Like many thousands of people, I was introduced to Darian Donovan Thomas‘ fantastic talents via singer Arooj Aftab’s NPR Tiny Desk video. You can’t miss him: He’s the one in back with the violin, sporting a smart black dress, gorgeous jewelry, and a blonde-tipped afro.
His playing kicked my spirits into the stratosphere, no small feat in this gloomy era. I immediately looked him up, and was rather embarrassed to find that the Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and disciplinary artist had been part of my musical landscape for a while—appearing with favorite folks like Moses Sumney, Amyra Leon, Balún, Kazu Makino. I’d even encountered one of his own performances-compositions in the poignant and lovely “Safe Space,” which made some rounds earlier in the pandemic. Much of this music shares a meditative, introspective vibe that’s a positive balm right now.
Now he’s the guest artist and Creative Lab composer for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (through August 10), debuting his new orchestral piece “Flowercloud” on August 9 in the “Becoming” program. “Becoming,” conducted by the festival’s brilliant musical director Cristian Măcelaru, is part of Cabrillo’s homage to the queer spirits that have presided over the festival—entering its 63rd year, on the 50th anniversary of LGBTQ+ Pride in Santa Cruz—including festival co-founder Lou Harrison, whose stature as a musical maverick and instrument-maker has only grown more monumental since his 2003 passing.
“I got to visit the site in January,” Thomas told me over Zoom from his sweltering New York apartment. “I was able to talk to a bunch of people there and see that everyone genuinely loved Lou. People cared deeply about him and miss him. When they first mentioned Lou as a theme for what we were doing, I thought, ‘What? How do you honor one of the original originals? That’s pretty huge.’ They were like, ‘If it’s gay that’s great, the gayer the better, especially in the context of the political climate.’ They gave me free rein. I loved that. And it was nice to have some anchoring points, too, by talking to people who had such a connection to him.”
Thomas, who says he sometimes writes very quickly, immediately seized on something grand. “I know I wanted to do a Mahler 4 thing with this project; Mahler’s symphony ends with a song. I found a book of Lou’s poetry online, and was able to integrate some of that text into the work itself.” But that doesn’t mean things are literal. “‘Flowercloud’ is one of those pieces where a lot of the experience of it isn’t on the page,” Thomas said. “Some of the things I write, like my percussion music, can be very avant-garde and complex, and there’s definitely a place for that. I think I really like right now for my music to not be complicated, so that I can talk about complicated things literally inside of it. The simplicity can make space.”
“Partly
adream I think,
he daily walks the world
as in a flowercloud of thought
& sight.” —Lou Harrison
“For this piece, I didn’t want it to be anti-music, I wanted it to be receivable,” Thomas said. “It’s almost self-evident and obvious. The actual situationing of the piece is the thing that makes it feel ‘other.’ There’s a gorgeous film by my constant collaborator Phon Tran, who’s a gay composer in his own right. And there’s going to be this flower cloud area. In my solo sets I’ve been installing a little art piece that one can interface with during the set: I did this for my recent Lincoln Center show, and for this thing I did at the Whitney. At Cabrillo, there will be a large area of flowers with little, shiny percussion instruments inside of it, chimes and spouting balls, that at times musicians from the orchestra can go to and play with, to add glitter to the air, as the piece is happening.”
It’s part of the overall theatricality of the piece, Thomas said. “The piece starts with one bassoonist alone on stage at the top, which is kind if a joke in itself, and then gradually the bassoon is joined by other instruments one-by-one, until everyone’s onstage doing this song thing. There’s a moment in the piece called ‘The People,” and everyone gets to say the text. There’s talking, there’s running around. There’s footsteps. And when people aren’t playing, they can go into the flower cloud, they can move around.”
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The gradual commotion of the staging, ensconced in tinkling chimes, is poignant and queer, Thomas explains. “It’s very comforting to have this piece at this moment, because all of us are under attack. I decided to confront that feeling and think, what was it like to be queer at another overwhelming moment like this, even at the lowest point. This is kind of an AIDS piece. How did our ancestors feel when everyone died, a lot of people were lost? Art kind of halted, parties stopped, culture changed. We ended up with grunge instead of disco. There was this aesthetic shift. But I think we’ve finally gotten back. Now, there are gays in high places again. There’s queer people everywhere. I think art’s expanding. We’re in another golden age because of it. But we still have to deal with the politics we’re dealing with.”
Thomas continued, “I’m representing that by starting with the loneliness of a single voice onstage at the beginning, then slowly moving into refilling it, finally having the full, queer community of the orchestra there. But still having to fight to prove this orchestra’s existence. There’s this character, a singer called The Elder, who for this performance will be me. In future performances I hope The Elder is someone who lived through the AIDS crisis. At the end, once they’re singing with the full group, and all the voices are working together, things gets agitated. The orchestra gets to start shouting all these questions of like, ‘Why are you suffocating us?’ ‘Leave my trans siblings alone!’ ‘Why do we have to fight to prove our existence?’
“And I say something like, ‘I’m not fighting to prove, I’m fighting to remind. In that queerness has always been. It’s natural. It’s not something that needs to be proven. I don’t actually have to prove my existence. I do exist. All this is here and has been and will be so. The piece kind of ends in this weird relief, or maybe it’s weird to me, because I’m constantly agitated by the state of the country. But the reality is, this is not actually a fight. We’ve already won, and no one can change that. So the piece has an intense climax, and then melts into calm, with many different voices, every instrument in the orchestra playing a different gesture, a different thing, calmly.
“And I just get to sit within that and be like, yeah, I think it just is this, actually.”
CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC through August 10, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz. More info here.
