Interpoiesis 4

Song of the Shank is based on the life of the sightless Afrodiasporic composer and virtuoso pianist Thomas Wiggins, born under US chattel slavery in 1849. Popularly known as “Blind Tom,” this child prodigy became a major 19th century American musical figure despite being enslaved throughout the formative part of his career. An 1860 account of a Blind Tom performance cited by the African American aesthetician Alain Locke recalls the young Mozart: “He could play flawlessly any composition he heard played, usually on once hearing it, could improvise correctly and expressively, and is said to have had a repertory of several thousand pieces.” In his best-known work, The Battle Of Manassas (1863), Blind Tom deploys the classic American trope of musical depiction, as thunder, lightning, and the sounds of cannons are recalled via cluster-like sounds that anticipate early Henry Cowell and the Futurist composers.

Allen’s novel, the product of extensive research, deals with the relation among music, identity, and human rights in ways that are most relevant to contemporary experience worldwide. The novel confronts the challenges Tom’s music poses to white conceptions, not only of black subjectivity, but of their own. Published accounts of Tom’s music, which regularly featured debates about originality in “the Negro,” congeal into a complex of paradoxes, all prompted by Tom’s undeniable soundings.

The musical work follows the novel in being not a simple recounting of Tom’s life, but a complex portrait of a child, accomplished beyond his years, coming to musical and personal maturity in a society trapped in spurious binary codes of racialization that permeated literally every aspect of existence. Similarly, the music does not re-present the music of Tom’s era, but instead imagines what a 21st century Thomas Wiggins might sound like. The two soloists, voice and piano, represent two imagined aspects of Tom’s experiences and personality, presenting both agonistic and complementary perspectives.

In the end, Blind Tom’s music transcended his objectification and confounded the racial order, showing the power of creative work to enact social change and promote new modes of consciousness. This is this kind of work that Ensemble Modern. George Lewis, and Jeffery Renard Allen have been pursuing for many years, and this new project amplifies that direction in relevant and salutary ways.