All of life contained in a single room.
Is there a positive to a pandemic? Amidst a world shut down and with protests growing every day, composer Dominique Le Gendre reflects on the gifts of isolation and solitude
Photo: Maria Nunes
“Well, they must have done something.” Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
I’d like to be able to claim to have written the sentences that follow the statement in inverted commas but no, it was Arthur Miller, in the New Yorker of October 14th 1996 in an article describing why he had written The Crucible. His play, written in 1953 about the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1692-1693 was in fact an allegory for McCarthyism.
My name is Dominique Le Gendre. I’m a composer. I’ve spent the last 14 weeks mostly in my room.
Getting back to the opening paragraph, the past few months of Covid-19 in the UK have convinced me that the state has lost its mind. The murder of George Floyd has cruelly placed this blog’s opening sentence in a gigantic neon reminder of the average response to the indisputable facts of decades of police brutality towards black people in North America and here in Europe.
“How you doing in lock-down?” we ask each other on the phone, in text messages, WhatsApp pings and Facebook posts. To be frank, my lockdown has been great. And here’s my selfish why.
Just before lockdown, my days and weeks were filled with lists of tasks to be completed by such and such a date, submit application x for funding, schedule some meetings, follow-up on that meeting last November, email so and so and diplomatically work in a - have you had any further thoughts about my proposal? All of which is familiar to every artist, producer or person involved in creating and selling their own and other people’s work.
I do two things: I compose music and I run an arts charity. The charity is an arts organisation called StrongBack Productions that I founded with a colleague, Patricia Cumper in 2013. Since May 2018, I had been running StrongBack singlehandedly, guided by a board of five formidable women. December 2019 ushered in an unexpected and timely gift of stability thanks to a donation from a generous benefactor. This also made two things possible: sharing the administrative work and sealing a great partnership. This April, we welcomed a sharp, on-the-ball young graduate as our administrator and June 2020 marks one year that StrongBack has been partnering with Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions.
March 23rd, the official start of lockdown, was the day I submitted our Arts Council England application to tour StrongBack and Speaking Volumes’ current project, Come On In, Life Journeys. The application that had taken months to prepare was for a year-long tour of 7 literary festivals, 5 arts venues and 3 community centres starting in September. Sharmilla (Speaking Volumes) and I were looking forward to touring our 6 poets and musicians who had created song-poems inspired by conversations with staff and participants from Loughborough Farm, The Baytree Centre and Herne Hill Train Station, all in Lambeth. We were proud of the extraordinary and moving portraits that had emerged from these six very different artists paying tribute to the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Six days later, there was an email from Arts Council England alerting us to the suspension of all applications until further notice due to Covid-19. Now, with the silence enforced on an entire nation, my internal spotlight could finally focus sharply on my music. And what actually was happening with my music?
On April 18th, there should have been a concert at LSO St. Lukes of Diasporic Quartets in which my string quartet Le Génie Humain would have been performed. The concert had been curated by composer Des Oliver and was to feature performances of string quartets by Philip Herbert, Daniel Kidane, Tunde Jegede, Des and myself. I had been looking forward to the concert because it was finally a chance to be heard, in good company and to let the long list of industry professionals I’ve been trying to make contact with for years, know that there was something for them to attend. By the time Des alerted us to the postponement of the concerts, I was lost in orchestration.
Le Génie Humain was mutating into a work for orchestra; what I had imagined as a two-movement work is still, for the time being, a dense one movement work that asks the whole orchestra to play as a solo instrument, and not always predictably nor at the same time. The piece is a meditation on the desire of the human spirit to transcend its earthly bonds. It’s inspired by a couplet on the base of a statue by a 19th century French sculptor Emile Louis Picault which reads,
Esclave sur le sol oú l’étrient la matière,Son esprit dans la nuit va chercher la lumière. A rough English translation of this would be: Earthbound, enslaved to matter, such is our plight, Through darkness, the human spirit will search for the light.
By May 21st, I had scanned all 25 manuscript pages and emailed the full score to Leo who typesets my scores. A few days later George Floyd happened. And the world erupted.
Every voice that had ever quivered ..they must have done something, was finally being answered by voices in unison across the globe. Voices that for decades had been stifled were suddenly being given the floor. Most self-respecting institutions have rushed to confess their failings and declare their promise to do better; even right-wing newspapers have surprised us by an air of contrition. Those institutions that have remained silent have been roundly and openly criticised. The State has demonstrated how lost is its mind in the only way it knows: We are the best! And in just four weeks, four centuries of slavery and its legacies have crashed into the present with the force of asteroids hitting the earth, toppling what we never imagined would fall, showering the ignorant with testimonies.
So what now? Lockdown was imposed for a reason that cost thousands of lives and will change lives and livelihoods for a long while to come. That reason, Covid-19, is still with us and depending on who you are, you can interpret its presence and effect in metaphorical terms, Biblical warnings of pestilence, in plain old epidemiologic factual terms; nature’s reckoning or free- for-all-in-a-state-that-has-lost-its-mind. Nobody knows what the future holds and who or what will survive. Safe inside my room, my world remains intact even if my credit rating looks set to fail.
StrongBack, like everyone involved in live performing arts will continue to wait until it’s safe to go outside. Arts Council Emergency funding means we can survive till next spring and…fingers crossed that an application to film our Come On In performers will indeed allow us to make beautiful filmed song-poems for online access. The sustained rude awakening of formerly deaf institutions following weeks of protests means that I can send that email without worrying about being too diplomatic: about that project I mentioned in November, the one about the season of composers of the Caribbean…
At a profound level, from the confines of my room, the protests have been cathartic, vindicating the choice I made 40 years ago when I left Trinidad aged 19, wide-eyed and boldfacedly declaring I was going to be a composer. Growing up in Trinidad and in the Caribbean had made it possible for me to believe that I had a right to stake my claim. I had grown up in my own land where the notion of ethnic minorities would elicit mostly puzzled looks. I carry in my DNA, the blood, the languages, the culture and the traditions of my pre-Columbian Carib ancestors with those who came after from Africa, Europe and Asia mixed with the fiery energy of a young independent country.
Forty years of life in Europe, most of that here in London have slowly and steadily been eroding my dogged determination to be heard as I want to be heard. The reality for me is that the only alternative to doing what I do, is a few blocks away through the automated glass entrance of Sainsbury’s. That erosion, unlike the one affecting the UK coastline, is not permanent.
And while I have little reason to believe this present government is the one that will usher in meaningful change that allows us to work together towards a future with respect, equality, consideration for our planet and justice at its heart, I know that things will not be the same. What we CAN do as artists, friends and people with integrity, is to insist on accountability, demand equality, press for the spaces where we too can be seen and heard and show that our difference is equal to all differences…just different.