Update: The D-Composed concert with Mosaic Vocal Ensemble on April 5 at Saint Benedict the African Catholic Church has been canceled.
To foreground Black composers, Coleman initially wanted to organize a series of concerts. D-Composed arose out of that effort. The quartet plays a wide range of material, including classical and trap music, and it prefers small rooms—cafes, galleries, private ballrooms, Chicago Park District facilities—rather than conventional concert halls. Its programming includes Family Edition shows (so far they’ve all been at the Stony Island Arts Bank) and D-Compressed yoga shows (at the Museum of Contemporary Art, though the group hopes to branch out to various yoga studios). But every D-Composed concert, no matter where or for whom, follows one rule: the music must be written by Black people.
After graduating from Oberlin, Taylor returned to Oakland and taught classical music in public schools for a few years. At that job, she swiftly learned why Black and Brown kids don’t remain in the field like their white peers. While Taylor’s students of color shared crowded classes at underfunded public schools, her white students were given more expensive private lessons. “Oakland is very segregated. I could see firsthand the disparities in classical music education, because all the kids I taught in my public school job were all Black and Brown, all ready to play, ready to learn, and then I had a private studio that was primarily white folks,” Taylor says. “To leave the public school to go to my studio, it was just really destroying me, to the point where I felt like I couldn’t do them both spiritually—because it was so hard to see some folks not having access at all and other folks having more access than they even realized what a privilege it is. Then I decided I wanted to be a performer again.”
Meanwhile the nonprofit arm of D-Composed, called D-Composed Gives, focuses on bringing its chamber music experiences to places that will maximize accessibility and reach: homeless shelters, senior citizens’ centers, museums, charities, and more. It’s played for underserved youth at Lurie Children’s Hospital, and it has another concert coming up at the Midland Center for the Arts in Michigan. In April, D-Composed will collaborate with Mosaic Vocal Ensemble for a performance in Englewood. Shows presented by D-Composed Gives tend to be free, while many booked by the LLC are ticketed.
Mass of Saint Benedict the African with D-Composed & Mosaic Vocal Ensemble Sun 4/5, 3 PM, Saint Benedict the African Catholic Church, 340 W. 66th St., $20, all ages
Update: This event has been canceled.
Money is always an obstacle, but Taylor argues that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an insurmountable one. “It’s expensive over the years,” she says. “But I also feel like so are sports. Sports are expensive, but the Black community will put dollars where they see value and investment. I feel like, the return on investment in string—people aren’t as sure as they are perhaps with sports, where they can see a line of success.”
Yet even with support from the tight-knit community its members have created, D-Composed faces serious challenges, like any innovative project does. To play Black composers, you have to have their sheet music. But the sheet music that’s been deemed important enough to copy, record, share, and learn has been by dead white composers, and it’s been that way for years. For Taylor to fulfill D-Composed’s mission of prioritizing the music of Black composers, she often has to do deep dives in books and in the archives of places such as Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research—especially if the composer has passed away. One obvious way for D-Composed to sidestep that difficulty is to give Black composers their flowers while they’re still alive.
