Daniel Bernard Roumain drills down on possibility in a time of uncertainty

The CSO MusicNOW series kicks off its 2024/25 season on Nov. 24 with “Voices of Migration & Innovation,” curated by Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), a composer and violinist working at the intersection of the classical tradition, African-American and Caribbean musical vernaculars, and modern technologies. (Romain is the CSO’s Mead Composer-Curator this season, along with Jimmy López.) Roumain’s own music — including a world premiere — will be featured alongside works by Brittany J. Green and Allison Loggins-Hull. He spoke about the program by phone earlier this month.

MG: The program opens with your String Quartet No. 5, which is a tribute to [civil-rights activist] Rosa Parks. It’s a nice reminder that, among a lot of other things, her story is also a story about migration, which is actually really interesting.

DBR: Yeah, isn’t it?

I spent a lot of my life in Norwood, Massachusetts. My son was born in Boston. Your cell phone says 617….

I used to be a Bostonian.

You used to be a Bostonian! You have migrated, presumably, to Chicago?

Back to Chicago — I grew up here.

I was born in Skokie. My sisters and I, we think, were some of the first Haitian children born at Skokie Hospital. Then my family moved to South Florida, and then I found my way to New York City. Right now, I’m calling you from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. I do think that we don’t think about how much travel and journey happens within the United States and affects us and changes the conversation. If anything, in its best sense, it informs and hopefully leads to innovation.

The pieces by Brittany Green (shift.unravel.BREAK, for chamber ensemble) and Allison Loggins-Hull (Homeland, for solo flute) — musically, how do you think they fit into this idea and the other music that’s going to be around it?

They’re both brilliant works in and of themselves. They have a musical language that I don’t have. I’m a formalist and I deal unapologetically with tonal music. Their musical language is much more dissonant and angular. I would say all of the music on the program is, in a curious way, very romantic and emotional. But their music is much more contemporary in its sound — at times, aggressive and at times, very contemplative, even meditative in some cases. But that was also a very purposeful choice.

Listening to your string quartet and Brittany’s piece, I was thinking about this idea of musical ensembles as models of societies, local societies or bigger societies, because it seems like both those pieces are mirroring dynamics of groups coming together or breaking apart.

I think about my dear friend [choreographer] Bill T. Jones. Bill has often said that the concert stage isn’t the world, it’s the world as he would like it to be. I’m reminded of that. My role as a composer, I think, is some ways, provocation, in other ways, education. My hope is that it forms a temporary, allusive community.

One thing that the performing arts teach us is that to get on stage with people you don’t know and that you may not share the same politics with and to create something beautiful and urgent and wonderful with them requires conversation, requires collaboration, requires compromise. I’m 53 years old, and I still remember the lessons from kindergarten: to lead by example, to embody the best of us, and to speak truth to power. I hope these works and this program do that.

I wonder if there’s anything you wanted to say about the new piece, Uncertainty Our Country. It is a provocative title, but the optimist in me thinks uncertainty can also contain possibility.

That’s exactly right. I think that it’s a very tonal, welcoming piece. In some ways, it’s a variation on “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” In other ways, particularly how the piece begins — there are these broad chords that begin a journey, they don’t really take us anywhere, but it’s a prayer, an exposition.

Each word matters on this program. I feel a lot of uncertainty. I’m feeling it right now. But also somewhere in there, somewhere within uncertainty is endless possibility, is endless potential, is, ultimately, reality. It’s funny — it’s literally within the word, I’m just realizing that now: Things are certain. Things become very clear.

When I get on onto a stage, it’s a place of real comfort. Again, as a Black, Haitian-American composer, it’s not lost on me that I have performed on many stages where, were it a different time, I would not have been allowed on that stage. That is not lost on me. I find a lot of comfort and a lot of humanity on that stage in collaboration with other musicians and with the audience. Yet here I am talking with you, feeling nervous as hell.

I’m nervous as hell because I am always trying to figure out my role and responsibility. What is the role and responsibility of the artist in a time of trial, terror and tribulation? What is my role? I don’t have an answer other than to say: On Nov. 24, I’ll be on a concert stage with local musicians, speaking to a never-ending cascade of international crisis. It makes me nervous, but I also feel like we can all respond in a way that can be literal, or beautiful or full of imagination.

I’ll leave it there. I think I choose to respond in a way that is full of boundless imagination.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.