On 28 March Marco Blaauw led the premiere of Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Songs of the Abeng at MaerzMusik, for two trumpets and fixed audio. He was joined for the 13-minute piece by Laura Vukobratović, playing offstage, and Aaron Holloway-Nahum, operating the electronics. Songs of the Abeng was commissioned by Marco Blaauw, sponsored by Musikfonds e.V. and Kunststiftung NRW, and debuted at silent green as part of the Berliner Festspiele.
The work is cast in three parts – ‘Why Abeng?’, ‘Grenadiers’, and ‘The Return’. Witter-Johnson’s recorded voice draws on text from Jamaican newspaper Abeng, published in 1969 to give voice to Black and Caribbean anticolonial thought. The Abeng for which it is named, played by the onstage trumpeter, is a cow horn that was used to carry coded messages among the Maroon people in Jamaica’s hills, guarding against British Colonial Forces during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This coded language was a warning, a signal and a primary tool of guerrilla warfare that lasted hundreds of years.
The onstage player is haunted by the Grenadier march associated with the British, in both live and recorded forms. Both trumpeters respond with improvisation and lively, searching music, that grows in confidence and energy as it develops in the final section of the piece, as well as improvising responses to unpitched rhythms and a ram horn that appear in the tape part. The work’s drama part comes from a degree of theatricality given to the onstage player, who reacts powerfully to the offstage and recorded sounds.
Witter-Johnson’s Jamaican heritage and commitment to exploring the past are key touchstones in her work. Island Suite (2022) was written for herself to perform with the Solem Quartet, premiering at Wigmore Hall, and explored her relationship to the Jamaican folk legacy; Fairtrade?, premiered by the LSO and Ryan Wigglesworth, is an illustration of the factory floors that produce cheap clothes. The album Ocean Floor was created in 2023 with the LSO Percussion Ensemble sets out the myriad currents that shape Witter-Johnson’s creative imagination, blurring the boundaries between chamber music, jazz, soul, and classical traditions.