A Conversation with Phil Kloer about the Atlanta Symphony performance of Carlos Simon’s curated works February 15-16, 2024.
Growing up in Atlanta, Carlos Simon never attended the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
“Tickets were just too expensive for our family,” he recalls. More than that, his father, pastor of Galilee Way of the Cross Church in College Park, discouraged any music other than gospel in the Simon home.
So, when the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra contacted him a year and a half ago and asked him to curate a special program, Simon felt called to make it one that would reflect both the Black experience in music and his own journey in becoming one of the premier Black classical composers in the United States. A composer in residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where he lives, he is also an associate professor at Georgetown University.
“When they approached me,” he says, “I remembered singing in the Morehouse Glee Club with the ASO with Robert Spano about 2004, singing Porgy and Bess, singing Beethoven’s Ninth. It changed my life.
“I said I’m going to have a piece performed by the Atlanta Symphony someday. But I had no idea how to get there.”
Up and Coming
Simon’s family moved from Washington, D.C., to East Point when he was 10. “East Point at the time was not what it is today,” he says.
“Now it’s up and coming, but then it was kind of the hood.” His father’s church provided a community and was “the center of everything” when he was a boy. But his friends were all clued into the latest hip-hop hits, and he was clueless.
“I’m still playing catch-up,” he says with a chuckle. Attending Tri-Cities High School in East Point, alma mater of Outkast’s Big Boi and Andre 3000, he flourished in the performing arts, learned piano and composition, and was exposed to the breadth of Black music.
Although he had been limited to a diet of mostly gospel, he discovered, as he frames it now, “A lot of Black music, including jazz, hip hop, and gospel, is birthed out of extreme hardship. Even if it’s positive, it comes out of something that is dark. And that’s one thing I learned: Hip hop had the same DNA as gospel music.”
After earning his PhD at the University of Michigan, Simon taught music at both Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, before moving to Georgetown University in 2019. In 2021, he received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence from the Sphinx Organization.
Something to Take Away
His compositions reflect his interest in social justice. Elegy is dedicated to Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and Requiem for the Enslaved combines spirituals, hip hop and elements of the Latin Mass to tell the story of slaves once owned by Georgetown University.
The ASO program Simon has assembled reflects his eclecticism, so it includes spirituals, arias from European composers, and ring dance music. “We wanted something where everyday people who don’t normally go to the Atlanta Symphony could have something to take away,” he says.
It was also important for Simon, a Morehouse grad, to honor the importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); the glee clubs of Morehouse and Spelman Colleges are both on tap for the evening.
“I wanted to highlight the role of HBCUs, particularly in classical music. Brian Major and I were at Morehouse at the same time, and we have him singing an aria and a spiritual. Same thing with soprano Kearstin Piper Brown.”
‘You Listened’
Finally, the evening showcases Simon’s passion for social justice, closing with brea(d)th, his 35-minute composition about the killing of George Floyd, in collaboration with poet/librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The two men spent three years talking to people in Minneapolis who had known Floyd to write the piece.
“We talk about the [killing] in brea(d)th, but it’s more about the future and what we need to do collectively to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and being aware of how much work needs to be done for equity,” he says.
It was commissioned by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra and premiered there in April 2023. “The greatest compliment we received was from his aunt,” he says. “It was: ‘You listened.’”
“And that was the greatest part, listening to them talking about him and who he was, not what you saw on CNN.
“Hopefully,” he adds, “it was something George Floyd would have wanted to hear.”
Photo: Carlos Simon. Photo by Terrance Ragland
