Get out! A QC friend wins the music Pulitzer Prize

One of the first people composer Michael Abels called after winning the Pulitzer Prize in music this week was Mark Russell Smith, conductor of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra.

“He was thrilled and honored, very excited,” Smith said in a Wednesday interview from France. “We just shared a really wonderful moment together. It’s really a big deal for him, it’s great.”

An acclaimed 60-year-old African-American composer, Abels has known Smith since they were in elementary school together in Phoenix, Ariz. Abels has achieved great success in a variety of artistic fields, navigating between the worlds of concert and film music.

He’s best known for his scores to Jordan Peele films — including the Oscar-winning “Get Out” (2017) and “Us” (2019), for which Abels won the World Soundtrack Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, a Critics Choice nomination, an Image Award nomination, and multiple critics’ awards.

The hip-hop influenced score for “Us” was short-listed for an Oscar, and was named “Score of the Decade” by online publication The Wrap. Abels also wrote the score for Peele’s 2022 science-fiction film “Nope.”

It was “Get Out” that brought the composer to the attention of singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, with whom Abels collaborated on both their first opera, “Omar.”

Premiered on May 27, 2022 at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., attended by Mark Russell Smith, it was this work honored Monday, May 8 as the 2023 Pulitzer winner for music.

The prize website calls it “an innovative and compelling opera about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries, a musical work that respectfully represents African as well as African American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage.

“This sweeping new work draws inspiration from the 1831 autobiography of Omar ibn Said, beginning long before the West African scholar was forced to board a ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina — the site of his initial enslavement. Pulling from a wealth of sources—including historical texts found in Carolina’s Louis Round Wilson Library—Omar tells a profound story of strength, resistance, and religious conviction in the face of harrowing circumstances,” says the Pulitzer Prize website.

“The rich, bubbling score combines West African traditions and traditional opera instrumentation to illuminate the lives of Omar ibn Said and those who came into his orbit,” the prize citation says.

Giddens is a two-time Grammy winner, and 2017 winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” which carried a $625,000 prize. Her work aims to lift up “people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art,” according to her website bio.

As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”

An ‘equally amazing talent’

Smith not only saw “Omar” at Spoleto, but went to the larger production of the opera last fall in Los Angeles. It has since been programmed by opera companies in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

Smith this week called Giddens (who was commissioned by the Spoleto festival to write the piece) “an equally amazing talent.”

She wrote the opera libretto and its melodies, tapping Abels to create the full orchestration.

“It’s really an amazing partnership,” Smith said. “He had the skills and the ear for dramatic scenes. She saw the film ‘Get Out’ and she thought the music was incredibly dramatic and evocative. She sought him out and thought he would be the right person. Their personalities just jelled.”

Of the opera, the QCSO music director and maestro said: “It’s an amazing story, really beautifully told, an amazing synthesis of musical styles. That’s what Abels excels at.”

Of Giddens (a 2000 graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio), Smith said: “She’s one of the most amazing singers I’ve ever heard. She has a remarkable voice. They’re both skilled in all sorts of different genres. The opera shows off that different types of music are used brilliantly to put the story.”

The New York Times’ Joshua Barone recently noted that Giddens penned the libretto based on Said’s autobiography, and recorded self-accompanied demos that Abels then responded to with a fleshed-out score.

“The result was a multigenre, multicultural swirl — a tour through the sound worlds of Islam, bluegrass, spirituals and more — that I described in my review of the premiere as “an unforced ideal of American sound: expansive and ever-changing,” Barone wrote.

In an interview, Abels said: “It shows the importance of telling all of our stories through our fine art, that people are waking up to the truth of that statement and the importance of our stories’ being part of our full artistic legacy. I’ve just come from seeing a couple of the shows in Boston, where it was playing to sold-out houses [at Boston Lyric Opera]. In each city, you’ve seen people who have never come to the opera before, feeling seen and feeling moved and being welcomed into an artistic space where they haven’t felt welcomed before.

“Rhiannon is the most talented person I know, in terms of the variety and breadth of talent, and I’m thrilled to be part of her musical life,” the composer said.

Giddens said in the Times’ piece: “I’m not even blowing smoke when I say I don’t know what angel whispered Michael’s name — well, I do, because it was his soundtrack to ‘Get Out.’ But I didn’t know what would happen. I had an instinct that it would work, and I don’t know how I lucked out so much in finding a collaborator. I can’t imagine us not doing more together.”

More with the QCSO

Of the QCSO’s Smith, Abels said in a November 2022 interview with Local 4:

“He’s been the longest advocate of my music I must say, and I’ve enjoyed a musical friendship that has intersected through our entire lives and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s really been a huge gift to my life.”

“He is just so communicative and direct and intensely knowledgeable and musical and just personable and funny and he’s a character, who completely owns who he is and makes everybody else wish that they were looking at life the way he does,” Abels said. “It’s remarkable.”

In December 2022, Abels came to Davenport to hear the QCSO play his new guitar concerto, “Borders,” with guitarist Mak Grgic.

In November 2021, the QCSO performed his lush musica illustration of “Frederick’s Fables” by Leo Lionni, narrated by Quad-City poet and author Shellie Moore Guy. In April 2021, the QCSO did Abels’s “Delights and Dances” (2007, rev. 2012), for string quartet and string orchestra. The QCSO commissioned his orchestral work “Liquify” in 2017, and co-commissioned “Borders” with an orchestra in Houston, Tex.

As a concert composer, Abels’s orchestral works have been performed by the Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and many more.

Smith has his friend back on a QCSO Masterworks program next Feb. 3-4, 2024, with “Liquify,” featuring the premiere of KV 265’s accompanying film that fuses science and art. The conductor has called “Liquify” a tone poem representing riverfront scenes, perfect for the QC.

“It is always a joy for me — and I use that word very deliberately — to collaborate with Michael,” Smith said in a 2019 interview. “I’ve known him since the first day of second grade when he moved to Phoenix. Before he arrived, I was the best pianist in my grade, but that ended when Michael came to town. He was a much better player than I was; so, I switched to the cello and we’ve been close friends ever since.

“We sang together in the Phoenix Boys Choir. We performed together in our 8^th grade play Fiddler On the Roof. We both went to Northern Arizona University Summer Music Camp where I conducted Michael’s first orchestral work – a piano concerto that he himself performed,” Smith said. “In 1991, I was also fortunate to commission and conduct Global Warming — Michael’s first professional orchestral work — with the Phoenix Youth Symphony. The work was inspired by the historic events of the end of the Cold War era and the collapse of the Berlin Wall.”

This week, Smith was confident that the already in-demand composer will see his profile raised to the stars because of the prestigious Pulitzer.

“His commissions are piling already. If it’s possible to be more busy, this will definitely lead to more interest in his music,” he said. “It’s undeniable – it’s great for him. I could not be more elated.”

Rhiannon Giddens will perform relatively close by this September – her 2023 world tour brings her to Iowa City’s Hancher Auditorium on Sept. 13, and Chicago’s Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture Sept. 17.

For more information on Giddens, click HERE. For more on Abels, click HERE. To learn more about “Omar,” visit the L.A. Opera website HERE.