Author: Julia Stumbaugh

The concert begins with a thunderous gong and booming timpani.

As the intro song progresses, a guttural drone pulses, seemingly from beneath the audience’s feet, while the breathy undulation of a distant horn floats over the rumble.

Audiences new to Bill Cole’s Untempered Ensemble may not immediately recognize what they’re hearing. That’s because they’re listening to a didgeridoo and a conch shell, two of the non-Western instruments that define the unique sound of this improvisational group joining the University of Virginia’s artist-in-residence program from November 15-17.

The ensemble’s instruments originate from six continents, and the methods used to play them are hypnotizing. Cole’s cheeks bulge as he stores enough air to fill his four-foot-long instrument. Taylor Ho Bynum’s fingers curl deftly inside the seashell. Althea SullyCole expertly strums the 21 strings of her round-bellied kora.

Most of these complicated manipulations happen without sheet music. In fact, the only thing on the musicians’ stands is a single opening line.

This line is based on proverbs shared with Cole by a Nigerian mentor. The syllables of each proverb shape the opening rhythms of the Untempered Ensemble’s unpredictable group journey through sound.

“It could be anybody that takes the lead on it,” says Cole. “After we play the line, whoever jumps out there starts it. It’s joyous to be able to play in a situation where the individuals who are in my ensemble are making equal contributions to the pieces that we’re doing.”

The improvised song grows like a living thing. Occasionally, the sound of individual instruments floats away from the pulsing core—the lilt of the flute, the thrum of the acoustic bass—but there are glowing moments of cohesion, where the entire band comes together as one.

“One of the things that I’ve been working on for quite some time now is to have everybody in the ensemble improvising at the same time,” says Cole. “In other words, we’re not doing solos. We try to play one music, but it’s improvisational style.”

Unlike pop and classical artists, who usually stick to chords shaped from the key the song is played in, Cole and his Untempered Ensemble float outside diatonic boundaries.

Deliberately discordant moments sometimes fit the tone of the proverb the song is based on. That may be the case at UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, where the Untempered Ensemble will hold its first Charlottesville performance of the year.

Cole, a descendant of enslaved laborers, is shaping the rhythm of this performance around two proverbs: “No wicked man will escape the judgment of God,” and “As we behave, so we are blessed.”

“Music has a way of initiating certain kinds of feelings within people when they come and hear the performances,” says Cole. “That’s the kind of thing I hope we do in our band.”

The performance will feature Cole on Asian double reeds, Australian didgeridoo, and African wooden flute; Joseph Daley on low brass; Warren Smith on African, Caribbean, and Western percussion; Bynum on cornet, trumpet, and conch shell; Ras Moshe Burnett on saxophones and flute; SullyCole on West African kora; Mali Obomsawin on acoustic bass; and Olivia Shortt on baritone saxophone.

In 1992, the ensemble began with just Cole, Smith, and Daley. The group slowly grew over the next three decades—until COVID-19 abruptly reversed that trend.

As venues closed their doors, Cole’s group shrunk back to a trio once more. Cole and two fellow ensemble members sat on his porch in Vermont, and played music for neighbors who set up folding chairs on the lawn to listen to the unique musical style.

“It’s American music, but in a state like Vermont, people haven’t heard the kind of music that I do,” says Cole. “It’s an interesting experience for both the people we play for and the players that are playing.”

The ensemble will return in full force to Charlottesville as an eight-member group featuring musicians ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s.

“Everybody is learning from everybody else, so it works out,” says Cole. “It’s the idea that everybody believes in the fact that we’re trying to play one music. That makes this important.”

The musicians’ influences range from the Senegalese, from whom Cole’s daughter SullyCole learned the kora during research in West Africa for her doctorate in ethnomusicology, to Aretha Franklin, for whom Smith once played percussion on tour and live TV.

But these differences in age and experience fade away on stage, when communal improvisation turns disparate instruments into a single noise that sounds like, as Bruce Lee Gallanter of the Downtown Music Gallery described it in April, “the dawn of mankind.”

Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras sought to find harmony, or the “music of the spheres,” in the vibrations of planets as they orbited through space.

