Valerie Coleman: Wish Sonatine performed by Alexa Still and Evan Hines

"Wish" by Fred D’Aguiar, read by Evan Hines...

Valerie Coleman: Wish is based upon a historical journey called the Middle Passage: the selling, trading and transporting of enslaved Africans from Africa to the New World, as references in the poem of the same name by Fred D’Aguiar.

Because Wish has an abundance of moments that allow both flute and piano to interpret rhythm and melody- as would happen in a djembe drum pattern or in the sound of a soulful wailing voice, the performers are encouraged to relax standard classical phrasings, in favor of an organic interpretation. The different sections are indicated by markings like Defiant or Chaotic, allowing the music to be much more than a tempo or mood change.

The vision of tall ships begins the musical poem; the pianist uses the sustain pedal to augment the flutist’s tone to create a distant echo effect. A dirge with blues elements follows, becoming more and more insistent, eventually transforming into the section marked With Fighting Desperation. Slaves are being herded onto the ships. Whips are cracked and slaves are dragged, pushed and beaten. This frantic yet soulful accompanied cadenza is a desperate but futile fight to stay on homeland soil. The cadenza finally shrieks into an aggressive rhythmic ostinato in the piano part, reflecting the pride and culture within the many tribes on board. There is a sense of moving on the water and sailing into the unknown (Depicted within the relentless triplets of the movendo section). Winding Back the Clock claims the pace and fight down into a quieter moment, marked as Defiant. Trafficked individuals occasionally resorted to terminal starvation or suicidal jumps off the ships as the very last thing that could be done to escape captivity and claim their personal sovereignty. In this section, the act of defiance starts with an inner contemplation, awakened and stirred up by an ostinato pattern found in the piano. Here, there is a growing dialogue between coercion and resistance, depicting slavers’ attempts to discourage suicide (as suicide represented a loss of profit) and the slaves’ fierce determination to reclaim self-worth.

At the most passionate moment of Defiant, I envision an enslaved woman experiencing a still moment in time, a profound sweetness of looking onto her newborn after giving birth (one note each on both flute and piano), What follows is the section called Still, a hint of what is to come; a precursor to African-American spirituals and the blues. The mother knows that she is about to lose her child. The accompanied cadenza that follows continues a fierce struggle. The newborn is ripped out of the mother’s arms and murdered (a common-place occurrence, as babies and toddlers were too labor-intensive to keep aboard the slave ship).

Wish finishes with a section marked With a Fierce Determination to Survive. This ending communicates a dual reflection: 1) renewed sense of self-preservation, the embrace and healing possibility in a multitude of cultures brought from African despite captivity, and 2) an echo of D’Aguiar’s poem as it refers to turning the ships around and changing history, thereby avoiding the sound of the ship “to deafen our ears for centuries.” Through repetitive leaps in the flute and driving lower voices stomps in the piano, the ending shouts the Poem’s final line: “No Atlantic road of bones from people
Dumped into the sea to form a wake.”