An Interview with Angel Riley

In the Particular, We Discover the Universal

Angel Riley is an emerging American soprano embarking on a promising career. Angel’s exciting stage presence and rich vocal color distinguish her performances, resulting in her winning a coveted position as a 2020 Gerdine Young Artist with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Register to attend Angel Riley’s October 17 (7:30pm curtain) performance of A Woman’s Life: A Song Cycle by Richard Danielpour on the Poems of Maya Angelou. This concert is free, but requires preregistration.

by Meghan Isaacs

On October 17, the Festival of Friendship will present a song cycle by prominent American composer Richard Danielpour, entitled A Woman’s Life, to be performed by soprano Angel Riley, accompanied by Lucy Tucker Yates on piano. The seven-movement work draws on the poetry of Dr. Maya Angelou, and like so much of Dr. Angelou’s oeuvre, presents a very particular experience that manages to resonate universally.

Danielpour set out to compose a song cycle for soprano Angela Brown, and already had Dr. Angelou’s poetry in mind as the libretto when he met with the poet at her townhouse in Harlem. When he asked Angelou if she could provide the text, she immediately knew which poems to select. “I was with my wife that afternoon, and [Dr. Angelou] read seven poems to us, sometimes clapping in rhythm with the poems, sometimes repeating lines of the poem that were not actually repeated in the text. By the time she finished, I was in tears. It was one of the greatest performances in my life that I had ever witnessed,” said Danielpour.

Several years after the premiere of A Woman’s Life, emerging young soprano Angel Riley, then a vocal performance student at UCLA, first encountered Danielpour’s music through a performance of his oratorio The Passion of Yeshua, in which she participated with the UCLA chorus. Provoked by his musical language, Riley reached out to Danielpour, who suggested she explore A Woman’s Life. Riley went on to engage in an independent study with Danielpour, during which she (along with Yates as pianist) worked through much of the song cycle under the composer’s guidance. Riley (who recently completed her Master’s degree with aims to begin an artist’s diploma program in fall of 2021) took time to reflect on the music and what it has to say to audiences today. 

Tell us about your relationship to A Woman’s Life?

I’ve been with this work for a while now, and I guess the most important thing about this set is that it follows the life of an everyday Black woman in America, and it sheds a positive light on her experience. Richard Danielpour wrote this set for Angela Brown as a thank you gift for performing in his opera Margaret Garner. They both thought it was important to present a work strictly relating to Black women due to the lack of positive portrayals in art and media. This set is so important and unique in that each of the songs comes from a Black woman’s perspective. Dr. Angelou was specifically committed to uplifting Black women in her life. Because of her poetry you see this uplifting of Black women, and Danielpour’s setting of the text really highlights that.

 Do you have a favorite song in the cycle, or one you feel you most relate to?

 My favorite is the second of the set: “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me.” It’s my favorite, but it’s so difficult for the pianist. I try to capture a young Josephine Baker-type feeling. It talks about all these things — “I’m not afraid of anything; I’m confident; I’m young; There’s nothing you can do to me.”

 My other favorite is the very last piece “Many And More.” Specifically, this piece signifies a woman in old age who, although her life did not turn out the way she thought it would, manages to find joy and peace in knowing that there are many men who she’s deserving of but who are not deserving of her. In the fourth movement, she’s confident in her womanhood and sexuality, but feels like she doesn’t need to be bogged down—she can have many men. But by the final piece, she’s gone through love and she’s lost. In the end she found comfort in knowing that she doesn’t necessarily need a man and she can find peace in God. To me, it’s significant: how you can go through life, and your ideas and thoughts about what you want can change. It really signifies wisdom to me.

What was your relationship to the writing of Maya Angelou prior to this performance?

 I have always read through her collected poems. I would literally just watch videos of her reciting her poems on YouTube. I’ve often watched her lectures too because she just imparts so much wisdom.

What does this song cycle have to say to our society today?

Just in the way our society is organized, the Black woman is at the bottom. This is a set that intentionally uplifts the Black woman and sheds a positive light on Black women in America. These are beautiful images of a Black woman who has lived, loved, learned, and lost. It is spiritually refreshing and culturally uplifting to Black women in America. 

The theme of this festival is “You Will Be Found.” Was does that mean for you? How does this song cycle speak to that?

Although this piece represents Black women, I think the text is so vivid and colorful that everybody can find something in the set that they can relate to. It’s going to make the audience feel something and learn something.

Spanish Soul: The Legacy of Graciano Tarragó

Soprano Camille Zamora

By Camille Zamora

Camille Zamora's performance of these Spanish art songs, from her album, If the Night Grows Dark, will be presented on Saturday, October 3, 2020 at 7:30pm. This online presentation will be offered at no cost, but registration is required. To sign up, please see the Revolution of Tenderness homepage at www.revolutionoftenderness.net

Music informs identity. The little tune that floats into an open window from the street below, the lullaby that vibrates in a low hum from a nearby room, the half-remembered refrain of a long-ago love song — these souvenirs in sound tell us where we’re from and where we’re going. And in sharing our songs of joy, sorrow, passion, and peace, we reconnect with ourselves and each other, and rediscover who we really are.

Composers have long taken inspiration from homegrown tunes. Classical standard-bearers from Haydn to Beethoven crafted countless arrangements of folksongs, and the Romantics who followed — Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Franck, Saint-Saëns — breathed new life into symphonic forms through their use of regional song. In folksong, they discovered the sinuous, singable melodies and bracing rhythms that refreshed their concert halls like so many country breezes.

