Apollo Chamber Players continues its season of spotlighting silenced voices with Revised, a genre-fusing statement on poetry, peace, censorship and Black revisionism. The concert features the world premiere of “Revise?” by award-winning poet, activist and educator Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton and Emmy-winning composer Jasmine Barnes, with members of Houston Ebony Opera Guild, The Philip Hall Singers and Houston Chamber Choir on February 17 and 18.
The program also includes “PAX,” an Apollo commission from composer John Cornelius with Houston Poet Laureate Emeritus Outspoken Bean and vocalist Kenneth Gayle, and the premiere of a second commission by Texas A&M faculty composer Marty Regan, a work inspired by the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. A presentation of Beethoven’s famous “Cavatina” from String Quartet Op. 130 illuminates the composer’s maverick musical activism and timeless affirmation of the human spirit.
“In our vernacular, we usually use ‘revise’ as a verb in the context of improvement,” said Matthew Detrick, Apollo Chamber Players’ founder and artistic director. “For the purposes of this program, we’re exploring revision and revisionism as something harmful and destructive. Revision is a form of censorship, particularly in the Black community, both past and present. That will be front and center of what we’re exploring for this concert.”
That concept is nothing new to the two artists responsible for Revised’s main crux, the commission by Mouton and Barnes.
If those names sound familiar, this is not their first rodeo. A recent production of theirs was mounted at Stages and made big waves – 2022’s Plumshuga: The Rise of Lauren Anderson. It turns out their collaboration is quite the unique pairing.
“She and I are the only Black female librettist and composer team that we know of,” Mouton said. “We don’t know anyone else. It doesn’t mean there isn’t another one, but we have not found one yet.”
The irony of this fact is not lost in this concert, which transitions classical music from the traditional association with dead, European white men like Beethoven, Bach and Brahms (rest their souls) to become something more modern, representative and, as this concert underscores, diversified.
“Part of Apollo Chamber Players’ mission is to represent Houston,” Detrick said. “Anything we can do to keep that conversation going is embedded in our mission. We’ve been working with a diversity of composers since the beginning of the organization. Diversity has been part and parcel of our DNA.”
Mouton shares a similar sentiment.
“Us being two black women in contemporary classical music, that is not a common thing,” she said. “As we talk about this idea of revising, we’re also revising the canon. We’re inserting ourselves into a canon that has been predominantly male and predominantly white for a very long time. To be able to dive into that space and hold space there is a part of what this concert is all about.”
This concert comes at a time when Black and LGBTQ artists have seen their work banned or become the subject of heated debates, which is an action Mouton feels is becoming too common.
“As the years have rolled on, and in ways that we’ve seen happen before, we’ve started to see opportunities dry up and disappear,” she said. “I think also though, there’s been this other attack that we didn’t expect on how history is maintained. We see textbooks changing here in Texas to erase enslavement or to reposition things so that they sound a little gentler when those systems were never gentle for minorities. This music is very representative of that need to hold on to existing in a world that wants to constantly silence and erase you and revise you out of the story and the narrative of what America has been.”
Apollo Chamber Players presents Revised at 7 p.m. Saturday at Holocaust Museum Houston, 5401 Caroline, and 2 p.m. Sunday at Unity of Houston, 2929 Unity. For tickets or information, visit apollochamberplayers.org. $10 – 35.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
