Queen

Lorene Cary
7 min readFeb 2, 2025

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Karen Slack, soprano, has just won a Grammy in the category of Best Classical Solo vocal album for Beyond the Years — Unpublished Songs of Florence Price! Pianist Michelle Cann collaborated. In honor of Karen’s brilliant album that recovers never-before-recorded art songs of the Black composer Florence Price (1887–1953), I’m thrilled to offer this record of Karen’s support for new music by today’s Black composers (and librettists).

— Dateline: Chicago, August 2024

This is a digital postcard from the Chicago premiere of African Queens, nine new works by contemporary African-American composers, poets, and librettists as it tours the country. In a patrician move, gorgeous, North-Philly born, Curtis-trained lyrico-spinto soprano Karen Slack has commissioned art songs on the theme of queens from Africa and the diaspora, all real historical characters. And there we were, at Ravinia Festival, to hear their stories.

True confession: for years I bristled at Black American claims on African royalty stories. I didn’t want to disrespect the other ancestors, all those farmers and weavers and fishermen caught up and dragged to the coastal dungeons. Didn’t they matter just as much as queens who powdered their cheekbones with gold dust? But now and then, when you’re wearing a new hat and a man on Girard Avenue in my native Philly calls you “Queen,” how can you not smile? And when composer Chicago-based composer Damien Geter calls and asks whether I could write an aria about Amanirenas, the queen we discussed during the pandemic, how could I not say yes, absolutely, yes? How could I not take the bus to New York, go into The Metropolitan Museum, and sit by the Temple of Dendur, next to the Aeolian sandstone, waiting for the aria’s structure to blow through me? Because that’s what a librettist gives — the structure — to the composer, who writes the drama in music so that the singer can slip into the character’s story and tell it from the inside. The form contains energy, as poet Stanley Kunitz has said.

As does Karen Slack. And she brings vision, too, and entrepreneurial chutzpah. She has forged community among these poets and composers throughout the country, over five years — more, if you count her concert, recital, and opera career habit of connecting to extraordinary creators. For African Queens, Slack’s creative collaborator Jay Saint Floyd, wrote four texts, one a prayer in both Latin and English, that laid out the scope and promise of the program. Other writers of the new music include Alicia Haymer, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton. Our texts are sung alongside — and honored — by the iconic poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Louise Wallace, and Langston Hughes, Lyombe Eko’s re-telling of a Cameroonian folktale and Sankung Susso’s co-edit (with composer Fred Onoverosuoke) of a Mandinka/Bambera song.

Picture this energy: Onstage, Karen, aka Kiki, in a red dress and coat of many colors. Hair in color-woven braids, like a low-slung crown; piano collaborator Kevin Miller at a shiny black grand instrument. “La Slack,” as Miller has named her, read about the 1929 Aba Women’s War in Nigeria eight years ago and began to mull Black women and self-determination, she told Ravinia Magazine. “I wasn’t telling the stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell stories about women that weren’t simply adjacent to men…I couldn’t find characters to really dig myself into, specifically from African-American composers.”

Blacknificent 7 composers and Slack at the Ravinia premier: Joel Thompson, Damien Geter, Carlos Simon, Karen Slack, Shawn Okpebholo, Dave Ragland. (Not pictured: Jasmine Arielle Barnes and Jessie Nzinga Montgomery)

And then, the pandemic. With performance venues shuttered, Karen created #KikiKonvos, an online show to hold together her community of makers, talking and laughing, sharing insights and musical inside baseball. For this soprano, it was a new way to develop voice. Composers who had known of each other enjoyed getting to know each other so much that they formed @blacknificentseven. Once musicians were performing everywhere again, the composers proposed to write something for Slack by way of thanks. African Queens was — were — waiting.

In this two-hour song cycle, La Slack creates her own affinity group across time. Her voice conjures archetypes as she sings. Women rulers love and care for families and queendoms; they fight, or compromise, agonize, and even murder for them. Yes, it’s Karen there onstage, “warm and down-to-earth,” as interviewers marvel (as if outsize artistry and leadership require self-importance). But each time she begins a new song, I glance at the program briefly to scan the lyrics and notes on language, country of origin, composer, librettist. Each queen must rise to meet or accept an unimaginable challenge served up to her by colonialism and war and family. Each brings her own sonic power to make us feel her triumph or agony or revenge.

