Nicholas Phan, a three-time Grammy nominee in the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album category, recently finished as artist-in-residence at New York's Kaufman Music Center. The San Francisco-based tenor wrapped up his tenure at the prestigious performing arts center with a concert on Thursday, May 30 titled The Artist As Citizen.
"I don't know that all art is political, necessarily, but I also don't know how it can't help but be political in a way," Phan tells Music Times and Classicalite about choosing the overall themes around this performance. "We live in a political world, and art is a response to the world around us."
The program, which Phan told the audience was inspired by artists who felt moved by the political landscape of their time, began with three pieces arranged for voice and piano: Irving Berlin's classic "God Bless America;" "Nov. 2, 1920," a bitter diatribe by Charles Ives bemoaning the results of the 1920 presidential election; and "Fellow Citizens," composed by Eric Malmquist to one of Carl Sandburg's 1914 "Chicago Poems" that served as an ode to a resident of Hull House, one of the Windy City's turn-of-the-century settlement houses for newly arrived immigrants.
"I never could have imagined today would be the day …" Phan said of performing these artist-as-political-commentator songs that particular evening, alluding to that day's breaking news that former President Donald Trump had been convicted in a New York court on 34 felony counts. The point of this trilogy of songs, Phan told the audience, was that they were all composed around the voices of Americans, and that art exists to tell these human stories. Political discussions, he said, "doesn't all have to be some crazy fight on Twitter where we argue with our thumbs."
That was the larger question he was drawn to while working with Kaufman Music Center's Special Music School high school students over the course of the year — how art can bring humanity to politics.
When he signed on for the residency, Phan remembers the center's executive director, Kate Sheeran, and director of artistic planning, John Glover, telling him "how smart these kids were and how thoughtful and mindful these young people were."
"They're growing up in wild times, and they're here in New York City," Phan says of the lived experiences of his students and their natural inclination toward advocacy. "Their ability to process all this information is super impressive."
Phan and the Kaufman students ultimately collaborated with Juno Award-winning composer Vivian Fung on an original work called Lamenting Earth. Its subject matter centers on climate change and the damage that has been and is being done to our home planet. Performed with the Jasper String Quartet and pianist Myra Huang, Phan sang the sorrowful poems his students wrote over the often dissonant string scraping and heavy piano chords of Fung's composition.
Phan says that Fung championed the topic for this commission, imparting on him how climate change affects young people the most and sharing her concern for her young children, who will inherit the irreversible injury that has been done. Phan, who was deep in the process of recording an album centered on the idea of song as a form of protest, immediately signed on to the vision. (That album, a collaboration with Palaver Strings and featuring singer Farayi Malek, called A Change Is Gonna Come, was released just a week before this Kaufman Center debut.)
"This idea of 'what does it mean for artists to be citizens,' and how do we use our art to digest and meditate and get our audiences to think about the world around us was top of mind," Phan says. He then took those themes of youth artistry and activism and asked Kaufman's students to write the lyrics for Fung's music. The students more than delivered.
Twenty-eight students are credited as poetry writers on Lamenting Earth, between its first, second, and fourth movements, and many of them performed spoken-word interludes between movements from seats around the concert hall.
"My body is made of more paranoia than it is water / Because Darwin didn't account for the glaciers becoming rivers," the second movement, "Sorrow Skies," bemoans. Is the narrator a hero or a villain here, the audience is left to wonder. The answer is unclear, but is likely both — mankind is killing the Earth, even as we mourn its loss.
The words of the third movement, "O," come from an award-winning poem by the author and poet Claire Wahmanholm. Kaufman Music Center students who contributed to Lamenting Earth are: Robi Albia, Mirabelle Alpher, Sibel Ayyildiz, Sarai Blackie, Jace Bloomberg, Cobie Buckmire, Jorge Castilla, Santiago Del Curto, Rowan Fortmiller, Griffin Frost, Alexi Fusina, Natalia Ginter, Anouk Gontarczyk, Montgomery Harkness, Lucy Harris, Rinoha Isetani, Gizelle Jimenez, Jack Landa, Liam Meyers, Silvia Nicholson, Simon Ostrower, Hazel Peebles, Casey Schopflocher, Sophia Shao, Max Spector, Isabel Vanderveen, Zachary Whelan, and Aim Zubek.
"I feel lucky that I'm able to be at a place like Kaufman this season, where I'm getting to work with young people in this really special and unique way that is also transformative and educational for me," Phan says of this experience. "The message I'm hoping that they take away from our time together is that their art means something and their voices have power. And honestly, it's a useful reminder for myself too."