Two thousand years later, Music Director Benjamin Rous is bringing the music of the spheres to Charlottesville in a surprising way: with harmonicas.

In Sonic Spheres, the opening show of the Charlottesville Symphony’s 48th season, eight orchestra members will trade their French horns for harmonicas to imitate what celestial vibrations might sound like for a performance of “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres).”

Rous has taken his baton everywhere from the National Symphony Orchestra to the Buffalo Philharmonic, but this score by American composer Missy Mazzoli is the only instance in which he has conducted harmonicas.

“She does these wonderful crossfades between different keys that you could only really do with harmonica,” Rous says. “It’s quite brilliant, how she’s embodied this idea of the music of the spheres based on the idea of orbiting planets having a frequency, and being in harmony with each other.”

To avoid getting lost in orbiting chords, Rous must sharpen his conducting style to help his orchestra members find the rhythm of the Sinfonia.

“They walk in and out in this kind of hazy outer-space way, instead of progressing in the straightforward and almost rectangular way that classical music changes harmony,” Rous says.

The five pieces featured in Sonic Spheres are designed to keep audiences’ attention with short jaunts into different genres, from Mazzoli’s celestial imaginings to Johannes Brahms’ “Hungarian Dances” to Johann Hummel’s classical bassoon concerto.

This bassoon concerto demands quick and complicated playing on one of the most difficult orchestral instruments to master, making it the perfect way to display the technical proficiency of principal bassoonist Elizabeth Roberts.

As a child in Alexandria, Virginia,  Roberts fell in love with the bassoon, but wasn’t allowed to take up the massive instrument until after she graduated elementary school.

The moment her mom picked her up from the last day of sixth grade, Roberts excitedly directed her to the middle school to borrow her first bassoon.

Not only is the bassoon heavy, but finger positioning is notably difficult. Unlike clarinet or flute, where the instrument rests on a musician’s steady thumb, bassoonists’ supporting thumbs move to cover five different keys beneath the right hand and ten under the left. Many bassoonists run, bike, or swim, Roberts says, to stay fit enough in order to span the keys with agility.

“The same way athletes train, you have to train as performers, from the physical to the expressive side,” Roberts says.

Roberts’ technical abilities were shaped by former Juilliard instructors Arthur Weisberg, who honed her technical skills, and Stephen Maxym, who taught her how to play expressively. Now a teacher herself in Charlottesville, she finds herself reflecting on them in her own lessons.

“What is really nice about teaching music is you’re helping another human being find an expressive tool, and also come to know themselves as a person, so that they can then be better at whatever it is in life they want to be,” Roberts says.

During the bassoon concerto, Roberts will use her lyricism to introduce Hummel’s principal theme before drawing on her years of technical expertise during the rapid climb and tumble of complicated arpeggios.

“I think my strengths as a player are lyrical,” Roberts says. “When I get to play the slow movement, that’s where I feel like I really sing.”

Audiences will hear more of Roberts throughout the 2022-23 season, which will be split between UVA’s Old Cabell Hall and Charlottesville High School’s Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center.

Both present challenges for the orchestra. Rous says crowd density can drastically change the acoustics of Old Cabell Hall, while the performing arts center presents more air to fill with sound.

But neither obstacle is as great as what the orchestra has faced for the past few years.

“For so many of our students in the orchestra, for the first years and second years and even some of the third years, this will be their first time playing live with the full ensemble,” Roberts says.

COVID-19 protocols kept wind and brass players off the stage from the beginning of the pandemic to March 2021, making this the first time in three years the entire Charlottesville Symphony will begin the season.

“I told the orchestra in the first rehearsal,” Rous says, “that my guiding thought for the entire season was that it’s so exciting to be back together that I just wanted to have every time that we rehearse be a fun time, and to come from a place of joy for the whole season.”

In February, Charlottesville will hear one of Rous’ personal favorites, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos,” which the conductor describes as an “impressionistic landscape of Iceland.”

In April, the orchestra will feature a flute concerto by Christopher Rouse, a long-awaited piece which principal flutist Kelly Sulick was originally slated to play in April 2020 with the now-late Rouse in the audience.

