Difficult Grace

Notes by John Fallas

In a 1934 essay, the writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston suggests that there is something common — what she calls a “will to adorn” — uniting a wide variety of African American cultural articulations, from styles of speech to clothing and home decoration. Understood thus, adornment may be both an expression of self and community and a creative response to trouble — especially when that trouble arises in the context of a shared history of pain and injustice.

This aesthetic of adornment — of constant, joyous multiplication — is embodied in cellist Seth Parker Woods’ ambitious, already acclaimed project Difficult Grace, with its relentless, exploratory acts of translation across different artistic media and dizzying expansion of what we might expect a solo instrumentalist to do, on stage or in the studio. The project was initially developed during Woods’ time as a lecturer at the University of Chicago (2019–2021) and concurrent artist residency with the Seattle Symphony, then expanded into an evening-length concert performance that premiered at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in November 2022. Tours of the program continue through 2023 and 2024. The concert version of the project features newly created video material, projected artworks, and live dance in addition to Woods’ own multiple roles as cellist, speaker and movement artist. The present iteration, specially developed for this recording, is necessarily experienced in audio only, but retains the sense of the solo cello as pressed in on by, actively responding to, and indeed creating plural realities both human and artistic.

As heard here, Difficult Grace comprises four works written specially for Woods, by Fredrick Gifford, Monty Adkins, Nathalie Joachim, and Ted Hearne; another recent work by Joachim; and two pieces written for Black cellists by significant composers of Black expression in America active in the 1970s and 1980s. The five recent works all incorporate electronic sound design, spoken or sung text, or both. Even the two older, purely acoustic works coax forth polyphonies of meaning and resonance from within a single instrument: Alvin Singleton’s Argoru II creates virtual theater from a dialogue of musical styles and registers, while the ostinato movement from Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Black/Folk Song Suite remembers — and adorns — what was originally a sung melody, and in doing so also draws history into the piece’s orbit of meaning.

This double broadening of scope might stand for the whole project. Throughout Difficult Grace, the expansions/adornments of the medium also bring a further “outside” into the music — that of human history, in the form of testimonies both public and personal. Nathalie Joachim’s The Race: 1915 focuses in on the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender and its role in encouraging and documenting what would become known as the Great Migration. (In live performance the piece is played in front of projections from the series of 60 captioned panels in which the painter Jacob Lawrence depicted these events at the beginning of the 1940s.) Woods sees the newspaper’s use of the term “the race” (“race farmers,” “race women”) as especially significant: as a reclamation by African Americans of the choice over how to refer to themselves, it is another act of adornment or “translation,” and an expressively and politically weighted one.

Another historical moment, and another creative response to trouble: mid-1960s Detroit, where the poet Dudley Randall published numerous Black writers through his Broadside Press, edited the influential anthology The Black Poets, and responded powerfully to the aims and contradictions of the nascent Black Power movement in his own poetry, itself frequently concerned with questions of self and community presentation — of which “mask” to choose.

Then there is the more private history embodied in Nathalie Joachim’s recordings of Haitian women singing, which additionally evoke for Woods the strong women in his own upbringing. Here, and in the last of Ted Hearne’s settings of the poet Kemi Alabi (where cellist and composer sing together), we hear for the first time voices other than Woods’ own; but, in fact, the whole album is shot through with other voices. The space in which they emerge and interact is shared space, just as much as is that of the histories and experiences which they narrate and evoke, remember and bear witness to. As Woods speaks through and alongside his instrument, he is cast as spokesman for and guide through a whole varied, communal history, responding to trouble with difficult grace and with complex, multilayered affirmation.

© 2023 John Fallas

John Fallas is a writer and editor specializing in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has a particular interest in the different ways in which text and the human voice impinge on, or are implied presences in, instrumental music.