Wind Ensemble Concert Shines Light on Lesser-Known San Francisco History
Composer Ursula Kwong-Brown has a familial connection to the inspiration for her piece, San Francisco's Angel Island.
Ursula Kwong-Brown and Austin Talbot.
Music frequently brings history to light—even the painful parts—but it’s in the learning and acknowledging that we can begin to heal.
Composer Ursula Kwong-Brown will bring that spirit to the SFCM Wind Ensemble concert on Friday, October 25. Her piece, Cover the Walls, is explicitly aimed at a checkered part of San Francisco’s history: the Immigration Detention Station on Angel Island, located in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.
Angel Island was sometimes called “The Ellis Island of the West,” and took in virtually all American immigrants of Asian descent between 1910 and 1940. But it differed from Ellis Island in that Asian immigrants into Angel Island suffered under the U.S.’s Chinese Exclusion Act, which kept immigrants incarcerated until they were able to sufficiently “prove” they had a relationship with an existing citizen. As the weeks and months went by, hopeful immigrants carved poetry into the walls of their dormitories as a way to pass the time and express their roiling emotions. These poems were painted over and were nearly lost to history entirely until 1970, when a park ranger doing a final inspection before the center’s demolition, found a few poems and rallied to protect the building as a museum, and the poems have since been translated and collected into a book.
Kwong-Brown came across these stories thanks to her grandfather, who forwarded the entire family a New York Times article and mentioned that one of their uncles was a “paper son,” the terminology for the Chinese people who got into America after the 1906 fire that destroyed all of the court records in San Francisco.
“They could claim to be the son of somebody who pre-existed here,” Kwong-Brown explains. “Because the Chinese Exclusion Act barred any new immigrants from China, you had to be the descendant of somebody here. And so, they basically falsified thousands of records. If you just paid somebody for this information, you basically memorized 20 pages of details about how many steps are in your house, how many windows, really detailed things. It often ended up that the people who were genuinely sons often failed these tests because of how detailed they were, but others were able to get through by memorizing all this stuff.”
She continued, “So, that's how my family got in, at least on my grandfather's side. Once you go to the detention center and read some of these deeply evocative poems… Even though it seems so obvious, we always forget that 60 years ago people had the exact same emotions we do. They just wanted to get home, to work, to have a family.”
Kwong-Brown honed in on select lines from poems—“I have lingered here three days moving again and again” and “it is difficult to compare this to the peacefulness at home”— and turned them into repetitive melodic and rhythmic motifs.
“When I wrote it, I tried to make it super-accessible,” Kwong-Brown says, “and Wind Ensemble Director Brad Hogarth helped me with that. So I didn't include harp, I tried to keep the instrumentation something achievable for high-school or younger ensembles, because that's one way of getting into people's hearts and minds. I've done a setting of another Angel Island poem for a middle-school choir: The choir is almost all Asian immigrants, and they were just happy to sing about their history. Now they’ve worked with the History department and they’re going to teach a unit on Angel Island when they do Ellis Island. That’s how it should work: But even if people only encounter the story and the poetry through my piece, at least they’ve heard of it, and that’s great.”
The rest of the evening's program is split between an arrangement of Francis Johnson's Suite No. 1 by Hogarth, and a showcase for one of the winner's of SFCM's annual Concerto Competition: senior Austin Talbot. Talbot was ready to put Henri Tomasi’s demanding Trombone Concerto to bed, having played it piece for a sophomore jury, and again for the American Trombone Workshop in D.C. (Which he won.) “It's been a pretty long-winded process with this piece,” Talbot says, without catching his unintentional pun. The piece was only composed in 1956, meaning it's much more of a showcase of virtuosity and a combination of styles than earlier solo trombone repertoire.
“Trombone players don't usually get to stand up in front of an ensemble very much just because of the limits of our repertoire,” Talbot says. “So it’s a real moment when we get to do that.”