musicians from the New York Philharmonic.
On March 3, 2023, the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra will perform side-by-side with musicians from the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Dr. Leslie B. Dunner. The four-piece orchestral program serves as the second half of मुक्ति : MUKTI, an original multidisciplinary work inspired by themes of liberation created by the students of Interlochen Arts Academy. Below, musicologist and Classical IPR Music Director Dr. Amanda Sewell contextualizes the program’s second piece: Soul of Remembrance by Mary D. Watkins.
A piece of music composed in the 1990s is often the newest work on an orchestra concert. In a refreshing change of pace, the piece composed in 1994 on this concert program is the oldest. Sacramento’s Camellia Orchestra commissioned and premiered the orchestral suite Five Movements in Color from composer Mary Watkins in 1994. Although Five Movements in Color is occasionally performed in its entirety, the work’s second movement, Soul of Remembrance, is often excerpted and performed as a standalone piece.
Five Movements in Color is a richly eclectic work that encompasses music of West Africa as well as many different musical styles and genres from the African diaspora. Watkins has said that the piece is an “epochal painting or poem about our journey as a [Black] people in [the United States].” The complete work includes improvisational sections, layered ostinatos and polyrhythms, and syncopation, all of which are characteristics found in various musics of West Africa and its diaspora. Together, the five movements have a sense of chronological development, traveling from the West African continent in the first movement to the sounds of a chaotic contemporary existence in the fifth and final movement.
Of the second movement, Soul of Remembrance, Watkins said, “I saw my own people in their long march to fully express themselves as fully human in a society when we were always boxed in.” There is a lyrical melody at the beginning of the movement that suggests but doesn’t directly quote “Remember Me,” the African American congregational praise song. It’s slow and contemplative, but the pizzicato bass line and pulsing harp create a sense of agitation and uncertainty.
Watkins’s compositional output is as variegated as this piece. She has had her own jazz ensemble for decades, and she has also composed incidental music for theatre and dance production. Watkins has scored multiple documentary films, several of which have been nominated for Academy Awards. She is perhaps best known for her operas about the lives of important American historical figures, including American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, and Emmett Till, the teenager whose brutal lynching was one of the major catalysts of the American civil rights movement. (It is worth nothing that Emmett Till was actually born two years after Mary Watkins, and she has written about how her memories of his murder affected her at the time and even today.)
Conductor Leslie Dunner has frequently programmed Five Movements in Color with orchestras that he conducts. In fact, the only commercial recording of Watkins’s Five Movements in Color that exists to this day was made under Dunner’s baton. Released in 2010, this recording of Five Movements in Color was the very first in the Recorded Music of the African Diaspora Series, a partnership between Albany Records and the Center for Black Music Research. The second album in this series also includes the first known commercial recording of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto, featuring pianist Karen Walwyn and also conducted by Dunner.
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A graduate of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, musicologist Dr. Amanda Sewell currently serves as the Music Director for Classical IPR. Her musicological scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop. Her first book, Wendy Carlos: A Biography, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
