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Behind the Score: 'Equality' by Jonathan Bailey Holland
Musicologist and Classical IPR Music Director Dr. Amanda Sewell contextualizes the third work of the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra's side-by-side performance with musicians from the New York Philharmonic.
On March 3, 2023, the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra will perform side-by-side with musicians from the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Dr. Leslie B. Dunner. The four-piece orchestral program serves as the second half of मुक्ति : MUKTI, an original multidisciplinary work inspired by themes of liberation created by the students of Interlochen Arts Academy. Below, musicologist and Classical IPR Music Director Dr. Amanda Sewell contextualizes the program’s third piece: "Equality" by Jonathan Bailey Holland.
In 2015, the Cincinnati Symphony commissioned three new pieces based on poetry by Maya Angelou (1932-2014). Jonathan Bailey Holland (IAC/NMC 89, IAA 88-92) was asked to compose a piece inspired by Angelou’s poem “Equality.” He has said that the poem was, in a way, “already music” because of its persistent energy. Holland has also noted that, although written in 1990, Angelou’s poem reflects the struggles of her own lifetime as much as it does those of people who lived more than a century earlier and were fighting to end slavery.
The text of Angelou’s “Equality” itself evokes music and sound with phrases like “you do own to hear me faintly / as a whisper out of range / while my drums beat out the message / and the rhythms never change.” In a later stanza, Angelou writes, “Hear the tempo so compelling / hear the blood throb in my veins. Yes, my drums are beating nightly, and the rhythms never change.” The stanzas are punctuated with the refrain “Equality, and I will be free.” Holland channels these poetic drums throughout the piece. The brass and snare drum tattoo bold, urgent rhythmic refrains that punctuate the narrator’s recitation of Angelou’s text. Near the end of the piece, the wood block introduces a new rhythmic pattern, perhaps suggesting the “marching forward” described in the poem.
Three decades ago, Jonathan Bailey Holland was himself a student at Interlochen Arts Academy and a member of the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra. In fact, he discovered his love for music composition at Interlochen. Now, as a professor of music composition, he advocates for the equality of musics when he teaches. In interviews, he has said that his own eclectic listening habits helped shape him into the composer that he is today. Holland grew up in Flint, Michigan and listened to everything from Phil Collins to Run-DMC to Wynton Marsalis; he listened to and enjoyed everything without thinking that any kind of music was superior to any other kind.
Although he has sometimes found his artistic point of view to be at odds with that of the traditional music conservatory approach to the teaching and learning of music history, he has been able to use his role to help reshape ways in which music history is taught and understood. Holland has said it can be challenging to serve the artistic and intellectual needs of students who don’t fit the conservatory model and that he tries to help everyone feel like they are a part of the conversation. To this end, every semester he provides his students with a listening list. The music on the list is hugely stylistically varied, and Holland’s goals are to encourage students to hear music that they’ve never heard before, increase their knowledge of musical styles and approaches, and understand that no music genre or style is superior to another. As he said in an interview, “There is no sense that there’s one way of doing things.”
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A graduate of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, musicologist Dr. Amanda Sewell currently serves as the Music Director for Classical IPR. Her musicological scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop. Her first book, Wendy Carlos: A Biography, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
