Alvin Singleton
56 Blows (Quis Custodiet Custodies?)
by Mic Holwin
originally appeared in Stagebill Oct. 1999 for American Composers Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall
In 1992, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey gave a speech on the floor of the Senate chamber that questioned initial "not guilty" verdicts for the Los Angeles policemen accused of brutally beating Rodney King. Emphatically and rhythmically saying "pow!" fifty-six times (the number of times King was struck in eighty-one seconds), Bradley dramatically illustrated the viciousness of the beating.
Composer Alvin Singleton was impressed by the powerful image of Bradley enunciating each "pow" to the Senate. That image haunted him for a month before taking shape as the orchestral work 56 Blows (Quis Custodiet Custodies?).
The work's Latin subtitle ("Who guards the guardians?") is taken from the Satires of first-century Roman poet Juvenal. Roman husbands are cautioned to put their wives under guard when not at home in order to ensure the wives' fidelity. But, the question is begged, who will guard the guardians?
"It raises the issue of 'people who are sworn to protect us are sometimes the enemy,'" says Singleton of the intent of 56 Blows. "It's not really about Rodney King--Rodney King was the incident that inspired it, but it could've been about anybody." Singleton cites more recent New York City cases of the stationhouse torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima and the shooting of West African immigrant Amadou Diallo by police. "I would hate for [the broader significance of the piece] to be missed with a concentration on the individual."
Rather than programmatic, 56 Blows is philosophic. In response to astute but literal-minded players and listeners who may count only fifty blows in the piece, Singleton responds, "This is a work of art. It's representative of something, an event, by title only. People define things so narrowly that they miss broader meanings."
56 Blows may have had genesis in the events of the Rodney King incident--the shocking videotape of the beating, the Simi Valley verdict, the riots in Los Angeles that followed, the subsequent civil rights trial--but it is music after all and cannot be fit into a neat categorical box. It is more a point of origin for reflection.
"I see myself, as [author] James Baldwin put it, as 'a witness for the times in which I live,'" says Singleton. "How can you not reflect what you live? Everything I experience is part of what I put on paper. It's not a conscious thing; I don't set out to write like this, write like that. But my consciousness of injustice within society rages now and then. And depending what I'm working on at the moment, it may turn up in a title or it may not."
Singleton's provocative titles call attention to the abstract art form they identify. While "Symphony No. 1" or "Piano Concerto in Bb Major" offers no physical setting to imagine or mental mind-set to slip into before hearing the actual notes, titles like Singleton's memorial to South African political activist Stephen Biko Extension of a Dream or his world hunger-addressing After Fallen Crumbs point a listener down a conceptual path.
A composer with a lifelong love of jazz whose works are played by orchestras and ensembles internationally, Singleton's chosen career as a CPA was (thankfully) derailed when he heard Mahler's Second Symphony as a teenager. He went on to study music instead at New York University and Yale, and as a Fulbright Scholar with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome. He remained in Europe for a decade, returning to the United States to serve as composer-in-residence with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (1985-88), resident composer at Spelman College in Atlanta (1988-91), and Unisys composer-in-residence with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (1996-1997).
Commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, 56 Blows was premiered in 1994 with David Loebell conducting. A lean twelve-minute work, 56 Blows opens with sporadic eighth notes sounded by the brass over a quiet tension of sustained strings. Like the slow, scattered build of raindrops at the beginning of a storm, the brass becomes increasingly agitated before dropping out to shift focus back on the strings, which now seem to have an ominous presence. Violins begin a see-saw ostinado reminiscent of a childhood taunt; the sustained strings are replaced by flute and harp as an unease builds.
Not overt, the tension has an insidious horror-movie quality: something familiar is about to turn creepy. The texture thickens, the side-to-side rocking continues; the listener is lulled by the waves rocking the boat, unaware of a shark circling underneath.
Sudden abrupt hits of the snare drum rip open the scene with a military tattoo. The brass turns harsh and dissonant. When the drumming stops, the eighths return, more disjointed this time, as does the unremitting string sustain. The strings now seem sadly beautiful, the aftermath of a brutal incident.
A jarring return of percussion in an aggressive tom tom, timbale and snare drum episode punctuated by brass eighths pierces the peace. Once the outburst subsides, the orchestra builds toward a cinematic conclusion that moves beyond sadness to a knowing awareness.
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