At the recital and after I feel so much at once that later I will be unable to sleep, unable to stop dreaming. For days after I find myself nearly unable to organize and share the layers of thought and feeling that pile up on top of one another in memory like phyllo dough.

No doubt I am still astonished to hear in glorious voice and brilliant music the 200 words I sent last summer to Damien Geter, the Chicago-based composer, conductor and bass-baritone. His two operas, Loving v. Loving for Virginia Opera and American Apollo for Des Moines Metro Opera, are both premiere this 2024–25 season. In our piece for La Slack, Queen Amanirenas of Kush has returned from battling the Roman army that killed her husband and son, one generation before the birth of Jesus.

With Damien Geter, before the program

Damien wrote the music and sent back, by email, a PDF of the notes and words as well as the computer program with an otherworldly tone that “sings” the vocal line. I could barely make it out. My friend talked a visiting young musician from Colombia into coming to my house in Philly to play it. He worked hard to play about half when he had to go. But before he left the young pianist/composer explained the challenge: the music kept changing: tempo and key and mood. He moved his hands as if to describe a mountain’s switchbacks. Exactly!

The historical Amanirenas had the head of the statue of Augustus Caesar, which the Romans had carried into battle, lopped off and buried under the entrance to her temple. She meant for worshippers to step on it before and after prayer. It’s the very head that stares from its pedestal in the British Museum today, perfectly preserved by the burial in sand.

Head of Augustus from Meroë, captured by the forces of Amanirenas in 24 BCE, excavated 1910.

Amenirenas lost an eye in battle, but according to the Greek historian Strabo, recovered to send to Augustus arrows cast from pure gold with this message, which I quoted, and Damien set:

If you want peace,

Take these with my blessing;

If you want war,

You will need them.

The music here soars, queenly, determined, bright red!

But it’s also true that after losing a husband and son to the Romans, Amanirenas would not let her daughter go to war. So, the music slows and quiets.

In one exquisite moment, Damien takes away the piano and the voice sings unaccompanied. Karen has climbed to this moment, switch-backing between power and maternal tenderness, and her voice hangs just above our heads, before she makes the final ascent into prophecy: Her one eye, she says, can see a matrilineal future dynasty and peace for her people.

Amanirenas is the last piece of the program, and I don’t know how Karen has done it. These brilliant composers and poets and multi-talented story-tellers have all required so much of their singer-friend. She has been and remains to the end, both regal and vulnerable, with voice and energy and control. She forms the final word crown and almost caresses it.

Five of the commissioned composers sit together, representing the seven. From their own top-line descriptions, with so many awards, here are brief and inadequate summaries. Jasmine Barnes, Emmy-Award winning composer — choral, orchestral, vocal music, including five operas — vocalist, and educator; my collaborator Damien Geter,composer of choral, symphonic, chamber music, and opera, conductor and bass-baritone; Jessie Nzinga Montgomery, violinist and composer of chamber, choral, orchestral, and vocal music, including this program’s Queen Nzinga piece, Shawn Okpebholo, composer of chamber and solo, choral, art song, opera, orchestra, wind and brass band music, and film; Dave Ragland, nominated four times for an Emmy: composer for solo voice, chorus, and opera, conductor, vocalist, and educator; Carlos Simon, GRAMMY-nominated composer for chorus, film, orchestra, and ensembles; also curator and activist; and Joel Thompson, composer of orchestral, ensemble, and vocal music, and opera. I’m on the end, watching them as we listen. They nod and squint and close their eyes to appreciate each other’s work and to hear Karen Slack, accompanied by Kevin Miller, bring their own queens to luxurious life. At intermission they speak to each other playfully and with respect. After Karen’s last sung word, “crown,” exquisite and precise, they jumped to their feet with everyone in the hall. How had she done it? She’d become Queen.

This was my postcard from Chicago, where I attended African Queens and then, in two days, my youngest grandchild’s first birthday with her loving mothers. All weekend long: learning, learning, learning.

Wish you’d been there.

African Queens is traveling the country for its 2024–25 tour:

It’s been to Chicago and Colorado this summer and fall. But you can still catch it:

Kennedy Center Terrace Washington, DC, March 9, 2025;

Kaufman Concert Hall, 92NY, in New York City, March 11, 2025;

Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, March 16, 2025;

Symphony Hall in Phoenix, AZ, April 12–19, 2025

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Lorene Cary
Lorene Cary

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