Producers: Sparks & Wiry Cries
50-minute song cycle

Co-comissioned with: Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
Music by: Shawn Okpebholo
Text curator: Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Featuring works by: Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Crystal Simone Smith, and Tyehimba Jess
Original Production
January 2023 - Metropolitan Museum of Art
The premiere performance includes additional musical material by singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens
Additional Production dates
January 2023 - Kimmel Center in Philadelphia
March 2024 - Wheaton College
April 2024 - Duke Arts
DESIGNERS
Kimille Howard - Projection and Lighting Designer, Director
Gabriel Vega Weissman - Associate Director
ORIGINAL CAST
Karen Slack - Soprano
Reginald Mobley - Countertenor
Will Liverman - Baritone
Howard Watkins - Piano
Director's Note
Songs in Flight is a unique song cycle that borrows texts from the Freedom on the Move
database, a collection of advertisements seeking fugitives from American Slavery,
held at Cornell University. This database contains thousands of such notices
containing specific details regarding these self-liberating individuals-- their
personality, appearance, life story-- and can be re-contextualized as thousands of
stories of resistance compiled into one resource. Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji wove these texts
with other poetic elements by herself, Tyehimba Jess, and Crystal Simone Smith to
respond to this primary source material, bringing them into the 21st century and
blending them with current events. The heartbreaking and violent murders of
Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 and Trayvon Martin in 2012, along with the imprint of too
many others to name, are embedded within the fabric of Songs in Flight.
Okpebholo's music ties the Western European tradition of art song to forms that are
distinctly American, especially those of formerly enslaved African peoples.
Reviews
"The achievement of “Songs in Flight”… is that it takes these murky, dehumanizing documents and illuminates them, shifting their perspective to reveal the person hidden in plain sight."
-New York Times
"Resistance is the theme of Songs in Flight, but it isn’t so much focused on slavery itself as it is on the interior drive to be free...The music from the African diaspora performed in Songs in Flight thankfully failed to achieve a performance atmosphere common in classical music concert halls. The expected silence between songs was not quiet; it was not kept."
-Donna Lee Davidson, ICIYL
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