It was only a matter of time before composer and pianist Courtney Bryan was tapped to curate a program for SoundBox, the San Francisco Symphony’s alternative performance space and concert series.
Launched in 2014, SoundBox is an ideal venue for combining different musical aesthetics. Rather than being at Davies Symphony Hall, with seating for more than 2,500, these concerts take place in a backstage rehearsal space that’s been reconfigured like a nightclub, with an audience capacity of around 500.
If tickets for the series were in demand before, the Symphony’s recent decision to scale back SoundBox to just two programs a season means performances there are more highly anticipated than ever.
That’s where Bryan, a 2023 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient, comes in. She’s putting together this season’s first SoundBox program — scheduled for two performances, Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 — and her curatorial vision is capacious. As a composer, she’s known for incorporating jazz, gospel, and classical influences into her work. Take for instance her 2023 concerto House of Pianos, in which she imagines visiting a house where the rooms are full of pianists who have inspired her. Nina Simone is there, along with New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis and 19th-century player Thomas Wiggins.
“Courtney listens to so much music. She listens to everything, and she takes it in very deeply,” said composer George Lewis, one of Bryan’s professors in grad school at Columbia University.
“Some people have very rigid ideas about what taste is all about. She’s much more likely to let many things happen,” Lewis added, speaking to SF Classical Voice by phone from Paris. “That’s an experimental attitude: ‘Let’s just see, real quick.’”
For SoundBox, Bryan has chosen pieces by 12 contemporary composers who represent the global African diaspora — hailing from such places as the Caribbean, South America, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Bryan recently curated a series of concerts focusing on contemporary Louisiana composers and considered doing a similar program of music from the American South for SoundBox. But she found herself going in a broader direction thanks to Lewis, who recently co-edited a book of essays with musicologist Harald Kisiedu titled Composing While Black.
“He’s been doing a series of concerts on Afrodiasporic composers and having conversations around it,” Bryan said of Lewis. “Since those were going on and I was a part of some of those, I was like, ‘Oh, I love the idea of having my own take on the concept.’”
It’s fitting, then, that Lewis will be represented at SoundBox by float, sting, his 2018 sextet inspired by boxer and activist Muhammad Ali. Bryan said that she knows all 12 composers featured on the program personally.
“I was thinking of having [fewer] composers and longer works,” said Bryan, who plans to fly in from her native New Orleans for the San Francisco performances, “but I kind of like the challenge [of including more].”
Along with Lewis’s work, Bryan has chosen music by other mentors of hers: Alvin Singleton, Tania León, Roger Dickerson, and the late Wendell Logan, who was a professor at Oberlin Conservatory, where Bryan earned her bachelor’s degree.
She has also included pieces by some colleagues and former students, like LaTasha Bundy, now Bryan’s composition assistant. When they first met, Bundy was just 14, a student at a music camp in New Orleans. There, Bundy was the only female trumpeter out of 60 or so teens, and Bryan was one of the few women teachers.
Later, in grad school at Tulane University, Bundy had Bryan as a composition teacher, and that’s when the younger composer wrote the piece that’s slated to be heard at SoundBox, Something Something Space. Inspired by drum machines and synthesizers, the work came about via Alone Together, a project started during the pandemic by New York City-based violinist Jennifer Koh, which brought together established contemporary composers and emerging ones. Bryan and Bundy were paired and each tasked with writing a piece that was less than a minute.
Bundy feels that she’s gained both a depth of knowledge and permission to be herself from studying with Bryan. The young composer, now 32, explained how she had previously been trying to write music that others would find intellectually appealing.
“It was extremely academic,” Bundy said by phone from New Orleans. “It wasn’t really music I necessarily wanted to listen to. She got me to the point where I was making things that I would actually want to listen to.”
Symphony violinist Chen Zhao is expected to play Bundy’s piece at SoundBox, as well as another solo, Tyshawn Sorey’s For Courtney Bryan.
Zhao has performed for the series before and loves it. All kinds of genres, from experimental to traditional chamber music, work in the SoundBox setting, he said.
“When we play in Davies Symphony Hall, because the audience sits so far away, we have to really push out our sound,” he said from Davies, where he was rehearsing. “[But with SoundBox] this is a very intimate kind of playing where you make a little tiny nuance and people can hear everything and see your expressions.”
The added visual appeal of the space, including innovative lighting and projections, plus the Meyer Sound system, enhances the experience, Zhao said.
“Everybody just loves being there,” he continued. “It’s a great setting, and we get a lot of new audience members.”
Having grown up in New Orleans, Bryan knows a thing or two about the synergy between clubs and concert halls, which she feels has shaped her music as well as how she thinks about history.
“Certain parts of the city really feel to me like I’m in different time periods, like in the French Quarter or Congo Square,” she said. “There are these areas where you can feel the history so strongly, but you feel like it’s a living history. I think growing up in [a place] like that makes me think about the cyclical nature of stuff. I’m thinking about the future a lot, but I’m not thinking about it as separate from the past.”
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
