In 1991, Brian Raphael Nabors was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to a mother who was a keyboard player and a father who was a visual artist. First tackling keyboard instruments, Nabors started writing music for chorus, Gospel choir, and jazz/R&B ensembles as a teenager. By age 16, he knew composing was his destiny. He inherited an interest in drawing and painting from his father and has synesthesia, a condition in which hearing music prompts him to see colors. Perhaps not surprisingly, Nabors’s compositions have strong visual connections, especially to nature, science, art, history, and his personal experiences as a Black man. Spirituality is also central to his music.
Along with numerous upcoming commissions, Nabors’s works have been performed worldwide by significant ensembles such as the Boston, Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, Detroit, Fort Worth, San Diego, Indianapolis, and Munich symphonies, as well as the ROCO Chamber Orchestra, American Youth Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, and Chineke! Orchestra. Nabors was a 2020 Fulbright Scholar and was previously a New Music USA Amplifying Voices consortium composer, Composer Fellow for the American Composers Orchestra’s Earshot program with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Rapido Competition Grand Prize winner, and Composer-in-Residence for Castle of Our Skins.
The Alabama Symphony Orchestra has embarked upon a year-long exploration of Nabors’s music. Earlier in the season, the symphony performed Letters from Birmingham, Nabors’s homage to his hometown and birthplace. These performances offer the world premiere of Nabors’s Hammond Organ Concerto, completed in 2019. As Nabors writes of the work:
Throughout the many eras of history, artists have presented genuine, visceral symbolic reflections and commentary upon their moment in history; creating time capsules for future generations to study and learn from. Today, as a composer of color living in the United States, I find myself doing the same, preceded by a deep history shrouded in darkness and struggle, but also great courage and light. The results of such a history present America with many challenges, but a generation of people more determined and capable of rising up to take them head on. I join other musicians, poets, painters, and authors not only as a recorder of the times, but as a vehicle of change. I join the people who seek to create a future of enlightenment and spread visions of equity, hope, and prosperity. This work is a celebration of not only how far we’ve come but how far we still have to go for our nation to fully live up to its proposed ideals.
I could think of no better instrument to capture this musical depiction than the Hammond Organ. It is rooted in so many home-grown musical genres of American music. It is unique in that it can tell a thousand narratives with its sound alone. Its sound is synonymous with the experience of my family and I, growing up deeply embedded in the traditions of the Black church in Birmingham, AL. That sound continuously brings you to the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, where echoes of freedom ring ceaselessly. Through this sonic world, I seek to inspire my listeners to search their hearts for the humanity that binds us all.
—©Jennifer More, 2022
