A Composed Response
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Montage Art, books, diverse creations 53 Open Book 54 Sketch Artist 55 A Novel Take on Eternal Life 56 America’s Little Giant 58 Chapter & Verse 60 Off the Shelf bystander and dash-cam videos of some of these events in their entirety. Bent over his phone, play- ing footage of Eric Garner’s last moments on a Staten Island sidewalk, Holland eventually had to stop and look up. “The visceral qual- ity of it…,” he recalls. “It’s difficult to take in.” With each repeat view and each new tragedy in the headlines, he felt in- creasingly entangled. Jonathan Bailey Holland “Simply because of who I am and what I look like, I could easily be on the other side of these stories,” he continues. “Sud- A Composed Response denly the music couldn’t be about anything but that psychological space.” Jonathan Bailey Holland’s meditations through music The resulting work, “Synchrony,” ex- by jennifer mcfarland flint plores the idea of duality, or two realities existing at once—for example, the Black Lives Matter movement taking shape dur- ne morning in the spring missioned to write a new work for the Ra- ing the country’s first black presidency, of 2015, the composer Jona- dius Ensemble, a local chamber group, and when “the notion of a post-racial America than Bailey Holland, Ph.D. ’00, ideas for the piece tumbled through his was thrown around,” says Holland. The O was riding the bus to Boston’s mind. Also weighing heavily on him was score is written for violin, cello, oboe, bas- Berklee College of Music, where he’s chair the crescendo of news stories about police soon, and piano—an unusual combination of composition, contemporary music, and brutality against African Americans. Hol- but beautiful in its symmetry, says Jennifer core studies. He had recently been com- land had challenged himself to watch the Montbach ’95, Radius Ensemble’s artistic di- 52 January - February 2018 Photograph by Robert Torres Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE rector. “There are two stringed instruments and two double reeds. Plus, with the simi- A former physician, now associate lar ranges of oboe and violin, cello and bas- OPEN BOOK clinical professor of medicine at Univer- soon, you have two pairs of instruments that sity of California, San Francisco, Victoria cover an entire timbral range, top to bottom. Sweet, G ’73, is appalled by the deperson- Piano is the anchor.” The piece opens with Robotic alization of healthcare in its technological, the gentle tonal sounds of the double reeds, institutional manifestations. In Slow Medi- and the music builds almost ceremonially Healthcare cine: The Way to Healing (Riverhead, $27), as the others join in. Throughout, Holland she recounts what transpired when her expresses duality through musical devices: father suffered a grand mal seizure and was call and response, repetition, dissonance, hospitalized—on the incorrect impression that it was his first such incident and that instrumentation, and so-called “extended he might have suffered a stroke. From the introduction: techniques”—unconventional ways of us- ing an instrument. I’d known that healthcare was getting tronic health records, his stay in the hos- Holland decided to add documentary ever more bureaucratic; that doctors and pital looked 100 percent quality-assured. voices to underscore the idea of juxtapo- nurses…were spending more and more There was just something missing. And sition—of hope and despair, harmony and of their time in front of a computer it was hard to put my finger on it. discord. About two minutes in, President screen entering health-care data. I’d ex- Everything looked so good in the com- Obama’s voice intones over the music, “We, perienced it myself. But until that week, puter, and yet what Father had gotten the people, still believe that every citizen I had no idea how bad it had become. If I, was not Medicine but Healthcare—Med- deserves a basic measure of security and as a physician, couldn’t get appropriate icine without a soul. dignity.” From there the score becomes care for a family member in a lovely com- What do I mean by “soul”? fraught with tension, and Eric Garner is munity hospital with well-trained staff— I mean what Father did not get. heard repeating “I can’t breathe” through the who could? Presence. Attention. Judgment. chokehold of a New York City police officer. What had happened to medicine and Kindness. “There’s a very specific rhythm to how he nursing? I asked myself. Above all, responsibility. No one took says it, so I had the musicians pick up on To find out, I ordered up