10 years in, SF Symphony’s Soundbox remains one of San Francisco’s freshest musical experiences—and definitely one of the hardest to pin down. Is it a backstage afterhours? A hyper-hip cocktail party? A hippie happening? An avant-garde extravaganza?
The regular night-time event, held in the cavernous SF Symphony rehearsal space, complete with floor cushions and thematic drinks, showcases cutting-edge contemporary music for a crowd that spans scruffy TL artists to sleek Pacific Heights patrons. Each installment usually invites a composer or musician to program an entire evening with their wildest musical fantasies: I’ve seen everything from hypnotic classics generated from two hands clapping to entire pieces composed from playing a giant video game, as well as entrancing new takes on solid classics like Bach and Debussy.
This weekend, Fri/31 and Sat/1, Soundbox brings in Courtney Bryan, an awesome pianist and composer I became acquainted with in an unexpected way—she was featured online by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, playing the final movement of her vibrant concerto “House of Pianos” with Radio Bird Quartet and bassist Max Moran. Before I even clicked I was drawn to the title. Who hasn’t passed by an old House of Pianos shop, or similar, in every downtown or thereabouts? (Icons immediately springing to my mind here in the Bay Area: Steinway Piano Gallery, Piedmont Piano Company, and the old Schoenstein Organ Factory). The name rings with vintage, even haunting, vibes.
For Bryan, the piece—which combines classical and jazz sensibilities into a seamless, swirling miniature world—is about history and gratitude: “‘House of Pianos‘ is a love letter to the many pianists who have inspired me over the years,” she says. “It is a dream world where I enter a house full of pianos and journey from room to room witnessing gatherings of legendary pianists from various times and places. I join them in reverence and with thanksgiving and joy.”
“House of Pianos” is just one example of the great music coming from the super-productive, New Orleans-born MacArthur Genius Grant winner, who has released two albums and is working on a third. For her Soundbox takeover, she’s planning something typically ambitious—an exploration of contemporary Afrodiasporic sounds, with contributions from composers hailing from South Africa and the Caribbean to London and New Orleans itself, creating a wide-ranging, kaleidoscopic evening of Black historical and cultural referents.
“I want to show the huge diversity of sounds coming from the African diaspora in terms of contemporary music, to show the incredible ingenuity of what’s going on right now. There’s so much! But when the Symphony contacted me a couple years back about putting this program together, I definitely had ideas about who I wanted.”
Her program includes a dozen well-known and up-and-coming Black composers like Alvin Singleton, Andile Khumalo, Latasha Bundy, Tania Léon, and Tyshawn Sorey. “Oh yes, we have to have something by Tyshawn,” Bryan laughs when she hears my little gasp at the mention of Sorey, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music winner for his Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith) and a very hot contemporary music commodity at the moment. “Everybody loves Tyshawn.”
Bryan’s grad school advisor George Lewis, who also contributes with a piece called “Float, Sting,” inspired her approach to building her Soundbox program through his multi-level approach to Black contemporary composers from around the world.
Lewis’ 2023 book with Harald Kisiedu, Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today is a 360-degree look at the Black contemporary music scene since 1960, engaging with “opera, orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and electroacoustic music, as well as sound art, conceptual art, and digital intermedia, revealing Afrodiasporic new music as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation that offers new subjects, histories, and identities.” Especially prominent is the 1968 founding of the Society of Black Composers, a group of mostly New York-based Black composers from diverse musical backgrounds.
“Several of the people on the program are mentors of mine—George Lewis, Alvin Singleton, Tania León, Roger Dickerson. When you read the names on the program, it reflects an incredible web of connections that Black composers have built across time and space to one another,” Bryan said.
In the meantime, when she’s not being featured by late night television, Bryan is working on an opera. “It’s something I have been thinking about for a long time, and with a residency at Opera Philadelphia it’s finally taking shape. It’s going to be an operatic treatment of ‘Suddenly Last Summer.’ It’s a huge undertaking musically, but fortunately it’s Tennessee Williams—so there’s no shortage of operatic drama to work with.”
SOUNDBOX: COUTNEY BRYAN Fri/31 and Sat/1, 300 Franklin Street, SF. More info here.
