Forgiveness
Suite for Spoken Word and Orchestra
Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Composer | Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Librettist and Spoken Word
David Alan Miller, Heinrich Medicus Music Director | Albany Symphony
Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and spoken word artist and librettist Bamuthi have been making work together for more than 15 years, often focusing on protest, social justice, morality, and freedom. Forgiveness was initially catalyzed in 2015, when a white supremacist murdered nine people at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and within days several relatives of the victims publicly forgave the gunman. That act of forgiveness struck Bamuthi as something that he himself would not have done, and perhaps as something that the families of the murdered should not have done. Yet the increased divisiveness of the country in the intervening years brought him to an acute and urgent question: can our democracy survive if we cannot forgive?
Forgiveness is the culmination of a three-year journey undertaken to explore that question. As an artist in residence as part of the Convergence Initiative with the Albany Symphony, Bamuthi spent two years visiting churches, high school classrooms, artist co-ops, and symphony rehearsals, leading conversations around this one topic. After speaking with hundreds of people, he crafted a libretto examining forgiveness from religious, political, and self-critical perspectives. Albany Symphony commissioned Bamuthi’s longtime friend and collaborative partner, award-winning composer DBR to build a score that uniquely asks its own questions about forgiveness, while centering Bamuthi’s language and performance.
“Roumain’s genre-bending score … was a thing of intense power and pathos. Embracing a kaleidoscope of sonic worlds, opera to jazz, hiphop to Haitian, the whole is nonetheless convincingly integrated, and appealingly funky.”
“[Joseph’s] delivery – which oscillated between a brilliantly inflected speech cadence and flurries of propulsive freestyle rhythms – demonstrated his well-cultured sense of pacing and phrasing.”
