Ancestral Echoes

EXPLORING ARACELIS GIRMAY’S AN EXPERIMENT IN VOICES

By Scott Edward Anderson

Poet Aracelis Girmay

Nestled on the northern edge of Tanglewood’s Bernstein campus, the Linde Center for Music and Learning was designed to develop new modes and methods for presenting music and innovative programming. Its intimate performance spaces allow for greater audience participation and engagement than the more traditional venues on the legendary 500-acre campus. 

On the afternoon of Saturday, August 9, the Linde Center will host the world premiere of An Experiment in Voices, an innovative multimedia performance that combines poetry, music, and sound design in a unique exploration of ancestry, memory, and motherhood. The performance brings together poet Aracelis Girmay, composer Brittany Green, and violist Ashleigh Gordon in a groundbreaking collaboration that pushes the boundaries of their respective art forms. 

An Experiment in Voices promises to be a mesmerizing tapestry of sound, memory, and maternal lineage that weaves together Girmay’s evocative text, Green’s innovative musical compositions, and Gordon’s viola performance. The piece exists in a liminal space between poetry reading, musical performance, and theatrical experience, with five distinct voices—four spoken parts that will be performed by actors, plus Gordon’s viola serving as the fifth voice. Audiences will be immersed in a multisensory journey where Girmay’s poetic excavations of her African American grandmother from Georgia and themes of motherhood, time, and finding nurturing in absence are amplified by Green’s soundscapes, which incorporate field recordings from Girmay’s daily life. 

The work draws deeply from Girmay’s exploration of her own lineage, which is a combination of her mother’s African American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican heritage, and her father’s Eritrean background. “So much of the work is thinking about mothers and focused on a specific line of mothers, most of whom are no longer living,” she explains. “I am interested in how we reach or are reached by these mothers and/or the events of their lives.” The piece invites audiences to consider history, speculation, and imagination—examining how currents from past generations continue to flow into the present. 

Girmay, the author of three books of poetry, including the black maria (2016) and a former professor at Hampshire College in Amherst who now teaches at Stanford University, was commissioned to write this work by the Authors Guild Foundation (AGF). Bernard Schwartz, who curates literary programs for AGF, including the annual WIT Literary Festival in the Berkshires each September, invited Girmay as one of four contemporary poets commissioned to write new performance works. The foundation also supports their first readings or productions, with other commissioned works by Ilya Kaminsky, Alice Oswald, and Danez Smith premiering in different venues across the country. 

“I was terrified by the idea at first,” admits Girmay, “because it’s so far from what I’ve done before—and also super excited for the same reason.” 

For this project, Girmay is working with Castle of Our Skins, a Boston-based organization dedicated to celebrating Black artistry through music. Artistic director and violist Ashleigh Gordon brings her distinctive musical voice to the collaboration, viewing her instrument as a bridge across time and generations. 

“I wanted to have this ancestral sound that was not like speech as we understand it now,” explains Girmay. “I was thinking of the viola as a throat—like what it might sound like coming out of the throat of an ancestor, or a person who exists in a different timescape.” 

This conception aligns perfectly with Gordon’s understanding of her instrument. “The viola is timeless,” Gordon says, “so it can talk to the ancestor and talk to the young mother character as well.” 

Gordon suggested bringing in composer Brittany Green, who specializes in creating music that explores ancestral connections. “Something I’ve been really interested in over the past couple of years is using sound to explore ancestry and cross-generational conversations, bringing family histories into the light through sound,” Green explains. Her composition will incorporate the field recordings the poet has shared, creating soundscapes that span from Girmay’s grandmother’s era through to her own experience of motherhood today. 

The three artists have been collaborating remotely across different time zones, sharing materials through virtual platforms. “So far, we’ve connected to exchange words, images, text, and we'll get together next with Brittany to share soundscapes and some musical ideas,” Gordon says, explaining that the piece was still a work-in-progress when we talked. 

For Girmay, working with musicians has expanded her conception of storytelling: “To begin to think alongside musicians about sound, and how it is carried, communicated, or interpreted really expands my sense of what it is possible to listen toward. It really changes my engagement with the stories, memories, and objects that I am working with.” 

During her time at Hampshire College, Girmay occasionally ventured into the Berkshires, teaching for a semester at Williams College and visiting MASS MoCA with her children. She particularly remembers the sound of the Green River, “to witness it through the winter and into spring, to hear its sounds and voices. It was so alive. So active.” This sensitivity to the sounds of nature informs her work on An Experiment in Voices, which seeks to capture the resonances between past and present, between human voices and environmental echoes. 

The Linde Center’s Studio E provides an ideal venue for this intimate, boundary-crossing work. Its flexible space allows for the integration of multiple art forms and creates an immersive environment where audiences can fully experience the interplay of words, music, and recorded sound. 

“When you put poets in a room with composers and musicians, something magical happens,” says AGF’s Schwartz, whose original inspiration for the commissions was 20th-century poet Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, produced at the 92nd St Y in Manhattan in 1953. “We’re excited to support artists making new work and presenting it to a wider audience with such amazing partners like Tanglewood.” 

In addition to the performance on Saturday, August 9, there will be a “Meet the Makers” session on Friday, August 8, where audiences will be privy to how the piece and its execution came together. 

“I’m excited to be a part of something that feels very expansive,” says Green, “that is pushing all three of us in new and exciting directions.” 

Girmay echoes this sentiment, saying she’s “excited to risk meaningfully, to stretch outside, and even to think about sound and voice differently. It’s been generative in ways that I can feel already, and I also suspect I’ll be feeling for a long time.” 

For years, Girmay has expressed a desire to pursue “collaborations that foster new ways of thinking, seeing, identifying, and signifying.” With An Experiment in Voices, she has created a work that not only explores her personal ancestral connections but also demonstrates how art can forge meaningful dialogues across disciplines, generations, and experiences—precisely the kind of innovative, boundary-crossing work that the Linde Center was designed to nurture. 

As audiences experience this conversation between past and present, between spoken poetry and musical expression, they will witness firsthand how the blending of artistic languages can open profound new possibilities for connection and understanding. 

Friday, August 8, 4 p.m., TLI Meet the Makers: Aracelis Girmay An Experiment in Voices.

Sat, August 9, 2 p.m., TLI Presents: Aracelis Girmay An Experiment in Voices (World Premiere).

Both events are in Studio E, Linde Center for Music and Learning, Tanglewood.

The Authors Guild Foundation’s 4th Annual WIT (Words, Ideas, and Thinkers) Literary Festival is September 26-28. The lineup will be announced June 9; tickets go on sale to the general public in July. For updates, go to authorsguild.org/event/wit-festival.

For more information about the programs at the Linde Center, go to bso.org/events/

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