'24-'25: Performance #4
The Not-So-Small Miracle of Self-Fluency
Performers:
Abel Selaocoe; cello, vocals, wisdom, dance
The Bantu Ensemble; Fred Thomas (piano, vocals, percussion); Alan Keary (bass, vocals); Dudù Kouaté (percussion, other things that might defy musical classification and are as such referred to as percussion)
Program:
A mystery. Announced from the stage. A mixture of Selaocoe’s available music, yet-released music, and improvisation.
Position: Front row, far right (Zankel Hall)
Purpose/Intent/Questions: I’ve adored Abel Selaocoe from the first listen, so his performance is really what earned Carnegie my subscription this year. I wasn’t aware of whether or how accompaniment from his Bantu Ensemble would impact my impression of his work, but he’s one of the few musicians I trust enough, musically, that I’d buy a ticket to any show with his name on it. Even if he were playing the spoons.
How’d it go?
I’m not sure if I’d like to call Abel Selaocoe a “once in a generation” artist. At this point, it feels most prudent to think of him as a “once.” Folks make a big deal in the classical music space–as in many spaces these days–about the question of “diversity” and whether or not there’s value or meaning in appealing to a broader audience, innovating within and at the edges of the genre, forcing or allowing classical music to evolve into something beyond an ossified caricature of itself. For people who want to uphold a needlessly narrow and conservative view of classical music, Selaocoe is an absolute nightmare. For the rest of us, he’s a gift, a gem, and a joy.
The horror and delight of the man is that he is a decidedly qualified, thoroughly skilled, and classically trained cellist. He can Bach with the best of ‘em. But he also brings African cultures into his music, through Xhosa-style throat singing, his language, his content, and more broadly into his performance through his dress, his dance, his ensemble, and his overall person. In my audio library, his work is classified as “Classical Crossover.” I’d typically feel leery about something like this, as if the “Crossover” designation merely exists to put an asterisk on things that keeps the decidedly Black elements of his work from “tainting” the “pure” genre1 of Classical-with-no-Qualifiers. In his case, as with the handful of other truly talented professional musicians who have mastered their individual idiom, I feel OK with a cross-genre or “genre expansive” classification. Is his music classical? “Yes, and!” He is bringing something new to the table, not a “lesser” form of classical, not something that has been “dumbed down” to attract people to the concert hall who “can’t understand” the warhorses of the repertoire, but a classical that is alive and moving, dancing around with itself, rethinking its sounds, not forgetting its lineage, but espousing and reveling in the joy of a family being enlarged through marriage, new customs being created from the merging of traditions, new voices being brought into the world to giggle and sing and cry along with many ancestors.
It is rare to witness a musician so unafraid to fully inhabit multiple traditions without reducing them to gimmick–which is what “purists” hope for and rely on. Selaocoe’s classical phrasing is not in conflict with his improvisation. It is all one language to him, and he speaks it fluently. His surety is contagious enough not merely to support his work with his cello and his voice, but to create substantial enough buy-in for others to grant him temporary use of their instruments and voices in pursuit of the greater musical project.
It doesn’t typically seem to be in good taste to lead off notes on a show with a brief love letter about the artist of interest, but Mr. Selaocoe has earned a lot of exceptions.
Not only did I enjoy the show, but–here comes the controversial part–I had fun. How uncouth.
While the man has been gathering his flowers since coming to the UK on an “exceptional talent”2 visa, performing with bands of renown, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, painting the gilded walls of the Wiener Konzerthaus with his impressive, expressive, unique colors, and having Yo-Yo Ma sit to record a song on his debut album, there will still be resistance to his work. Having the audience dancing in our seats? In our nice little velvet prisons designed for uncomfortable, focused stillness? What a profound abandonment of decorum! Oh, how the mighty have fallen! That our symphony halls should be filled with music suitable for dance other than ballet3, that patrons might cheer or respond to music with something other than dainty claps and raspy coughs… if you want to up-end tradition so badly, why not allow people to bring in their cell phones and interrupt performances with ringto–oh. The world of classical music has been changing all along, will continue to change, and must continue to change. Selaocoe said it well, himself, during the performance: “Tradition is progressive.” The creature of tradition cannot continue to live without adaptation. There are people who insist that “fun” music has no place in any room that might have had the seemingly sacred works of Tchaikovsky on the same stage. If you never have fun with Tchaikovsky4, you might want to sit in the front row for this one. Have your pencils ready.
From the moment Selaocoe and his ensemble stepped on stage, it was clear that it was not merely so that he might play some cello. He was there to make music. The music will expand to fill the container provided for it, and Selaocoe will test for potential openings, ways to make more space, ways to make more, richer, higher, better music throughout the performance. This necessitates that he get to know his audience–surely, some of this trust in this performance came from the riotous support of the many South Africans in attendance, celebrating with Selaocoe and Carnegie the anniversary of democracy in the country. But with each additional layer of musical trust he established, he surely earned more and more investment from his audience-cum-instrument.
Enraptured from the start, I loved watching him transform his primary instrument through six distinct modes of play, half of which I don’t recall ever having seen on a stage before, one or two perhaps being entirely new to my sense of how the cello might sing. Seeing someone so creative and enthusiastic about the outer edges of the instrument’s potential is exciting. The other side of witnessing that which is so exceptional is the subjective sense of dullness that is then cast over instrumentalists who do not fully explore, experiment with, and develop a relationship with different aspects and modes of the individual instrument beyond what common repertoire demands.5 Fortunately, I had a couple of days before needing to see or hear any other cellists, giving me a bit of time to regain perspective.
