Born on September 28, 1991, in Baltimore, Maryland; Currently resides in Dallas, Texas
kinsfolknem
The Sunday Dinner
The Repast
The Reunion
Composed: 2024
Estimated length: 20 minutes
First performance: August 1, 2024, with Teddy Abrams conducting the NYO2 national youth orchestra at Carnegie Hall, with Demarre McGill, Titus Underwood, Anthony McGill, and Anthony Brady as the soloists.
First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work.
A composer, vocalist, and educator, Jasmine Arielle Barnes draws on a wide spectrum of styles and genres, with a special interest in writing music featuring the voice. Her work has been commissioned by such institutions as the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Washington National Opera, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Aspen Music Festival, among many others. She has had residencies with American Lyric Theater, Chautauqua Opera, Opera Theater of Saint Louis’s New Works Collective, and All Classical Radio in Portland, Oregon.
Opera plays a central role in Barnes’s artistic practice. To date, she has composed five stage works, including She Who Dared, with a libretto by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. This opera, which portrays the women who took part in the Montgomery bus boycotts, will receive its world premiere in June at Chicago Opera Theater.
As an educator, Barnes has taught composition and jazz studies at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas. She champions music’s lasting impact, and, as a member of the Sigma Alpha Iota International Music Fraternity, embraces its motto as a guiding principle: vita brevis, ars longa (“Life is short, art is long”).
Barnes has received numerous accolades for her work, including the Florence Price Award for Composition from Pricefest and top honors in the International Women’s Brass Conference Emerging Composer Competition. She was also awarded the Black Brilliance Award by The Pleiades Project, named the Gwendolyn J. Brinkley Fine Arts First Place Award Winner by Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. (South Central Region, 2021), and recognized as a finalist in All Classical Portland’s Recording Inclusivity Initiative. Barnes received a 2023 Capital Emmy Award for the PBS documentary Dreamer, which explores her choral/orchestral song cycle Portraits: Douglass and Tubman.
Barnes belongs to the cohort of Black composers, known as the “Blacknificent Seven,” who began connecting in 2020 during the pandemic isolation. Her colleagues Damien Geter, Jessie Montgomery, Shawn Okpebholo, Dave Ragland, Carlos Simon, and Joel Thompson are part of this collective of like-minded artists who support each other.
Commissioned by a consortium that includes the Nashville Symphony and dedicated to the late Rev. Martina D. Madden, KINSFOLKNEM (pronounced “Kinsfolk and ‘em”) is a concertante work – that is, a composition that highlights a solo instrument or, in this case, a group of instruments in dialogue with a larger ensemble. While the most familiar example of this format is the solo concerto, which features a single instrument in contrast with an orchestra, Barnes takes a different approach. In KINSFOLKNEM, she juxtaposes a solo woodwind quartet with the ensemble, creating an inventively layered interplay of individual and collective voices, with multiple possibilities for virtuosity. This setup allows her to explore shifting dynamics within the quartet itself, as well as its evolving relationship with the orchestra.
IN THE COMPOSER'S WORDS
Barnes writes: “KINSFOLKNEM is a celebration of family and extended family gathering. The piece highlights the sound world of places and themes surrounding Black family gatherings. The first movement, “The Sunday Dinner,” showcases themes of gospel idioms, much like the second movement, “The Repast.” The third and last movement, “The Reunion,” is a final celebration of the sort. It features the sound world of a Black cookout.”
In addition to a solo quartet of flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Back