Blacknificent 7 collective showcases eclectic artistry of emerging composers

Modern classical-music history is dotted with famous composer groups like Les Six (The Six), a circle comprising Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and other French and Swiss creators, or the Second Viennese School, which included such heavy-hitters as Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

One of the latest such associations emerged in 2020 during the COVID-19 shutdown when six up-and-coming Black composers joined famed jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard for an edition of the then-new #KikiKonversations, a Facebook Live talk show with soprano Karen Slack.

The six composers got on so well that they decided to keep the conversation going as a group chat, later adding a seventh member, Carlos Simon, and giving the collective a playful name: the Blacknificent 7.

While the profiles of the individual composers have continued to grow, the group as a whole has stayed largely out of view. But all that is set to change Dec. 3, when it will have something of a coming-out concert as part of CSO MusicNOW, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual contemporary-music series.

Courtesy Chicago Symphony Orchestra

“You could say that it is a debut performance of the Blacknificent 7 as a group,” said Jessie Montgomery of New York, one of its most prominent members. She curated the program as part of her duties as the CSO’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.

Five of the Blacknificent composers – Jasmine Barnes, Damien Geter, Shawn E. Okpebholo, Dave Ragland and Joel Thompson – will have works on the program, including the world premiere of a MusicNOW commission by the Dallas-based Barnes. Donald Lee III, a member of the Ryan Opera Center, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s artist-development program, will conduct.

All the music is very different, said Montgomery, Musical America’s 2023 composer of the year, but she has tried to find what she called a “programmatic flow” that will help loop the disparate stylistic threads together.

Rachel Hadiashar Photo

“I feel this program has a really nice balance of composers whose music you may have heard before and those you have not, but all are tied together in a special way,” she said.

In addition, four of the collective’s members will join tenor Russell Thomas and members of the CSO as performers, including Montgomery on violin and Simon on organ. Barnes will also take part as a soprano and Geter as a bass-baritone.

“Right off the bat, from the conversation with Terence, we all just hit it off, basically,” said Ragland, a Nashville-based composer whose song cycle “To Harlem, With Love” was performed in February under the auspices of the Los Angeles Opera.

Padrion Scott Photo

“We had never felt that feeling of being in a room full of Black composers whom we could identify with on a personal level, a cultural level,” said Barnes, the youngest of the group. “It was a realization for us that we should keep this going. We can’t lose this kind of community that we found just now.”

The composers decided they needed a name for the collective, and they landed on the Blacknificent 7, a take-off on “The Magnificent Seven,” a famous 1960 Western. “Honestly, it was funny for us,” Barnes said, laughing as she told the story.

The seven have made a point of staying in touch since, offering each other career advice and personal support and sometimes attending fellow members’ premieres and touching base at music conferences.

Courtesy Chicago Symphony Orchestra

“I enjoy the camaraderie,” Ragland said. “I definitely enjoy just having a colloquy of like-minded individuals, composers, out here trying to make it. Just having that sounding board has been immensely beneficial.”

He will be represented on the MusicNOW program with two works, including “Eight Tones for Elijah,” a canon that will be performed Dec. 3 with flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. It was inspired by Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who died in 2019 in Aurora, Colorado, after the police restrained him with a now-banned chokehold.

Courtesy Chicago Symphony Orchestra

“With me being someone who is very much introverted, kind of geeky and awkward myself, the story of Elijah really struck a nerve, and so I really wanted to do something to commemorate his life but also to do something for social justice,” Ragland said.

Barnes’ premiere is a setting of “The United States Welcomes You,” a work by Tracy K. Smith, the 2012 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, that interrogates the notion of the United States as a welcoming land of opportunity. The musical adaptation is written for two vocalists, flute, piano and string quartet and intersperses elements of the march “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“This poem is completely formed in questions,” Barnes said. “There is no definitive statement within the entire piece.”