A robustly developed performer, Selaocoe also invoked different worlds with his own voice, set his own music-making down for a brief moment of exuberant dance, and shared small, precious bits of wisdom between songs and improvisations throughout the set.
While his renditions of classical works are flavorful and easily situate him as one of my top five cellists–I’ll choose his interpretation of a Platti sonata over most anyone else’s–the virtuosity still shines radiantly in works informed by African traditions, whether his vibrant take on the hymn that begins, “Ba mitsa ka mabitso, Emmanuele6,” or the original “Ka bohaleng7 / On the Sharp Side,” expanding on a phrase used by Setswana people to comment on women’s ability and willingness to wield the good of the world, regardless of the often great cost to their own wellbeing. Those two, in particular, were truly savory delights to hear–and move to–at Carnegie, and continue to rise as frequently visited friends in my music library.
It feels wrong to describe it as humility, even though I can understand the argument for it. A musician as profoundly gifted and vision-secure as Selaocoe might seem difficult for other musicians to work with. There is a level where too many grand talents on stage, too many cooks in the kitchen, can lead to what is often referred to as “personality conflict.” It seems to me that Selaocoe is above and beyond that level–he articulates a sense of the “big picture” of the music so well that others can figure out where they fit within it, enjoy it, and happily meld and mesh into the beauty of an ensemble.
He had no problem giving space to Thomas, Keary, and especially Kouaté to let the musical experience expand through them, their credited instruments, their own voices, and other supplementary instruments not listed on the program.
Kouaté walked right up to the line–though he stayed seated on the stage for nearly all of the performance–of seeming to show off, using such a variety of familiar and novel percussion instruments that he almost came across as an alchemist or foley artist, creating sonic experiences that didn’t always seem possible given the materials physically present.
Everyone was heard, deeply, and in a significant way. No note was out of place.
Not satisfied to leave the music at a fraction of its full realization, Selaocoe eagerly conducted the audience, his bow becoming baton, directing a more complex divisi than most would have the courage–the absolute assurance of musical vision and spect-actor buy-in–to attempt. But even I sang, quite enthusiastically. I can understand why it would make people feel uncomfortable–he’s the sort of musician who it makes sense to pay good money for a ticket that grants you the right to shut yourself up and listen to him. But listening to him involves some amount of surrender, not to passive listening, but to active listening and possibly a bit of participation. All of us have participatory music as part of our heritage. All of us. Each morning, the birds find their place in the symphony of the sunrise. Many of us have forgotten how to participate, we might even feel embarrassed about singing in public. But you don’t have to trust yourself. Just trust Selaocoe’s vision. If you truly are more Screaming Piha8 than he’s looking for–he’ll pivot, gracefully.
He’d make a great cult leader. Hopefully he’ll stay in music and fill out the full figure of what he knows to be waiting–for our sake, for his sake, for music’s sake.
I left the show satisfied and ready for more, wondering in every corner of myself what he might do with command of a full orchestra. He’s played with some of the greats, and as a soloist he has of course served to co-conduct, if not taking the helm proper. But I don’t think there’s a floor or a ceiling to what he’s capable of, musically. However much of it I am privileged to witness will be enough to keep me curious and in love with the world.
Do I have anything bad to say about the show? Not really, no. Maybe I could have chosen a different seat to have had a better view of all of the percussion work. Maybe next time, Carnegie will trust Selaocoe to sell out Stern rather than just Zankel. Maybe next time, he will have a Leningrader-sized orchestra to conduct. The closest thing I have to a complaint is that it only happened once. But it was a tremendous once. And I look forward to once more, wherever and however it manifests.
While the genre is, in reality, no more “pure” than the average racist on Stormfront desperately trying to reason through the “statistical noise” of distant mixed race heritage, classical music remains “white-coded” for many. It is a product of Western Civilization™, but the admixture from other cultures is hardly new–even prior to participation, there was significant appropriation. Genre being tied to other sorts of identity isn’t just a “classical” thing; one of the best cases in my own music library is KiTTiE, the all-female “hard rock” band that hit it big when I was a kid, whose status as actual teen girls made a lot of grown men uncomfortable with classifying their work appropriately–i.e. as “metal”–sometimes settling on misclassification with the pejorative “nu-metal,” a designation that arose to malign metal music that borrows significant elements from… hip hop. Hm.
This is a legal designation. And an understatement.
I would be first in line for a ballet with music by Abel Selaocoe.
This is one of my great intellectual and personal interests: the conflict between the pursuit of meaning and distraction, where arts fall within that, the tension that arises when one person’s meaning is another’s distraction, the impurity of it all, and the difficult task of remaining lucid about how we’re approaching things in life, handling the strange moments when meaning becomes distraction becomes meaning–there are many people in the world of classical music who try to keep our spaces “serious,” just as any given synagogue surely has at least one member who misses all the jokes in the Torah, insists that the sex in Shir haShirim is metaphorical, and thinks that our forebears were born perfect despite the centrality of moral failings in their character development arcs. Aside from enjoying Selaocoe’s music, I enjoy the challenges he presents to classical institutions.
This is a vulgar, superfluous comment, so if you feel you might be offended… stop! But it’s giving “it’s not my problem if you don’t orgasm when we have sex.” Except in the case of an inanimate musical instrument, there’s even less room to argue that the quality of the song isn’t a consequence of the quality of the touch.
Meaning “the Name above all names, Emmanuel (God is with us)” in (Se)Sotho, a Bantu language.
“Mosadi o tshwara thipa ka bohaleng,” (Se)Sotho for an idiom meaning, “A woman holds the knife on the sharp side of the blade.”
The hype man of the avian world, play the Screaming Piha’s call when you’re trying on a new outfit and taking a peek in the mirror.