In the hierarchical world of classical opera, Anthony Davis stands as a revolutionary force. Described by Opera News as “a national treasure” and recognized by The New York Times as one of “the great living American composers,” Davis has forged a singular path by reinventing opera as an American art form deeply rooted in African American traditions.
The 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Central Park Five” made history as the first composer to create a new American genre: opera on contemporary political subjects. His groundbreaking works address power structures in ways that create awareness, empathy and understanding, weaving together European classical traditions with the improvisational spirit of jazz pioneers like Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk.
Davis’s most celebrated work, “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” recently debuted at the Metropolitan Opera after its original 1986 premiere at New York City Opera drew lines of eager viewers around the block. The new production, directed by Tony-nominated Robert O’Hara, continues a nationwide tour that will conclude at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. A graduate of Yale University, Davis currently holds the Cecil Lytle Endowed Chair in African American Music at the University of California, San Diego, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.
Anthony Davis, the renowned composer whose groundbreaking operas have brought Black history and culture to classical stages worldwide, shares insights into his creative process, musical influences, and mission to reinvent opera as an American art form rooted in African American traditions.
How would you describe your voice of bringing culture, particularly Black culture, to opera in a way that invites all of us to understand we belong there?
My first opera X, when I first started to do that, what I wanted to bring is to really reinvent opera as an American form, as our form, particularly African American form. That’s built also on traditions.
The whole traditions of Jazz have been so influential for me. Building on what Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and all these great artists, and I have done in the past as well as the classical music, to create a new kind of form for opera that could both have the legacy of the European traditions, but also the African American traditions, particularly the improvised traditions.
Why are you such a great storyteller in giving compassion and a new lens to our truth?
I think that to me, there are those so many great stories to tell, and Malcolm X , that was a give. I was so excited when we first embarked on that journey, creating an opera based on Malcolm’s life, because Malcolm was such a powerful influence on me and everyone at the time. And with Central Park 5 too, it’s another story that’s living in New York in 1989.
When this happened, I was well aware of it and also, seeing how those events transpired and the beginning of Donald Trump’s political career, which began with the central persecution of the Central Park 5. And now we see Yusef Salaam is a city councilman now in New York, and Raymond Santana is also running for city council.
It’s amazing how their lives have turned. And now, I guess they’re suing Donald Trump, too, for defamation. But I think that this case in particular, what happened to them was, an indication of what the future was going to be with Donald Trump.
What’s it feel like to know that you as a transmitter of truth and creativity have created this sonic boom right in Detroit in a moment when everybody is once again having to revisit the fact that the Central Park 5 deserve this opera?
I like to hope that art has an impact to me. One of the reasons I create the art I do is to have an impact in society, to make an impression, to capture those moments, those pivotal moments of transformation. Where that define who we are today and define, and point toward the future. That’s something I really think about when I’m operating and the subject matter I take. I try to think of what can capture this moment, and what can speak to this moment.
Describe at least 3 moments in the Central Park 5 Musical moments that you want people to tune into when they come in, and just begin to experience something that they’ve never before
There are a number of moments. One thing that comes to mind is just the exhilaration of these young people. They were 15, 16 years old at the time when they were usually going into the Park, going into Central Park. And it’s really interesting, because if the terminology around it, they would say they were wilding in the park. Wilding actually comes from the Tone Loc song, Wild thing, which is the song they were singing when they were going in the park.
I was trying to capture that exhilaration, the youthful exhilaration, I mean some of the struggle. They’re turning over trash cans and doing stuff like that. But to capture that, I did a parody of a Parliament funkadelic song that comes in – We are the freaks, which is in my operas. But I was trying to capture that moment. That feeling of trying to break out, trying to realize, be feel free. That’s crushed when they’re arrested and stuff. So that’s one moment.
Another moment is Sharonne Salaam, Yusef Salaam’s mother has an aria in which she talks about how they’re convicting her son, how they’ve targeted him, and her aria is very moving. I tried to write something that was very direct and very emotional and the interrogation music is very interesting, because I try to use, try to capture how they force confessions from the 5.
Trying to get them to turn on each other. I was trying to imagine what it was like. The music sort of carries it, they’re using a lot repetition sometimes. This rhythmic drive, you feel this relentlessness of the interrogation, and you have a sense that of the time passing, thirty six hours without food and water, etcetera.
Those moments when they sing together, the 5 sing together, they sing in harmony. It’s kind of inspired by all those male vocal groups, the whole tradition. You go from Troy, from Smokey Robinson, and the miracles and all that stuff to, Take 6, and Boys to men, etc.
The use of close harmony that characterizes African American vocal music, especially group music. I wanted to have that and the opera so the 5 which are singing together, and it’s kind of plaintive and they’re worried about how people look at them, how they see them and when they’re marched out of the court after the conviction, they sit about the flashing, light bulbs that blinded them as they leaving the courtroom.
Korey’s aria. When Korey finally is released from prison, he had a different experience with the others, because he was in an adult prison, for he was tried as an adult. He was in prison for 13 years. The others were released after seven, in a youth detention rather than adult prison, and he feels this resentment when he comes in, he feels like they stole from me about the life, the years, the pound of flesh that they took from him. That painful moment is captured in Korey’s aria.
For those who’ve never had an opportunity to understand what aria is, can you describe it?
Aria is a song. It comes with a word like air. Aria, it’s this idea of the song and the expression of an individual. So, in this case it’s the plaintive expression of his pain, his feeling of his pain. A lot of times in aria, is a chance to show the inner the feelings of a character, the emotions of the character, what underlies, what’s going on. Those aria moments like Sharon Salaam has two arias in it, and certainly Korey’s arias are prime examples of that.
