Composer Shawn Okpebholo on his most haunting song cycle yet: ‘I still am that guy in a hoodie’
“Songs in Flight,” having its Chicago-area premiere on March 11, connects runaway slave ads to the modern-day deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin.
By Hannah Edgar
Composer Shawn Okpebholo on his most haunting song cycle yet: ‘I still am that guy in a hoodie’
“Songs in Flight,” having its Chicago-area premiere on March 11, connects runaway slave ads to the modern-day deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin.
By Hannah EdgarLook for the gray audio player embedded throughout this story and press play to hear samples from Songs in Flight.
Three years ago, Shawn Okpebholo got the kind of once-in-a-lifetime call most composers dream about.
The music organization Sparks & Wiry Cries, which commissions new music and runs an annual New York City festival, wanted the Wheaton-based composer to write songs based on a Cornell University database of text-searchable runaway slave ads. A superstar quartet was already on tap to perform it: singer and folk musician Rhiannon Giddens (a Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Genius Grant and Grammy Award winner), soprano Karen Slack, baritone Will Liverman and countertenor Reginald Mobley.
Even so, Okpebholo, 42, nearly turned it down.
“I had just gotten off writing pieces that dealt with Black pain, whether police brutality or slavery. I’m a very emotional person; I put my all into my writing, so it affects me,” he said.
But when Okpebholo spent some time searching the Freedom on the Move database, he was staggered by what he found. The ads intended to dehumanize and surveil formerly enslaved people. Instead, they inadvertently provided precious records of their existence: their names, builds, mannerisms, family relationships, literacy levels, even interests and talents.
The child of a Nigerian father and African American mother, Okpebholo grew up in Lexington, Ky., playing in brass bands run by the Salvation Army. Later, while finding his voice as a composer, he began exploring the musical traditions of his heritage, studying West African traditional music and arranging spirituals for voice and piano.
The latter has become a pillar of his career, leading to other songs addressing race in America. His Two Black Churches, recorded on a Grammy-nominated 2021 album by baritone Will Liverman, memorializes those killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. The fugitive slave ad project, which he calls Songs in Flight, built upon that earlier work.
“I wanted these enslaved humans to reclaim their identity and narrative — but I don’t even want to use the word ‘reclaiming,’ because ‘reclaiming’ implies that it was taken away,” Okpebholo said.
In addition to text from the Freedom on the Move database, Songs in Flight is based on 12 poems curated by Zimbabwean poet and scholar Tsitsi Ella Jaji, including works by Jaji herself, Crystal Simone Smith and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess.
Songs in Flight premiered last January at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. Wheaton College, where Okpebholo teaches, hosts the songs’ Chicago-area premiere on March 11, alongside Two Black Churches and a solo set by Giddens. Songs in Flight will be recorded and released by local label Cedille Records in February 2025.
Okpebholo spoke to WBEZ about sections from Songs in Flight ahead of the Wheaton performance.
“Oh Freedom”
The first thing we hear in Songs in Flight is a spiritual setting actually composed by Okpebholo more than a decade ago, also premiered and recorded by Liverman, a Lyric Opera regular and Wheaton College alumnus himself. (Baritone Markel Reed steps in for this month’s performance.) The singer starts a cappella; ominous piano chords tiptoe in, then settle in the background as the song goes on. At the very end, the chords are exposed alone, tolling 27 times before “Oh, Freedom’s” uneasy conclusion.
A similar effect emerges in the sixth song, “jack (and paul),” with dirge-like low octaves on the piano. Okpebholo says he was thinking of the monotony and ceaselessness of hard labor in repeated motifs like these.
“When [‘Oh, Freedom’] premiered at Wheaton College, the audience didn’t know when it was going to end. At one point, people kind of chuckled a little bit before realizing, ‘Oh, this is serious,’ ” Okpebholo said.
“I would characterize it as uncomfortable — and not to be kind of flip, but slavery is uncomfortable. They were working all day in the fields. I was forcing the audience to feel that.”
“Jubilee: Thomas Rutling (1854?–1915)”
While working on Songs in Flight, Okpebholo reached out to Tyehimba Jess to ask if he might consider licensing one of the poems from his Pulitzer-winning collection Olio (2016). The poet generously gave Okpebholo carte blanche to choose any selection he wanted, and he gravitated toward this poem, named after a founding tenor in the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
To Okpebholo, “Jubilee” threaded out themes already prominent in the rest of the cycle: the motif of flight (“And did she die / Dreaming of our flight, hands clasped, into starlight?”) and the hypocrisy of pious slaveowners, one of whom also appears in the fourth song, “Peter.”
“I mean, these were Christians! I teach at a Christian college; I’m a Christian. These people used the Bible to justify these things, while enslaved people read Scripture and the book of Exodus in a very different way,” Okpebholo said.
Jess’s brutal poem imagines a child narrator — likely Rutling, born into slavery and separated from his parents by the time he was a toddler — watching his mother be “dragged… slow. / Chained to a wagon pulling her off.” In the same breath, though, the speaker “remember[s] how she sang that Bible” and quotes the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” — the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ calling card.
“This is where I really lost it,” Okpebholo said. “I mean, she was being whipped. But singing was the hope, and the light.”
“Four Martins”
While exploring the Freedom on the Move database, Jaji wondered what she would find if she text-searched the surnames of Black Americans slain in high-profile shootings — like Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery — and the surnames of those accused in their killings.
The acquittal, in particular, of George Zimmerman in the shooting of hoodie-wearing teenager Trayvon Martin inspired her poem, “Four Martins.” Jaji’s final stanza, “And George, free to go / And George, scot-free” gripped Okpebholo.
“A lot of Black people can point to one atrocity that changed their lives. For me, it was Trayvon Martin. I wear hoodies all the time. I’ve gotten pulled over three times in Wheaton. Even though I’m a composer and a professor who did everything ‘right’ — and I’m using scare quotes — I still am that guy in a hoodie,” Okpebholo said.
“I wanted the audience to really understand that: He [George Zimmerman] is free. Emancipated slaves had to run away to set themselves free. Meanwhile, you have people who literally kill other people, and they’re just free.”
In Okpebholo’s treatment of the line, three singers — soprano, countertenor and baritone — dwell on the word “scot-free” on a tightly voiced, hypnotic chord. Like the dissonant piano tolls in “Oh, Freedom,” he uses repetition to confront not only the phrase but its implications.
“I remember that moment at the world premiere at the Met. I was a mess, and I don’t cry at my own stuff,” he remembered. “It just grabbed me … what does freedom mean? The idea of freedom is different for different people.”
If you go: Songs in Flight featuring Rhiannon Giddens has its Chicago premiere at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, March 11 at Wheaton College’s Armerding Center for Music and the Arts Concert Hall, 520 Kenilworth Ave., Wheaton. Tickets from $42, with discounts for students.
Hannah Edgar is a Chicago-based culture writer. Their work appears regularly in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Musical America and Downbeat.