With all strings attached: composer William C. Banfield notes the clash of artistry and commerce while weaving together a world of music

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 16, 2004 by Kendra Hamilton

He's "a modern magician" of music who has only to raise his baton to "(fetch) forth a spirit and image that touches new meanings and interpretations. Nobody interprets with a clearer voice and higher tone," says Dr. Ray Browne, founder of Bowling Green State University's Department of Popular Culture.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of Harvard's department of African and African American Studies, calls Black Notes: Essays of a Musician Writing in a Post-Album Age, "a must read" and "a book from which to learn and by which to teach."

They're lauding Dr. William "Bill" Banfield, a quadruple threat in the world of music. Banfield is a composer with nine symphonies to his credit, not to mention countless smaller scale works--concerti, chamber works, operas, choral and jazz works--that have been performed all over the nation.

He's also a performer--with highly acclaimed jazz performers such as Patrice Rushen, Earl Klugh, Najee, Nelson Rangell and many others.

And he's a scholar. With degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston University and the University of Michigan, Banfield, 43, may well be one of the youngest endowed professors in the nation. He holds the $1.3 million Endowed Chair in Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., where he founded and directs the American Cultural Studies program.

But perhaps most importantly, Banfield may be making his true mark as a musical and cultural critic. Through books such as the recent Black Notes and the highly regarded Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers, through his work preserving the original scores of Black composers and his radio programs on Minnesota and National Public Radio, Banfield is creating a sustained conversation on the clash of artistry and commerce in the lives of Black music-makers. In the process, he's also communicating a unique vision of American culture through its music.

But right now, Banfield is simply trying to catch his breath in the midst of a whirlwind of a fall semester.

He's just returned from the world premiere of his ninth symphony, the "Hope Symphony," a massive work with a 100-voice chorus commissioned by the National Endowment for the Art's American Composers Forum. Teased about the superficial similarities to Beethoven's ninth symphony, Banfield chuckles and explains that Beethoven, in fact, served as a model for the work.

"Beethoven had his Goethe to inspire him with that wonderful universalistic vision of the healing spirit of the word (in poetry). Well, my Goethe was Area Bontemps," he says, referring to the Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright who ended up preserving the movement's legacy as head librarian at Fisk University.

Banfield even lived for a time in Bontemps' childhood home--now the Arna Bontemps African American Museum in Alexandria, La.--while he was writing the work.

And there's much more. Two of Banfield's operas--"Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On" and "Soul Gone Home"--are about to open in New York City. He's also promoting a new CD--his eighth, featuring longtime friend Rushen, former Pat Metheny trumpeter Mark Ledford and Sounds of Blackness, among others.

The title of the CD is "Striking Balance."

"For me, it's one of the biggest challenges of my life, the need to strike a balance between all these different sides, all these different passions," Banfield says. "Going back to high school, I've been warned, 'You're trying to do too many things. People don't do all this. You need to focus.'"

Going back to high school with Banfield means time-traveling to what he proudly names "the No. 1 public high school music program in the country": Detroit's famed Cass Technical High School. Cass Tech produced true musical luminaries, from pop diva Diana Ross to Ron Carter, the great jazz bassist and Miles Davis sideman, to Regina Carter, a jazz violinist whose musicianship is so sublime she was recently invited to play the Stradivarius that belonged to 19th century virtuoso Niccolo Paganini.

"I have to give all the credit for any success I may have had to my parents, who loved music and encouraged me to listen to everything. And I also have to give credit to Detroit, which is a lively and artistic city where music is just in the soil," Banfield says. "My guitar hero was Jimi Hendrix. But from my parents taking me to symphonies as a child, I grew up wanting to write symphonies for Jimi Hendrix. As a kid, I didn't know the difference between rock and popular music and classical music.

"In a way, I still don't know the difference," he laughs. "And it's a blessing and curse."

It was certainly a blessing at the New England Conservatory of Music, which, despite the traditional sounding name, was in fact a hotbed of experimentation with what was then in the 1980s a wild new idea: interdisciplinary studies. Under the presidency of renowned classical conductor and jazz historian Gunther Schuller, students in the conservatory's "Third Stream" program studied both jazz and classical performance, theory and composition. Later in Banfield's graduate education experience, however, that interdisciplinary bent would also become a curse.