By Lucy Gellman | Newhaven arts
The first time composer Joel Thompson read James Baldwin’s “To Be Baptized,” he could feel the words rattling through him. If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class, Baldwin wrote. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! — and listens to their testimony.
It was 2021, or maybe it was 1972, or maybe somewhere in between. Thompson let himself read and re-read the words. From the page, Baldwin urged his readers to ask “any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, and Black man” whether America was just. The sentences stayed with Thompson as he sat down to compose, as he listened, as he made stops around the country to present his work. Always, they were as prophetic as they were troublingly timeless.
Thompson, a soft-spoken, musical dynamo who is the 2022-2023 composer in residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, will bring those words to the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts this Sunday, for the New England premiere of his work “To Awaken The Sleeper.” The piece, written last year, layers Thompson’s composition and Baldwin’s text in an incisive, stunning critique of white supremacy in the United States.
It marks a continuation of his work as a platform for social justice, from his sweeping 2015 “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” to his 2019 “In Response to the Madness” and 2020 “breathe/burn: an elegy,” written in memory of Breonna Taylor. Last Wednesday, he joined Probate Judge Clifton Graves at the Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Avenue to discuss the piece, his second composition in two years to use Baldwin’s text as a launchpad.