The Inside Story: Philip Spray and DEEP RIVER

One might be tempted to think that there is no crossover in music that hasn’t been done yet; and thankfully, one would be mistaken. DEEP RIVER presents a vibrant selection of 21 African American spirituals, interpreted by countertenor Michael Walker II and early music consort Alchymy Viols, under the direction of orchestrator Phillip Spray.

Today, Philip is our featured artist in the “Inside Story,” a blog series exploring the inner workings and personalities of our composers and performers. Read on to learn about his early fascinations with both rock and classical, and the healing qualities he finds within the music of his Navona Records release…

What were your first musical experiences?

There were the piano lessons and the required participation in the school choir, but after that Sunday night in 1964 when we watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, “music” meant only one thing, being in a rock band. I spent evenings in my brother’s room playing air-guitar to his records of The Beach Boys and The Dave Clark Five. I moved up to playing combo organ in a couple garage bands. I don’t know what started the change — maybe it was from the piano lessons and church choir — but I began interspersing nightly rock recordings with Beethoven and Mendelssohn. In the high school library I discovered reel-to-reel biographies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky but it was Handel’s Water Music that I listened to over and over. I moved on to seat-of-the-pants composing in baroque style for the high school orchestra, and after they actually performed a couple of my pieces, my nightly air-guitar concerts had morphed into nightly classical improvising on the family piano — while my parents tried to watch TV in the next room. Much later now, it strikes me that never once did they yell at me to be quiet.

What advice would you give to your younger self if given the chance?

A choral conductor whom I much admire said to me: “My greatest fear is that people will find out I’m a musical fraud.” I have that same fear I told him. And I think most honest musicians fear it to some degree as well. So I’d say to my younger self, “Trust yourself. Trust the joy the music brings you. Although not blindly. Learn its grammar early. Become competent in basic music skills, just like Picasso told aspiring painters to do with drawing skills. And whenever that voice whispers in your ear that you are a fraud, improvise loudly.” 

Take us on a walk through your musical library.

One wall is taken up with Bach cantata recordings, lots of Handel oratorios, and Baroque pieces I was once frantic to learn for performances. Underneath are rows of rock LPs that I can’t bring myself to get rid of. My desert island recording would probably be 1610 Vespers of Monteverdi, but none of those do I pull for casual listening. When my wife gets engrossed in yet another PBS English mystery, I detour to our small back patio and wait for the twilight with either Bryn Terfel singing Butterworth’s Is My Team Ploughing?, or Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, or his orchestral Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus.

Where and when are you at your most creative?

If I wrestle myself to be creative, that’s when I’m the least so — or whatever I force myself to come up with, I rarely end up using. You hear about people being most creative in the shower or just before going to sleep, but for me, ideas that seem worth keeping tend to come during another mundane task–mowing the grass. I think maybe it’s the constant moving. A problem starts to scroll in my head, and I’m in no hurry because I’ve got to finish the yard with or without ideas, so by the time I’m cutting around the sweet gum tree, I’ve slid into a conversation with it.

What musical mentor had the greatest impact on your artistic journey? Is there wisdom they’ve imparted that still resonates today?

That’s an easy one. It’s Barthold Kuijken, the great Belgian baroque flutist. He and his brothers were pioneers in the international early music movement of the 1980s and 1990s. When I first heard him play a solo flute recital, I remember saying to someone, “It’s like he plays the flute with Belgian consonants!” To my ear, Flemish consonants tend to be unapologetically strong and well-defined… just like his musical articulations. But it’s not articulating like a machine-gun, it’s “rhetorical” articulation. Inspired by Bart, I always make up a sentence to go with an instrumental phrase, and then play it with a hierarchy of stresses and articulations, just as I would speak it. Bart keeps teaching me that “notation is not the music;” it is a dramatic, cool, inspiring, weeping, laughing language that communicates emotions with the same techniques we use to speak.

What emotions do you hope listeners will experience after hearing your work?

I hope listeners might receive what I surprisingly experienced while working on DEEP RIVER. Before then I had no musical awareness of Moses Hogan, let alone of earlier great Black composers like H.T. Burleigh, Margaret Bonds, or Roland Hayes. And there’s something about this music… the painful texts, the way the composers set the tunes, the way Michael communicates them, what is it? Something very human I think. During the months of editing DEEP RIVER, my local music-making threatened to take a sudden turn, and it would mean a major change of life. On the drive to the studio one bad day, I pulled up the tracks Soon Ah Will Be Done and Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. And for the first time in three years, I no longer heard them for what I needed to fix in the music – suddenly I heard them for what the music was doing to fix me. They were comforting. The texts were tragic, they spoke of desperate inhumanity, but at the same time they were affirming. Hopeful. An invisible hand.