NEW SOUNDS: #4431, Three Musical Tales
NEW SOUNDS: #4431, Three Musical Tales
BY JOHN SCHAEFER
“Listen to the ‘Mixed music’ by Joseph C. Phillips Jr. and his ensemble Numinous with The Grey Land – a work about being Black in America. The libretto, written by Phillips, chronicles a single Black mother and her son and uses additional text from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, author Isaac Butler, Abolitionist Frederick Douglas, and from Mothers of the Movement, founded in 2013 by Black mothers. Hear the choral lament, “The People Get Tired of Dying” along with ‘The Sunken Place,’ a concept built on “the metaphor for the system that is suppressing the freedom of Black people” (Jordan Peele) used by Peele in his film Get Out.”