Father’s elec- responsibility for the story. The essence the rhythm, which they keep up even after tronic health records and went over his of Medicine is story—finding the right the audio clip ends,” Holland explains. The near-death experience. story….Healthcare, on the other hand, oboist and bassoonist remove their reeds The document was 812 pages long and deconstructs story into thousands of tiny and breathe into their instruments in that took me four hours to read. It began not pieces…for which no one is responsible. same pattern; the pianist reaches into the in- with the doctors’ notes but with hun- A robot doctor could have cared for strument to dampen the strings, hammering dreds of pages of pharmacy orders; then my father just as well. out the rhythm to produce a dull, percussive hundreds of pages of sound without pitch. These extended tech- nursing notes, which niques create a sound that’s both percussive were simply boxes and breathy, like the wheeze and punch pat- checked. Only the doc- terns of a hospital respirator. tors’ notes were narra- Then comes a second set of voices. First, tive, and mostly they actress Cicely Tyson is heard addressing were cut-and-paste. No the young women in the audience of the wonder no one could fig- Black Girls Rock awards ceremony: “The ure out what was really moment anyone tries to demean or degrade going on. Still, to be fair, you in any way, you have to know how great although I found mistakes you are. No one is going to bother to put in the records, Father you down if you are not a threat to them.” had, after all, gotten dis- Her words are countered by audio from charged….I had to admit, the dash-cam footage of the arrest of San- judging by those elec- ISTOCK dra Bland. The instruments respond with gnashing sounds, and the piece ultimately closes in a decrescendo of dissonant whole that he wrote around the same time as “Syn- and earned his bachelor’s at the Curtis In- notes. This unresolved conclusion repre- chrony,” came from a similar psychological stitute of Music and his Harvard doctorate sents Holland’s view of the national con- space, sparked by the senseless deaths of in composition, didn’t take this approach versation about race. Tamir Rice and Michael Brown. “I had to from the outset. Early in his career, he had Reacting to the world around him in this write [it] as a meditation,” he says, “as a way hang-ups about “who I was supposed to be way is one of the artist’s responsibilities, he of using my art to work through the weight as a classical composer,” he says. “I didn’t says, but it’s also impossible for him not to. of all of those events.” want people to expect a certain kind of mu- “Dream Elegy,” a somber orchestral piece Holland, who grew up in Flint, Michigan, sic because I’m a black composer, I wanted Harvard Magazine 53 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE people to come to my music without any troit Symphony Orchestra, influenced by Today, Holland tries to convey the same preconceived ideas about what the music Motown, R&B, soul, and other popular mu- message to his composition students: “If I’m was going to be.” At some point, he stopped sic genres he’d always listened to. It was, he not telling you who I am in a genuine way, I’m worrying about how to manage audience thinks, the first time he consciously decided not sure why you’d want to listen to what I perceptions. Soon after this realization, he to let that side of him come out clearly in his have to say,” he reasons. Without that, he says, completed a 2003 commission for the De- music. He wrote what felt true. “Who cares what I’m writing?” stage, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, this will be great to Sketch Artist do on SNL,’ and I’ll try it at dress rehearsal and it will just not work at all. There’s this Colin Jost writes jokes for page, stage, and camera. special rhythm to being either at a club or by oset babür theater.” When developing a sketch for SNL, Jost often starts by thinking of a voice, and then writer’s style isn’t always New Yorker’s humor section, Shouts and Mur- deciding which actor could most naturally neatly captured in a single piece murs—“Oh, droit moral? It means ‘droid mor- embody it. He created the character Drunk of work, but with Colin Jost ’04, als.’ Like it’s such an obvious moral question Uncle, for example—meant to “sound like A his “Mocktails,” a collection of that even a robot would know the answer.” an uncle pretty much everyone has”—by cartoons scribbled on cocktail napkins, Jost has been writing comedy since his working with cast member Bobby Moyni- are especially telling.