The completion of the transcontinental railroad was a herculean achievement. In 1850, the United States had 10,000 miles of track; by 1900, trains carried people, goods and ideas from coast to coast over 215,000 miles of track. Recently, historians have begun to tally the human cost of this construction project, especially among the people who performed the dangerous and backbreaking labor and the Native tribes whose lands and livelihoods were slashed through by the tracks.
On Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Silkroad Ensemble brought this history to life in “American Railroad,” an evening of multimedia storytelling that probed collective scars while letting musical lineages tangle in beguiling ways. Carried by the joyful collaboration of brilliant improvisers, the performance proved that this ensemble has lost none of its verve since Rhiannon Giddens, a musical polymath and scholar of Appalachian music, became artistic director in 2020. (The ensemble was founded in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma to celebrate the cultures along the ancient Silk Road.)
A haunting tune from Appalachia, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” anchored the program. A work song created by incarcerated Black laborers, it describes the deadly cave-in of a railroad tunnel. Giddens sang it with a voice splintering with emotion over a background of harsh percussive thuds.
Individual numbers paid tribute to dispossessed Native Americans, Irish famine refugees and Chinese laborers cut off from their families by racist immigration laws. While each time the cultural context was deftly sketched through specific sounds — a Celtic harp, a pentatonic tune — the interplay of instruments native to other regions revealed new affinities. Historical photographs, projected above the stage, added visual poignancy.
At times, though, the program had a didactic streak that felt at odds with the polycentric spirit of the music making. The inclusion of an Indian-inspired segment with fiery tabla solos by Sandeep Das was a musical highlight. But the accompanying text slide, drawing links between the transcontinental railroad and industrialization in British-ruled India, brought an unnecessary whiff of the classroom. Silkroad is involved in curriculum design in middle schools in underserved communities across the country, and at moments like these, the desire (stated in its publications) to “reset the narrative” in historiography feels heavy-handed.
A performance earlier in the week by the contemporary music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, also at the Brooklyn Academy, was an example of how to engage an audience emotionally with uncomfortable subjects through mystery and understatement. The program, which was presented Nov. 18 and 19, was titled “Sun Dogs” and featured three short movies by different creators. It was the result of a commissioning initiative by Liquid Music that paired filmmakers with composers.
In atmospheric science, a sun dog is an optical effect that occurs when light refracts off water crystals causing bright spots to appear. The collaborations here derived much of their lingering impact from the oblique angles at which they approached their subjects, opening up an interpretive space that a viewer could lean into.
In “On Blue” the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul teamed up with the composer Rafiq Bhatia for a dreamlike meditation on place and identity in a country too often exoticized by tourism. The scene is set at night in what may once have served as an outdoor cinema, where two canvases painted with idealized landscapes limply hang across a rustic screen, curling and unfolding, as if governed by a botanical process of decay. Bhatia’s score is a slow-moving mass of elegiac sounds that swells and ebbs, with the music growing out of a single, viscous chord. Seductive and unsettling, the film gradually makes the viewer complicit in the objectification of a natural setting that mocks human attempts to grasp it.
“Naked Blue” directed by Mati Diop and Manon Lutanie with a score by Devonté Hynes, also plays on the human gaze, this time directed at the moving body of an adolescent Black girl. We watch her dancing, stretching, catwalk-strutting, blowing kisses at herself in the mirror. Her movements have the now-virtuosic, now-goofy quality of someone experimenting in complete privacy. In contrast to her physical exuberance, the score unfolds with glacial grandeur, sound colors constantly changing as one instrument completes the thought of another. Questions unfold about who directs our gaze and what it is we are watching for.
In “Rise, Again,” by Josephine Decker with music by Arooj Aftab and Daniel Wohl, the subject matter is more overtly defined as we watch families forced into homelessness. Even amid gut-wrenching scenes, the film and its gently animated score appear to center the strength of women and a mother’s love.
In its final moments, a recording of Aftab singing the words “we will meet again” can be heard, an enigmatic message of hope that left as many questions, and perhaps an even stronger call to moral action, than the Silkroad’s beautiful but more deterministic show.
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