So how did you first encounter this work?

I first ran into it when I was an undergrad looking for something to write a paper about, as you do in your junior year. It’s about 350 pages; Acts I and II are in pretty good shape, but Act III is rough—there are a lot of missing passages, and there are other sections where she wrote out two versions and it’s not clear which one she decided on using in the end.

There are some orchestration cues in the piano-vocal, and we have the program from the performance as well as photos and reviews in various newspapers. So that means that we actually do know quite a lot about what the original performance looked like, but I don’t think a final draft of the score ever existed.

It definitely sounds like there are musical obstacles to mounting a full new production of this work. Are there other challenges—in terms of how the racial subject matter is handled, say?

Unfortunately, yeah. The biggest challenge is really the work’s depiction of Africa as this dark, violent, primitive place. These are very stereotypical images of African primitivism, and they’re just not accurate in any way, not the least of which is that the work treats Africa as a single undifferentiated country instead of a continent that’s home to really breathtaking diversity. You can’t just put that on stage with no commentary—probably there’s a way to handle it with staging or program notes or something, but it definitely needs to be handled delicately and proactively.

The other big hurdle is the sheer scale of the work. It was enormous and expensive: there was a 200-person chorus in addition to, from what we can tell, a very large percussion section; there was a live elephant at one point, and even a waterfall. So you want to give it the scale and vision that Graham originally had, but you also want it to be feasible for a modern opera company to do without breaking the bank, and that’s a tricky thing to manage.

Do you have thoughts on how white people in the classical music world can help redress the erasure of all of these works by African American artists?

I think the most important thing is for white people in positions of power to relinquish that power. Put people of color in charge, and listen to what they have to say. There’s already so much brilliance out there, there are so many just stunning artists and thinkers out there right now, and we really just need to get out of the way and create pathways for that brilliance. Their voices need to be at the center of this, not ours.

When it comes to institutions, like the Metropolitan Opera, that do have the resources where they could do something like Tom-Tom, the people in positions of power, realistically, are going to be mostly or even exclusively white, whereas institutions that are PoC-led tend to have this legacy of underfunding—they tend to not really have the kind of accumulated resources that white-led institutions have. So this is an opportunity, I think, for institutions that do have those kinds of accumulated resources to really share those resources, in partnership with an organization that hasn’t had access to them. I think that would be a very powerful, important thing.

National Sawdust hosts “Listening to Tom-Tom” on April 4 at 8pm; nationalsawdust.org 

Brin Solomon writes words and music in several genres and is doing their best to queer all of them. Solomon majored in composition at Yale University before earning their MFA in Musical Theatre Writing at NYU/Tisch. Their full-length musical Window Full of Moths has been hailed for its “extraordinary songs” that “add magic to otherwise ordinary lives”, and their latest one-act, Have You Tried Not Being A Monster, has been described as “agitprop for Julia Serrano.” Their writing has appeared in VAN, New Classic LA, and National Sawdust Log, and they recently won runner-up at the 2018 Rubin Institute for Music Criticism.