(light music) - The Arthur Zankel Music Center is a fabulous venue that opened in 2010 .

Is a really premier space for presenting predominantly music in all forms.

It is tunable acoustically.

It's a gorgeous space with fabulous internal materials and external views.

It allows Skidmore College to bring phenomenal musical talent to Saratoga Springs.

(orchestral music) Today is the world premier of a Skidmore Commission song cycle by guest artist who we've brought to the college under the auspices of the McCormick Artist Scholar Residency which is now in its 20th year.

We are thrilled to have Grammy Award-winning composer, Richard Danielpour premiering his score which is set to poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning, U.S. former Poet Laureate, Rita Dove's, work.

- I was in lockdown, as many of us were, in the middle of 2020 and it was shortly after the George Floyd incident had occurred on the West Coast.

I was living and I heard about this and then I heard that following that incident 200 protestors were arraigned in Jackie Robinson Stadium, of all places, on my campus where I teach at UCLA.

And I was more than annoyed by this.

And Rita Dove and I had just almost finished a major 70-minute work called "A Standing Witness" that was supposed to be performed at Tanglewood and then got rescheduled as everything else did.

And I called her and I said, "Do you have any poems that speak to this event and this time in which racism and antisemitism," but I was thinking more about racism, "seems to have reared its ugly head once again in full frontal display?"

- Richard came to me and said, "We really need to do something else, something more."

And I felt that urge too.

I felt that given with Black Lives Matter with all things that were happening, that the helplessness and wanting to do something to address what I felt had been festering all along.

And so when Richard said, "I'm thinking of a song cycle called, you know, "The Unhealed Wound," I immediately clicked with that and I thought, "Yes, that's exactly what the title should be."

The problem was that I was in the middle of doing a lot of other things and I said, "Richard, I'm not gonna be able to write any poems exactly for this, but I have been writing these poems for quite a while during the pandemic."

So I sent him the poems that I had been writing about this and said, "Does any of this work?"

And he said, "Okay."

He was off and running then.

(orchestral music) (orchestral singing) - She sent me a group of 9 or 10.

I set to music the texts of seven of them.

Some of them are a setting verbatim of the actual poem.

They're remarkable in that these poems can exist completely on their own, but they also work beautifully as a text to be set to music.

(orchestral music) ♪ Avenge us over ♪ - It's very exciting to see how others would interpret the rhythm of the poems and breathe into it.

My hope always is if someone is going to set something to music that they can hear it too.

Now, I think that Richard had already proven that he heard it too.

And what I find fascinating about this particular piece, it's exciting, because he not only hears those rhythms but it's almost like he will riff on something and say, "Oh, what about this?"

And I'll say, "Yeah, that's pretty good."

(orchestral music) - The other interesting thing too is that I had thought about the instrumentation of this and I liked the idea of having a solo obligato cello with piano because I had discovered around the same time that we had discussed this new piece, I had discovered that Rita had been a cellist.

And so this idea of a wordless witness accompanying the singers who share their experience, I thought was more than appropriate.

(orchestral music) ♪ If I rest my cheek ♪ - My experience has been so eye-opening.

I believe that working with Richard Danielpour and Rita both has been so great to actually get to work with them in person.

I feel that each piece pays homage to a different part of the Black experience here in America, but also just in experience of how we celebrate life and how we manage to deal with things like grief and deal with anger and rage and pain, but even celebration of life and reverence and all of that can be found in today's work.

♪ Good morning sir ♪ - One of the great advantages, I guess you could say, or magic tricks of music, is that it can soothe us even as it is opening up, for instance, a vein.

And it's particularly when it comes to songs something that has words with it as well.

I'm hoping that the audience will be able to look at what I guess you could say it's the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room in all of our lives, without shame, without defensiveness, but to realize that it's visible, that we all recognize it.

The music itself is both heartbreaking and utterly beautiful.

So that, ooh, that difficult truth, I guess you could say, is made soothing because we are, after all, human and we keep striving to do better.

So all of those things are going to be in there.

If they feel moved by this and come away feeling that we can do better, then I'm happy.

(light music)