And throughout the entirety of the season, audiences will be treated to old favorites from Beethoven to Brahms to Antonín Dvořák’s instantly-recognizable New World Symphony.

“I don’t usually program this much from the top 10 lists,” Rous says. “This season, I thought that I would lean in that direction a little more. And I think the result is going to be a lot of fun music that people already love, and will love to hear.”

Half an hour before taking the stage in No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone, actress and lawyer Yolanda Rabun sits in her dressing room listening to Bach.

The room is filled with the music Nina Simone’s grandfather played for her as a young girl, which later inspired the compositions on Rabun’s desk.

Even though she’s preparing to be the only person on stage at the Culbreth Theatre, Rabun is surrounded by her idol.

“I don’t think I feel tremendously the pressure of being by myself, because I’m not really by myself,” she says. “I have her with me. I have her memory. I have her energy. I have her spirit. I have all of my rehearsal. I have all of my learnings—what went wrong, what went right. I have all that with me, so I never feel alone on stage.”

Rabun portrays Simone in No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone, an interactive one-woman production exploring the life of one of the most prolific artists and civil rights activists in American history.

The show is part of the Virginia Theatre Festival, formerly the Heritage Theatre Festival, which is returning to the University of Virginia for the first time since 2019.

No Fear is the culmination of Rabun’s lifelong connection with Simone, an activist who wanted freedom—which she defined as “no fear, I mean really, no fear”—for Black people and women in America.

Rabun first heard Simone’s voice at 8 years old, when her mother played a recording of “Four Women.”

To an inexorable beat, Simone used her powerful voice to paint a vivid portrait of four Black women suffering from the lingering impact of slavery and segregation: “My skin is black / My arms are long / My hair is woolly / My back is strong / Strong enough to take the pain / Inflicted again and again.”

When the song ended, the child was left stunned.

“It freaked me out, because she started talking about these four women, and I could see them,” Rabun says. “And I was like, ‘Who is that? Who can sing like that? … We can sing that low?’ And so I started building my contralto. The bottom of my voice is from that, listening to Nina Simone.”

In 2008, Rabun used her contralto to bring to life a vignette crafted by writer Howard Craft and director Kathryn Hunter- Williams for a Nina Simone exhibit at UNC Chapel Hill.

Craft used his script to connect real events in Simone’s life—from her relationship with New York neighbor Malcolm X to her mournful tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.—with how she might have reacted to current events like the election of President Barack Obama.

“A lot of it, arguably, is speculation of what she would say,” Rabun says. “But I don’t think he got it wrong.”

Since 2008, the world has changed, and so has the play. Based on extensive study of Simone’s writing, career, and life, Craft expanded No Fear to connect Simone’s timeless songs with issues relevant to 2022 audiences.

“It’s a reflection on her experience, where she’s also giving us some tools on how to carry on,” Hunter-Williams says. “Howard has given us an imagining of what she might say to encourage us and strengthen our spines to fight the fights we are fighting.”

Simone’s music emboldens this message, just as it did during her lifetime. “Mississippi Goddam” was written in 1964 in response to the brutal murders of Black children like Emmett Till, but Rabun’s performance draws a visceral response from listeners today.

After performances, audience members share with Hunter-Williams how Simone’s fiery lyrics (“You told me to wash and clean my ears / and talk real fine just like a lady / and you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie / oh but this whole country is full of lies”) resonated with them.

“It’s the only reason we do this crazy art,” says Hunter-Williams. “Every play, every moment, everything I do, is finding a way to connect with the audience, to let them know how powerful theater is, and how it really can be a vehicle for change, and for reflection, and for inspiration. It is why we do what we do.”

Performing these politically powerful songs, which Simone later said damaged her career, is when Rabun feels closest to the artist she is embodying.

“That’s when I think Nina Simone started becoming more of the artist she wanted to be,” Rabun says. “She went into civil rights music because that’s a part of who she was. That was a part of her entire struggle, of facing the fact that her color was the barrier to the success that she wanted to achieve and was denied.”