Take us into your lab when you first decide that you’ve got an idea. Do you hear it in your mind? Can you see it in completion? What’s your creative process?
When I start working in an opera sometimes, I have a piano, and I play stuff, I get ideas and I kind of try to think about what’s next, and I sort of hear it in my head what I want. Sometimes I laugh because I discover things. I think there’s a process of discovery that happens when you write a piece. That’s in many ways the most exciting part, when you’re not sure of where it’s going to go, you have to trust yourself that you’re going to find it, and then it comes to you.
I was writing an aria for the mask, Harlem of black and tan fantasy, those are Richard’s lyrics, and I said, Oh, God, he’s going to Duke Ellington here, black and tan fantasy. That’s 197, Duke. I began to think of Harlem, and then all the manifestations of Harlem through Ellington’s eyes, Harlem through the sixties, Harlem through then, later Harlem through the eyes of these young men, growing up in Harlem in the eighties.
Thinking about that, the whole transformation of Harlem. I wanted to capture the old Harlem, too. There’s Ellington Mingus kind of melody that’s in there and then I was thinking of of Ellington’s Harlem suite and I actually bring in some aspect of black and tan fantasy. You hear the blues underneath when they’re in the prison, they’re singing a blues that’s related to the stop time in black and tan fantasy. But these are all because they were in the lyrics. He suggested it to me, so I had to carry it out into the score.
For young musicians, what do you challenge them to do as it relates to taking over opera stages and tackling subjects that people wouldn’t imagine would come to stage?
I think that’s what it is. Don’t accept in a way I mean, one thing I realized is that some people accept certain limitations, a limitation like oh, they’ll never do, Malcolm X. They’ll never do that, I said. Well, no, if you don’t do it, they’re not going to do it. So to me, it’s say, allow your imagination of freedom to see things that haven’t been done before, to create something that allows you to imagine your own freedom.
There are no limitations to what you can do, and no limitations to what your art can be. And if you can imagine that, then that frees your mind, so you’re able to create things that are not necessarily in the mold of the possible. But for creating a new, possible.
How do you and Henry Louis Gates speak about the nuances of taking up space and giving us a presence and a history lesson to something we might want to forget?
I think it’s important, Skip and I, we’re close friends, and Henry Lewis Gates. We went to college together at Yale. We were at Yale at the same time, and he was the best man at my wedding. We’re partners in crime in many respects. I think about all he’s given to this world too, from his initial book about the Signifying Monkey, which is very inspiring to me, and it introduced to me, the Yoruba deities, Eshu, the trickster God actually has appeared in my operas, a number of my operas and stuff.
But it’s like the intersection of the real world and the imaginative world, that the imaginative world is influenced by the real world. Hopefully, your imaginative world has some impact in the real world. That’s something that I’ve taken a heart, and being around people like Henry Lewis Gates and Wole Soyinka was at Yale when we there, and others, was inspiring to me, did to realize also that our connection to our history, our history is so nuanced.
There’s so much in our history. I mean, there’s so many stories that we can tell, from our history, and there’s attempt today, with to bury our history to erase it. And I think that as artists we have to fight that with everything we have.
What does it feel like to have all that power behind your creativity to paint through this opera in Motown?
It’s very exciting to me, always excited to come back to Detroit, because I know so many musicians from Detroit. Detroit has such a rich musical legacy and from Motown, and also the jazz, great jazz artists. You could talk about the Jones brothers, Paul Chambers, Charles Mcpherson, I could just go down the list of the great artists, one of my close friends, Verona Kloff and Dwight Andrews, from Detroit, and Regina Carter.
I could just keep going on, James Carter, I could just go on. But it’s such a rich legacy here in music and I had the good fortune of coming here as a jazz musician a number of times, performing here. Always was a great experience.
To come back now with opera’s X I did a couple years ago. And now Central Park 5 is really rewarding and also working with musicians from Detroit. That I always have improvisers within the ensemble, and the improvisers in Detroit are at the highest level. They’re fantastic. So it’s been a wonderful experience for me.
Can you share the power of being able to improvise and why it’s important for our imaginations to understand improvising?
I’m an improviser myself. I wanted to incorporate that into opera because I wanted to. That makes every performance of the opera unique. It’s not going to be exactly the same every time, because you have the role of the improviser, and this kind of interaction of that with the music, to have these occasions for these, for musicians to really rise to the music, and that’s been very exciting for me to work with. Part of my original conception of opera was to bring the improviser into opera.
That opera could have both, the composed and fixed elements in it, but at the same time allow the freedom and the creativity of the musicians within it.
If you could have a conversation with Satchmo and Duke Ellington, what would the title of your conversation be as it relates to creating and creating show and creativity for the world to see?
That’s interesting. I had a chance to speak with Duke Ellington when I was a freshman at Yale. Duke Ellington came, he looked at me across the room, and I had this huge afro, like Angela Davis afro. He pointed at me all the way across from me, he said, you must be a musician. Yeah, of course I was.
I walked over and I started talking with Duke Ellington and Satchmo I never had a chance to talk to, but I would love to talk about how inspiring his music has been, and what it was like growing up in New Orleans and creating this music that he did, and Ellington and I would talk about those black, brown, beige, and Harlem suite. All those incredible masterpieces that he wrote that have been so influential in my music.
I think with Duke is funny, I probably talk about my great uncle, who was a really close friend of Ellington’s, and I didn’t realize that at the time when I met Duke, until I read his autobiography and he talked about my Uncle Arthur, I realized I said, Oh, wow! They went to high school together. So I want to talk about that. I would talk a lot about Ellington’s profound influence on music today.