During the first decades of the 20th century, composers intensified what Australian composer/arranger Percy Grainger called their “folk-fishing trips.” (Grainger himself had traveled the back roads of the British isles in 1905, early phonograph in hand, recording elderly villagers in nearly forgotten ballads, shanties, and lullabies.) As industrialization and urban migration continued to erode rural identity, more composers began to tap their musical roots and notate what previously had been a purely oral tradition of cradle, campfire, and countryside.

Composers including Dvořák, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Bartók, and Kodály ushered in a nationalist music movement that sought to preserve what totalitarian regimes were threatening. Later, the use of regional song in the work of Hindemith, Lutoslawski, Górecki, and others became a deeply personal way to assert identity and register protest. These local musical expressions would blossom in the “Singing Revolutions” of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, contributing to the end of Soviet rule.

Graciano Tarragó (1892–1973) was among the 20th century composers who mined their countries’ musical gold, in his case against the backdrop of Franco’s Spain. A teacher, composer, arranger, and performer, Tarragó was part of the lineage of Catalonian guitar maestros — from Fernando Sor to Francisco Tárrega to his own teacher, Miguel Llobet — whose contributions elevated the guitar from humble “tavern accompanist” to serious solo instrument deserving of dedicated study and nuanced composition.

Tarragó’s studio at Barcelona’s Conservatori del Liceu nurtured a generation of Spanish musicians that included his daughter, the virtuosa Renata Tarragó, and the young soprano Victoria de los Angeles. Working within the Late Romantic aesthetic of his youth, he delved into Spain’s two particular motherlodes: its early music treasury and its rich folk tradition. From these complementary veins, he forged an inimitable Spanish voice.

For Tarragó, who played Renaissance vihuela in addition to guitar, early music was an artistic touchstone. The musicologist Felip Pedrell had recently recovered the compositions of Renaissance master Tomás Luis de Victoria (“the Spanish Palestrina”) and his contemporaries, offering new clues to the origins of Spanish musical identity. The perfectly balanced contrapuntal and harmonic elements of this early repertoire spoke to Tarragó’s direct style and honed technique. In arranging these works, he found a purity of musical structure that demanded utmost tonal clarity and focus. Like Bach’s arias, Tarragó’s arrangements of these pieces locate their magic, as well as their difficulty, in their deceptive simplicity.

By contrast, Tarragó’s folksong arrangements offer the fiery, extroverted elements typically associated with Spanish sound: driving dance rhythms, exotic flamenco scales reminiscent of their Arab origins, and impassioned, quasi-improvisatory flourishes. Many of these songs are colored by flamenco cante jondo (literally “deep singing”), with arching melismatic phrases that soar and plunge to express tenderness, longing, and desire. In these works, we hear what the composer Isaac Albéniz referred to as the essence “of the people, our Spanish people… color, sunlight, flavor of olives… like the carvings in the Alhambra, those peculiar arabesques that say nothing with their turns and shapes, but which are like the air, like the sun, like the blackbirds, like the nightingales in the gardens…”

My own journey with Tarragó began on a hot afternoon in Madrid when, taking refuge from the midday sun in a dusty music shop on a side street, I stumbled across some out-of-print folios. My Texan-Spanish-New-Yorker self recognized in the yellowed pages certain essential parts of my own musical makeup: the canciones my father sang to me as a child, the stories of my grandfather serenading my grandmother, and my very first classical album featuring Victoria de los Angeles singing zarzuela in her crystalline soprano. (The fact that her family hailed from the town of Zamora allowed me to imagine her as my angelic distant cousin.)

Flipping through those old scores that afternoon and humming under my breath, I fell in love with the songs. I could hear the light-dark Spanish sensibility built into the melodies as into the chiaroscuro of my voice — the quicksilver vacillations between major and minor, the deep shadows even in the brightest noon, the cocina counterpoint of comfort and spice, the awareness of sorrow in joy and joy in sorrow.

I bought all the collections I could get my hands on that day, and in the weeks that followed, I read through song after song, noticing one arranger’s name in particular: Graciano Tarragó. It was not a name I had heard before. Tarragó was virtually unmentioned in music history books, but I was struck by his gentle genius. Each song seemed an opera in miniature, a tiny window on a vast world of emotion, identity, and story-telling. These were songs infused with duende, the heightened emotional/spiritual connection that exists in a realm beyond technique — what could be loosely translated as “soul.”

In Tarragó’s setting of the 16th century song “Si la noche se hace oscura” (“If the night grows dark”), we hear a woman’s soul. In her exposed opening phrases, she calls out to her love. The night is dark and the road is short, so why does he not come to her? She pours all of her vulnerability, tenderness, and desire into a melodic arc that rises and falls as inexorably as nightfall itself. It is a song of heartache and withdrawal. It is also a song of the quiet joy of choosing to love completely, with abandon, even in the face of separation and uncertainty. Delivered by Tarragó across centuries to this moment, to a world suddenly defined by lockdown and distancing, it feels like a gift.

Music can be a delivery system for shared hope, for individual passion, for ancestral coding, for peace. A simple song can allow us to send our voice, our breath, out across the night air, over hills and highways, to curl around our beloved in the darkness. Through song, Tarragó seems to say, we honor our teachers, our heritage, our hearts. Through song, we are restored to the people and places we love; we are restored, ultimately, to ourselves. Aun si la noche se hace oscura. Even if the night grows dark.