Klarafestival: Abel Selaocoe
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by PAULINE DRIESEN
With thanks to Klarafestival
Florence Price Ethiopia's Shadow in America (1929-1932)
Carlos Simon Songs of Separation: I. The Garden II. Burning Hell IV. We Are All the Same (2023)
Leonard Bernstein West Side Story: Symphonic Dances (1957)
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Jessie Montgomery These Righteous Paths: Cello Concerto (2025) (Belgische première)
Jessie Montgomery Coincident Dances (2017)
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29.03.2026 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
Music that brings many stories to life
If it were up to Carlos Simon – at just forty years of age, the youngest composer on the bill – this introduction wouldn’t really be necessary. Simon doesn’t like to lead the listener by the hand. What makes music so fascinating, he believes, is precisely that everyone can recognise something of themselves in it. The compositions in this programme are also rooted in the unique experiences and backgrounds of their creators. All four grew up on American soil, without ever forgetting their ancestry elsewhere. Together, their works form a vibrant palette of styles and stories, rooted in the African-American diaspora and often distinctly personal. Yet, time and again, they are surprisingly universal…
These programme notes are therefore primarily intended as a guidebook, not a set of directions. For every listener will experience this musical journey differently – and that begins with the baggage you (unconsciously) carry with you. The diversity of backgrounds and experiences that equally characterises the audience is a richness cherished by Abel Selaocoe. In this programme, Klarafestival 2026’s featured guest artist may well be in the spotlight as a soloist, but that does not mean he forgets the audience in the darkness around him. On the contrary, for Selaocoe, every concert is an exchange: he is just as curious about the story you hear in this music as he is about the story he himself wishes to convey through it.
Florence Price
Ethiopia's Shadow in America (1932)
The story of Florence Price has been told often over the last decade. Price grew up in the America of the first half of the 20th century, a country ravaged by ever-increasing segregation. After a lifetime of battling racism and sexism, her exceptional musical legacy seemed to have been quickly forgotten. Until 2009, when a treasure trove of original scores by her hand was suddenly discovered in a dilapidated house near Chicago. This led to a veritable revival, so that today Price is known to the general public as so much more than simply the first black woman whose work was performed by a professional American orchestra – albeit a special honour bestowed upon her first symphony in 1933.
In those same years, Price composed Ethiopia’s Shadow in America, the only work in her oeuvre to be given an explicit programme. The three movements sketch the journey – or rather, the uprooting – of African people who were brought to America as slaves. The expansive first movement depicts their arrival, with an orchestral colouring that gives voice to the mysterious allure but also the disorientation of a new world. In contrast, Price employs a strikingly austere harmonic language in the second movement, in which the strings take centre stage. With warm, subdued melodies, they give voice to the inner force field in which faith offers both comfort and a strategy for survival. The final movement is an explosion of the will to live, with rhythm as a ‘compelling, onward-sweeping force that tolerates no interruption’, in Price’s own words. Thus, in Ethiopia’s Shadow in America, the composer manages to translate the diaspora experience into music in a striking way: not through literal quotations, but through rhythmic energy and the use of colour.
Carlos Simon
Songs of Separation (2023)
Following the colourful splendour and rhythmic drive of Price, Carlos Simon’s Songs of Separation mark a return to the inner self. Simon wrote this song cycle at the start of this decade, when the coronavirus pandemic had suddenly knocked the world off course and brought it to a standstill. The loneliness and loss with which the pandemic confronted many of us set the composer thinking. For however painful, it was precisely these feelings that brought us closer together as human beings. Simon also found this insight in Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet for whom saying goodbye did not signify an end, but a gateway to insight.
Each of the three Songs of Separation selected for this programme combines the poetry of Rumi with a musical language that is deliberately expressive and direct. The warm, expansive melodic lines of the mezzo-soprano (a part performed here by Marta Fontanals-Simmons) are supported by a transparent orchestration, which subtly fills in the picture rather than taking the brush into its own hands. Gradually, the orchestral colours shift from dark to light, from mourning to embrace. Together, the four movements form an arc that culminates in the realisation that ‘what hurts you, also blesses you.’ This is not merely a poetic notion, but a musical principle: dissonances open up into more harmonious chords, closed sound fields break open into movement, and ultimately, the work culminates in an introspective yet deeply convincing message of hope.
