Scores

Tala is thrilled to present Scores, a solo exhibition by anti-disciplinary artist and DJ Jesús Hilario-Reyes (NYC). Opening Thursday, September 17, 5-8PM In the late 1960’s classical composer & jazz musician Frederick Tillis took a step toward composing the form of the spiritual as a written score. Trained in the conventions of European-centered arrangement styles, his chamber works are infused with the harmonic dissonance of jazz and Black vernacular music traditions, arriving at a timbre echoing the persistent candor of pioneering Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Fully embodied in his work Five Spirituals for Chorus and Brass Ensemble(1967), a five-movement choral work whose lyrics and cadence draw from Brooks’ The Second Sermon on the Warpland. Tillis’ faltering notes intersect and blend with Brooks’ sonorous phrases, at once melding into a singular voice: “Salve salvage in the spin [...] / prop a malign or failing light / but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.” Within contemporary underground club culture, modalities of whirlwind as refuge emerge through conditions of enmeshment.