Composer Alvin Singleton prefers to ‘Be Natural’ in his music and in his life

Though the classical music world has ramped up its emphasis on diversity and inclusion in recent years, Atlanta-based composer Alvin Singleton tries to just “move ahead.”

“Racism does exist,” said Singleton, one of three Black composers whose music will be featured on the opening concert Oct. 24 of the 25th season of MusicNOW, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s contemporary music series. “The fact is, I just ignore it. It’s not really my problem. I just write what I write, and I move ahead.” 

And moved ahead he has. While Singleton might not be a household name in classical music, he has enjoyed much success in his more than five-decade career, including such honors as a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, an appointment as composer-in-residence of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1985-88 and a stint as a visiting professor of composition at the Yale University School of Music.

MusicNOW is curated each season by the CSO’s Mead Composer-in-Residence, a post held through 2023-24 by New York-based composer Jessie Montgomery. The Oct. 24 program includes two works by Singleton, who plans to be in Chicago for the concert and will assist with the rehearsals of his works. Rounding out the lineup will be a selection by Montgomery and three by Carlos Simon, a 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient, who is composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

MusicNOW concerts feature CSO musicians in groups typically ranging from duos to small ensembles of 15 or so members. This season also marks the return of the series to Symphony Center.

Growing up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Singleton sang in a church choir and played trumpet in a marching band. There were many jazz musicians in his neighborhood, and he would sometimes sit in on piano with a jazz combo. The style continues to influence his music in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. “The jazz elements, they are just natural to me,” he said. “I’m not conscious of using a jazz language. It’s the music I grew up with, so there are certain sounds and sound combinations that I like. When I’m putting a piece together, they are there, and I don’t realize they are there until someone else points it out.”

After high school, he began work at an accounting firm at the insistence of his parents, who were intent on his finding a practical career. But he soon left to study music, earning a bachelor of music degree from New York University and a master of music from Yale University, where he studied with Yehudi Wyner and Mel Powell. As a Fulbright scholar, he traveled to Italy to study with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He wound up staying in Europe from 1971 through 1985, living mostly in Austria, where he became fluent in German. 

“I’m not conscious of using a jazz language. It’s the music I grew up with, so there are certain sounds and sound combinations that I like.” — Alvin Singleton

In a 2002 profile in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he said his time in Europe “saved his life” by allowing him to escape racism in the United States. But most important about the experience was the opportunity to immerse himself in another culture and see the differences between it and the world he grew up in both musical and everyday life. “A lot of people don’t realize this,” he said for this interview. “They think the American culture is it, and they won’t go outside of that. But I learned a lot.”

Though Singleton emerged as a composer at time when serialism or atonal music dominated classical composition in North America and Europe, he professes to have not been influenced by modernism. “I was just interested that so many pieces had to my ears wrong notes,” he said. “I went to a lot of new music concerts where that language was used, but I never wrote anything that used any kind of 12-tone [scale].”

One of the composer’s best-known pieces is Again (1979) for chamber orchestra, which was premiered by the London Sinfonietta at the Styrian Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. “I was asked not too long ago, ‘Why is it called Again?’ I said, ‘It encourages future performances,’ ” he said with a chuckle. The piece was featured at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., in August, and it was performed by the Ensemble Modern in Cologne, Germany, on Oct. 10.  

One of the composer’s most recent successes was the release this year of an album on the New World Records label featuring the Momenta Quartet in performances of his four string quartets, written from 1967 through 2019 and differ significantly in style. “I don’t consciously do that,” he said. “I don’t consciously write to make it different from what I did the last time. I get an idea and I develop it over time, and then I fit it to the instrumentation that I’m working with at the time or the performer that I’m working with at the time.”

The album was one of five showcased in a recent New York Times article titled “5 Classical Albums You Can Listen to Right Now.” Championing Singleton was Seth Colter Wells, who wrote: “In sharp liner notes for this album, the composer Carman Moore describes Singleton’s creativity as possessing ‘that special African-American attitude both of make-do and of derring-do.’ Evidence for that crops up all over this portrait album from the Momenta Quartet.”

The first of Singleton’s two works to be featured on the MusicNOW program is Jasper Drag (2000), inspired by a 1998 incident in Jasper, Texas, in which three white men dragged a Black man to his death after chaining him to back of a pickup truck. It was premiered by the Verdehr Trio at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., one of the work’s two commissioners. In notes accompanying the piece, Singleton wrote: “This composition is not intended to tell a story, or even to evoke images. Jasper Drag is meant to be a marker on the collective memory of a nation still growing.” 

Singleton’s second selection is Be Natural (1974), written during a summer music course in Darmstadt, Germany. He was tasked with writing a graphic score, one with musical diagrams in place of traditional musical notation, and what he produced won a music competition sponsored by the City of Darmstadt. The work, which comes off as a kind of musical game, can be performed by any combination of three stringed instruments. It begins with all three playing a sustained B natural, and then two of them break off to interpret the first of the graphic indications in nine boxes. They then switch off, with one of the three musicians always playing the B natural.

The whole thing is spontaneous, with no two performances ever the same. “It’s actually a form of improvisation,” Singleton said. The work has found particular success with children, who quickly grasp how the musical back and forth works.   

But it definitely appeals to audiences of all ages. In a 2016 review of a concert featuring the work, New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe declared: “The B-natural note that is passed around throughout the piece is always droning, a groaning river flowing underneath jittery textures. Near the end, a ferocious duet for viola and cello [gives] way to a passage of music that [is] quiet, mellow, simply gorgeous.”