Leonard Bernstein
West Side Story: Symphonic Dances (1960)
One composer who, already decades earlier, held a firm belief in the richness of a multi-layered and diverse culture was Leonard Bernstein. Like no other, Bernstein knew how to bring together the most diverse styles and thus shape a new American musical identity. He did so in Symphonic Dances, a suite in which he transformed the music of West Side Story into a concert work. The dances carry us into a sonic world where lyricism, rhythmic ostinatos, jazz influences, Latin idioms and classical structures constantly intersect and sometimes get in each other’s way. This music is so vibrant that the energy and narrative of Bernstein’s hit musical remain intact even without words. The rousing cadence of the mambo, the soaring lyricism of ‘Somewhere’, the percussive bursts of sound and the clashing yet ever-dancing rhythms: in the Symphonic Dances, the New York of the 1950s immediately comes back to life. Bernstein’s polyglot idiom thus heralded a new phase in American symphonic music, one that found its distinctiveness precisely in the intersection and fusion of styles.
Jessie Montgomery
Coincident Dances (2017)
Whereas Bernstein portrayed New York from a 20th-century perspective, Jessie Montgomery presents the city as it sounds today: layered, hectic and resolutely multilingual. This characterises Montgomery: as a 21st-century composer, her work is radically rooted in today’s world. Not only does she navigate effortlessly between the most diverse cultures in her musical language (something she learned at a young age by embracing both her Ghanaian roots and her classical violin training). It is also often what is happening in our contemporary world that drives her to compose. Many of her compositions, for instance, draw inspiration from the fight against social inequality. This has earned Montgomery worldwide acclaim for her social engagement, and of course musical recognition too – the latter even in the form of the music award par excellence: a Grammy.
Coincident Dances is Montgomery’s musical city walk. On even the shortest stroll through her hometown of New York, you hear sounds coexisting and intertwining simultaneously: samba rhythms alongside techno beats, swing over African percussion, electronic pulses beneath classical melodies… Montgomery composes these clashes not as a collage, but as a tapestry of sound layers that enter into dialogue with one another. The orchestra becomes a kind of DJ pult: mixing rhythms, articulating tensions and building an energy that is constantly in motion. Coincident Dances is the diaspora in real time – not as a memory, but as a daily experience.
Jessie and I have different African backgrounds: she comes from the United States, I come from South Africa. Yet we tell stories that seem to connect somehow.
Jessie Montgomery
These Righteous Paths (2026)
Montgomery’s latest work is a cello concerto, written for and in close dialogue with Abel Selaocoe. Whilst composing These Righteous Paths, the composer went through a period of deep mourning following the death of her mother, theatre maker Robbie McCauley. Her commitment to the Black Theatre movement had always been a great inspiration to Montgomery, but in the years following her death, the composer felt more inspired than ever by her mother’s texts: texts that simultaneously revealed her own threads in the web of history and formed a way to give new meaning to the future.
The composer explicitly draws on the Ghanaian concept of ‘sankofa’: moving forward requires the courage to look to the past. Musically, this results in a layered language in which African rhythms, Baroque clarity, jazz harmony and improvisational freedom subtly intertwine and enrich one another. Montgomery’s own diaspora experience intertwines with that of Selaocoe – two musical paths which, though different, nevertheless resonate with one another. The solo part is symbiotic with the orchestra, navigating between different roles. At times the cellist is a rhythmic driving force, at others an improvising narrator, but always in dialogue. These Righteous Paths regards history not as a burden, but as a source of movement. It is music that unfolds towards the future, whilst remaining deeply anchored in memory.
This programme brings together composers and performers who, each in their own way, ask what it means to carry one’s past into the present, and to shape one’s identity in a state of perpetual motion. Their compositions are not linear narratives, but worlds in which tradition, memory and renewal engage in dialogue with one another time and again. And it is precisely there that they invite us to participate in that conversation ourselves: first and foremost by listening, but also by contributing to the narrative in our own way.
