We Keep Coming
Program note by Hannah Edgar
The 2021 premiere of Black Being, in its first version for flutes and electronics, began the moment audiences stepped into the Arts Club of Chicago, but it couldn’t continue until they actually started listening. As attendees filled in for that performance, they were greeted by the same low, pulsing flute loop that begins the orchestral version. It crescendoed, imperceptibly at first, until all pre-concert chitchat was eventually drowned out by its lapping waves.
That moment encapsulates exactly what Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull, who perform together as Flutronix, aim to do in Black Being: reclaim the time, respect, and agency so frequently denied Black women. Through a thrumming electroacoustic soundscape and an epic, evocative text by North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green, Joachim and Loggins-Hull share facets of their lives they would have otherwise never imagined sharing in a classical concert setting. They run their fingers through bowls of beans and rice, reminiscent of Joachim’s long afternoons spent washing rice on the porch with her family in Haiti. They allow their bodies to slacken and rest in chairs onstage, popping paper fans like the Baptist church ladies from Loggins-Hull’s youth. They command a roomful of people to transport themselves to the bloodstained hull of a slave ship.
“The imagery is just so vivid,” Loggins-Hull says of Green’s poem. “Reading it, I see the Middle Passage immediately, or I see those warm summer days. That’s my absolute favorite thing about this work: It’s just so true to, like, everything. It connects us all in this way that can’t even really be explained.”
In April 2022, the Cincinnati Symphony, Black Being’s co-commissioner, premiered the chamber orchestra version under the baton of Mei-Ann Chen. Chen reprised the work in 2025 with the Chicago Sinfonietta for the orchestra’s annual Martin Luther King Day concerts — which, that year, coincided with Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The work took on special resonance those evenings, particularly as realized by an orchestra with a steadfast, and rare, commitment to racial diversity.
“For us to be able to really claim [an orchestral] space means something very different,” Joachim says of Black Being’s chamber orchestra arrangement.
Black Being’s existence can be traced back to 2018, when Flutronix began a two-year residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The duo’s stint in North Carolina introduced them to Green’s poetry, which Joachim later set to music in Blood Sister (2019) for treble choir and viola. The poem Joachim set, “Revelations,” from Green’s 1983 collection Dead on Arrival, taps into themes that course through the poet’s entire body of work: sisterhood, living history, slippages of time and place.
Even so, when Flutronix tapped Green to write a poem specifically about Black women for Black Being, the state poet laureate admitted she felt daunted by the task.
“I dare not try to define what Black womanhood is. I don’t think there’s any such thing —tomorrow, it’s different for me than today,” Green says. “But I told them what I did not want it to be: I did not want it to be the ‘oh-woe,’ Black woman syndrome. I just did not want it to be about that weight. It’s more about how we’ve carried that weight, and we’ve thrown that weight off. We’re lighter, and we are light.”
After receiving Green’s text — and absorbing it, which was quite another task altogether (“I opened up the email, then I had to sit at my desk in silence for a while,” Joachim remembers) — Flutronix outlined the poem’s narrative arc by segmenting it into four chapters. The first, “Angels,” groans with the weight Green describes: The opening flute loop and vocoder (a type of voice synthesizer) recitations evoke an uneasy atmosphere before launching listeners headlong into the terror of human bondage. Brass snarl, percussion pound, and strings and clarinet shriek.
That pivots to “Water Babies.” Meditative, then stormy, then reflective again, Green’s text doesn’t sugarcoat the harrowing reality of people being thrown from slave ships. But she reimagines those souls as fantastical sirens, liberated, at last, from their earthly forms.
“Up to that point, [Jaki is] laying out all the activity that got us to that point, but then you move into this beautiful space. It’s another way of thinking about birth: We keep emerging from these beautiful nothings,” Joachim says.
“Water Babies” lays the foundation for “Moon Pies and Stardust,” teeming and glowing gold-green with nostalgia. (In Loggins-Hull’s words, “it’s leisure, it’s ease, it’s some sweet hammock lifestyle.”) By the time we reach “Black Lights,” Black Being’s propulsive, iterative final section, the weight from the exposition is less shrugged off than defiantly hurled. Its unspooling enumeration of people, places, and things — both by inclusion and by negation — affirms the richness of Black womanhood across continents, class, appearance, eras, and experience.
“So often, we get stuck into tropes of only being allowed to be this or that kind of Black person. What’s radical about this piece is that it acknowledges our universality without making us this monolith,” Joachim says.
The title “Black Being” is similarly multivalent. “Being” could be interpreted as a noun, a verb, or a gerund. Joachim and Loggins-Hull say this ambiguity was intentional. As Black Being attests, there are many ways to be a Black woman.
And it’s enough — revelatory, even — to simply be, like that quietly radical moment of rest in “Moon Pies and Stardust.”
“The fact that we exist is a revolution,” Green says. “When young people started talking about Black joy as resistance, I thought, ‘Yeah.’ Every day that I see a Black child laugh, smile, or ride down the street eating ice cream is a declaration of nowness — of being here, now. I know that we are all our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
Hannah Edgar is a Chicago-based freelance writer who writes about classical music and jazz for the Chicago Tribune, WBEZ, The New York Times, Musical America, Downbeat, and other outlets.
This writing was adapted from an article originally published in Fanfare Magazine, the official program book magazine of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Pops.
