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The name Courtney Bryan is not one that you\u2019ll currently find on many recordings. Aside from two independently released, jazz-tilting albums from 2007 and 2010, precious little of this pianist and composer\u2019s finely woven, adventurous music is available to hear widely.<\/p>\n
But you can expect that to change, beyond live performances including the premiere of Bryan\u2019s chamber work \u201cDREAMING (Freedom Sounds),\u201d presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Merkin Hall on Wednesday<\/a>. She also recently signed with the influential music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, whose biography of her<\/a> online includes the promise of a third recording: \u201cSounds of Freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n Bryan, 41, who was born in New Orleans and received a MacArthur \u201cgenius\u201d grant<\/a> earlier this month, has been making her mark since earning her doctorate in composition from Columbia University in 2014. Symphony orchestras, chamber musicians, vocal groups and jazz performers have all been drawn to her sound. Last spring, the New York Philharmonic premiere<\/a> of \u201cGathering Song,\u201d with text by the stage director Tazewell Thompson and hints of post-bop jazz harmony, displayed her place among the most exciting voices in contemporary American music.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In a phone interview, Bryan said that before she started her Ph.D. program, \u201cI had the separate thing of doing \u2018classical\u2019 here, \u2018jazz\u2019 here,\u201d while also working as an organist at the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But at Columbia, her composition teacher \u2014 the eminent composer, trombonist and computer-music pioneer George E. Lewis<\/a> \u2014 encouraged her to put everything together. \u201cHe helped me dream bigger,\u201d Bryan said.<\/p>\n And Lewis also helped introduce her to other like-minded students, including the musicologist Matthew D. Morrison, who said that his forthcoming book \u201cBlacksound\u201d<\/a> is \u201cheavily informed by our conversations, our conspiring \u2014 trying to figure out how to get certain ideas of what Black music is out into the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Lewis recalled Bryan\u2019s \u201cunassuming brilliance,\u201d a quality evident even at the admissions stage, in which \u201cbombast\u201d and \u201cblowing your own horn\u201d are the norm. Once she started, she altered the culture of the program, Lewis said. The school\u2019s composition seminars had a reputation for treating people poorly: \u201cyou know, the idea that somehow sharpening one\u2019s critique was confused with being mean to people.\u201d<\/p>\n One day, Lewis added, \u201cCourtney stood up and said, \u2018We just can\u2019t continue to treat people this way.\u2019 And everyone just looked at her; she hadn\u2019t said very much, to this point. She\u2019s a person who has that deep spiritual reservoir. And she changed a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Their relationship continues today: Lewis leads the International Contemporary Ensemble, and he programmed Bryan at Merkin as part of \u201cComposing While Black: Volume One\u201d \u2014 which has ties to his latest book, a volume of critical essays<\/a> that he edited with Harald Kisiedu.<\/p>\n The inclusion of Bryan on this bill reflects Lewis\u2019s appreciation for her direct approach to political commentary. \u201cCourtney was one of the people who, early on, put Black Lives Matter on the classical music table,\u201d he said. Yet, he added, in her works \u201cthere\u2019s no one dogma. It\u2019s not conventionally tonal; it\u2019s not conventionally atonal. The orchestration is lush \u2014 but spare in some ways.\u201d<\/p>\n She brings eclectic references to bear in \u201cDREAMING,\u201d which incorporates text from a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and other legal opinions. To hear the gospel and jazz elements, Lewis said, \u201cyou have to go through the looking glass with her,\u201d and the results are what he called \u201cstrange resonances.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCourtney is able to make you feel reassured,\u201d Lewis said, \u201cbut also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n In an archived La Jolla Symphony performance of \u201cYet Unheard,\u201d<\/a> a 2016 piece that incorporates poetry by Sharan Strange and commemorates the life of Sandra Bland<\/a> (a Black woman who was found hanged in a Texas jail cell in 2015 after she was arrested during a traffic stop), you can hear Bryan\u2019s talent for transfiguring trends in experimental orchestration, as well as gospel tradition. Similarly, a recently filmed performance of \u201cSanctum\u201d (2015) by the London Sinfonietta illustrates the score\u2019s braiding of influences including the sermons of Pastor Shirley Caesar<\/a>, marching band percussion and the rhythmic exultations of street protests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Bryan\u2019s religious side is likewise front and center in her Requiem, in which she sets Greek and Latin text from the Mass as well as selections, in English, from Ecclesiastes and Psalm 23. That work was performed on video during the lockdown portion of the pandemic<\/a> by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble<\/a>.<\/p>\n The mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher, a member of Quince, said that Bryan\u2019s use of extended technique \u2014 including whispering and chanting \u2014 was not \u201csuper intense or aggressive\u201d compared with other contemporary music. But, she added, it was Bryan\u2019s way of fusing those elements with more traditional chamber writing that was responsible for its distinctiveness: \u201cUsually someone will only do an only-extended techniques piece. Or only a tonal, written-notes-on-a-page piece, and not combine them in interesting ways.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Bryan\u2019s recent piano concerto, \u201cHouse of Pianos,\u201d<\/a> bustles with references to jazz-piano history, including boogie-woogie and Harlem stride. It also contains approaches to harmony that she learned in lessons from the towering New Orleans pedagogue Ellis Marsalis<\/a>, and traces of music that she examined in a master\u2019s degree program at Rutgers, where she studied with the jazz pianist Stanley Cowell. \u201cNew Orleans Concerto,\u201d<\/a> by her former teacher Roger Dickerson, also informs the work.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s my way to pay tribute to a lot of pianists who\u2019ve inspired me \u2014 but also a challenge for me as a pianist and composer,\u201d Bryan said of the concerto. For its premiere at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra last May, she performed the solo part.<\/p>\n More of her pianistic prowess can be found on those early recordings. For Morrison, the musicologist, one exemplary moment comes during a rendition of \u201cCity Called Heaven,\u201d from Bryan\u2019s first album, \u201cQuest for Freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShe takes this spiritual and she really transforms it,\u201d he said, professing himself \u201cobsessed\u201d with its experimental rhythmic touches and its \u201cChopinesque\u201d figurations. The first time he heard it, Morrison thought: \u201cOh my goodness, who does this so seamlessly? And it was Courtney.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n