SATURDAY , JULY 19, 2003

National Black Arts Festival: ASO brings 'Martin's Dream' back

Pierre Ruhe
AJC Staff

ATLANTA

California composer Michael Abels' 13-minute "Dance for Martin's Dream" was a hit of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's King Celebration concert in January 2002.

"If we'd had an applause meter at the concert," remembers ASO artistic administrator Frank Dans, "Michael's piece would have topped the scale. It received quite an ovation."

The ASO had discovered that rare item --- a contemporary work (written in 1997), by a young composer (born in 1962), which the audience took to heart.

So for its free concert at 7 p.m. Sunday, part of the National Black Arts Festival, the ASO will reprise a performance of Abels' "Dance for Martin's Dream" at the Horizon Sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. tribute piece will share a program with popular standards from the ASO repertoire, including Brahms' Fourth Symphony and a movement of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, with the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra's co-concertmaster Amyr Joyner, 17, as soloist.

For Abels, reached at his home in Los Angeles, "writing about Dr. King was a very daunting assignment, not least because there already exist some brilliant pieces on the subject."

When the Nashville Symphony commissioned the piece, says Abels, "I knew my work on Dr. King had to be about what his legacy meant to me."

The piece isn't musical biography, the composer explains. "For my generation, who are too young to have been part of the '60s civil rights movement, we enjoy the legacy. It had to be a joyous piece."

He decided to make the music "poly-cultural, a cultural stew without the cliches of the term 'multicultural.' " Thus a listener can hear elements of funk, salsa and bluegrass, all in an orchestral setting. At the beginning and end, the score asks the musicians to scat-sing various syllables, in hip-hop human beat-box fashion.

Significantly, Abels decided to exclude "music of the church, gospel music" because he felt it would root "Dance for Martin's Dream" too much in King's own time. Instead, he wanted music that would, he felt, best reflect our post-King world.

But creating music with an ear for cultural diversity comes with its own assumptions. If a composer taps, say, salsa rhythms, is he claiming it as his own?

"When you're in your 20s," he says, "you think you know everything, you're done asking questions, and I used to think my heritage had little bearing on my identity."

Now, he continues, "I'm getting a much deeper understanding of who I am. As a musician, I can't claim salsa as part of my identity, but I am still exploring."

 

(c) Copyright 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution