The juxtapositions of music by Bach and Grammy-nominated composer Shawn Okpebholo, in the upcoming concert Sacred Spaces, as part of NOVA Chamber Music Series current season, are wisely chosen.
Distance for cello and marimba (2016) and Two Black Churches (2020 by Okpebholo will receive their Utah premieres, running parallel to two Bach cantatas, Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen, BWV 32 and Nun komm; der heiden Heiland, BWV 61.
The concert will take place Nov. 16 at 3 p.m. in the Libby Gardner Hall at the University of Utah. Among the performers will be Jennifer Youngs and Julia Gershkoff, sopranos; Timothy Jones, baritone; Thomas Glenn, tenor; The University of Utah Chamber Choir, with Eric Schmidt conducting, and Haruhito Miyagi on organ and harpsichord.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Okpebholo said both pieces are about loss. A signature element in his artistic expression is his love of poetry. “It inspires me to engage in poetry because it really does elevate my music in incredible ways,” he explained.
He composed Two Black Churches for baritone and piano, which marks the 1963 bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. In the first movement, he blends Ballad of Birmingham by the late Dudley Randall with Black gospel idioms, symbolic musical references, and poignant lyricism into a meditation on grief, injustice, and faith. For example, the civil rights anthem, We Shall Overcome, and the hymn, Amazing Grace, are referenced in nuanced ways.
Randall’s poem recalls the Birmingham church bombing from the perspective of a mother and her child, as the following excerpt indicates:
“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”
“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”
“But, mother, I won’t be alone.
Other children will go with me,
And march the streets of Birmingham
To make our country free.”
For the second movement, which brings us more than 50 years later to the Charleston church bombing, Okpebholo relies on the significance of the number nine, as it is reflected in the meter and recurring nine-chord harmonic progression. Nine people died the day of the bombing. In addition to quoting the hymn Tis so Sweet to Trust in Jesus, which the congregation sang in the first service after the tragedy, he incorporates Marcus Amaker’s poem The Rain. Amaker’s verse epitomizes the metaphor Okpebholo portrayed. That is, in the composer’s words, the “inability of Blacks in America to stay above water—a consequence of the flood of injustice and the weight of oppression.” Unquestionably, Amaker’s verse amplifies the imagery:
When the reality
of racism returns,
all joy treads water
in oceans of buried
emotion.
Charleston
is doing
everything it can
to only swim
in a colorless liquid
of calm sea
and blind faith.
But the Lowcountry
is a terrain
of ancient tears,
suffocating through
floods of
segregation.
When gunshots
made waves,
we closed our eyes,
held our breath
and went under.
And we are still
trying not to
taste the salt
of our surrounding blues
or face the rising tide
of black pain.
As Okpebholo noted in the interview, the piece “makes us aware of the importance of not forgetting our history,” as violent attacks on unarmed Black people continue to occur to this day.
The subject of loss also is embedded in Distance for cello and marimba, which he composed in 2016. The piece is a tribute to Roger Lundin, a professor in the English department at Wheaton College in Illinois, where Okpebholo is the Jonathan Blanchard Distinguished Professor of Composition at the school’s music conservatory. In the interview, Okpebholo said he regularly visited Lundin to gather his thoughts about literature.
In addition to musical quotations for Prepare Me One Body and For All the Saints. The work also is inspired by Miho Nonaka’s poem Distance. The poem is a tribute to Lundin, as the following excerpt demonstrates:
What flies, invisible, interpose between words,
splinter the syntax of eulogy?
Uncertain, stumbling, we
turn to music, hymns, prayers. As if the soul
is a kind of distance, measured around and still beyond
circumference. We ache to feel exactly
what our fragile faith tells us we can’t
but must.
The two Bach cantatas on the program make for clearly comprehensible companions to both of Okpebholo’s works. For Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen, BWV 32, Bach relied on Luke 2:40-52, which is the account of Jesus, at the age of 12, who stayed behind Jerusalem after Passover. Three days later after Mary and Joseph had been searching frantically for him, they found him in the temple with the religious scholars who were astonished by the boy’s religious knowledge. The cantata opens on a despairing tone of lamentation, symbolizing Mary’s search for Jesus, and the music later transitions into gratitude and jubilation, once she finds Jesus in the temple with the scholars.
In Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BVW 61, which Bach composed when he was 29 for the first Sunday of Advent, the music evidences the composer’s youthful urges to experiment with effects. He combines an ancient Advent song with a French overture that hints at the royal grandeur of Louis XIV. The Advent gospel readings remind the faithful of the first and second coming of Jesus Christ. In one of his most unconventional bass recitatives, he uses pizzicato in the strings and similarly, for the soprano aria, he uses adagio as the tempo indication, another Bach unconventionality. The closing section of the cantata uses a Christmas hymn and ends with the violin part in the stratosphere of the instrument’s range.
This is the third consecutive NOVA season in which a work by Okpebholo has appeared in at least one concert. He recently was nominated for the 2026 Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Songs in Flight, a 55-minute song cycle he composed in 2022. The Cedille Records album features performers Rhiannon Giddens, Karen Slack, Will Liverman, Reginald Mobley, and Paul Sánchez.
Okpebholo was inspired by the Freedom on The Move project, a crowdsourced database of newspaper advertisements that enslavers posted to locate runaways and fugitives. Jailers also posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property. Its historical significance for researchers, genealogists and others cannot be understated. The ads ultimately put the face on individual lives and captured details about the experiences of enslaved people on an unprecedented level. The database comprises more than 39,000 advertisements and more than 30,000 contributions of information from more than 16,000 individuals.
The Grammy-nominated composition, with 12 movements, received its premiere in January 2023 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, the text setting includes her own poetry, haiku sequences by Crystal Simone Smith, and a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyehimba Jess. Songs in Flight was commissioned by Sparks & Wiry Cries and The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Okpebholo was named last December Chicagoan of the Year in Classical Music by the Chicago Tribune. Music critic Hannah Edgar wrote. “I’m even harder pressed to think of anyone, anywhere, who composes with Okpebholo’s finesse across so many genres. His art songs ache, from the shattering diptych of Two Black Churches to Songs in Flight, whose settings of runaway slave ads were the most haunting thing I heard this year. His instrumental music surges with Ivesian detail and color. His Black Music, for saxophone quartet and trumpet, premiered on what was ostensibly a Scott Johnson tribute concert in February. That heady work made off with the whole thing.”
In the interview, Okpebholo said he encourages students in the composition program to be honest with their music and “don’t try to write like other people.” He added, “Everything I write is inspired by something or is a response to it. Music written for the sake of music is something I can’t do.”
Okpebholo encourages his students to cultivate friendships with other musicians and to explore collaborating not only with musicians, but also those in other disciplines. It is such experiences in which young composers have the opportunity to write a piece for the next Yo-Yo Ma, for example.
For tickets and more information, see the NOVA Chamber Music Series website.