This is a story about the impact of Duke history on cultural life, of significant and inspirational mentorship, and of a personal reckoning with dynamic people, spaces, organizations and operations working at Duke. It’s also a story of one of the most important musical compositions written by one of the most important jazz composers in America’s history, Mary Lou Williams.
It starts in the archive.
Even growing up in Henderson, North Carolina, I appreciated the delight of discovery that only an archive could provide, digging deep in the record collections at the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library. So when I served as a card filer in a pre-digital Perkins library for a work-study job as a Duke undergrad, then upgraded to the Music Library in Biddle, it felt like an occupational homecoming.
But the symbiosis between my artistic passions and the power of the archive peaked shortly after I checked out a DVD of Joanna Burke’s 1990 documentary “Mary Lou Williams: Music On My Mind” from Lilly Library in 2019.
Covering the trajectory of Mary Lou Williams’s life with vivid archival footage, the film addresses her main concerns at the end of her life, when Williams was taking on a new role as Duke’s artist in residence, coping with a cancer diagnosis, and composing a new work for the Duke Wind Symphony.
One of the film’s most touching moments unfolds with footage of a young black turtle-necked Paul R. Bryan (P.B., who was still conducting the Wind Symphony when I played tuba in the band) telling the rehearsing Duke students, “There is an unfortunate thing that Mary Lou went into the hospital last night and apparently is in difficult enough shape that she won’t be able to come tonight.”
The footage cuts to a shot of the students looking at sheet music and placing oboes and bassoons on their lips, then to Williams in a hospital bed, listening to audio playback of the rehearsal and commenting, both seriously and at times smiling.
Williams would die in Duke care, the Wind Symphony composition unfinished. Watching the film, I thought “Wait. If P.B. and the students are reading from a score in this 1979 footage, where on Earth are these artifacts, and why isn’t this piece — Mary Lou Williams’s last composition — being played everywhere?”
Thus started my journey. I spent a couple of hours with current Duke Wind Symphony conductor Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant digging through the Wind Symphony library in Biddle. I asked Libus, the daughter of P.B., if she saw any Williams manuscripts as she sorted through his affairs in 2021, when Bryan died at the astonishing age of 101. She directed me to John Yarborough, a Duke grad who I worked with in the Music Library, who pointed me to a specific archival box.
Then, last May, a magnificently meticulous librarian, Ani Karagianis Mlis, greeted me at the library by saying, “I think we have something you’re going to like.”
Opening the gray archival box felt like the film cliché of a light glowing from inside with a soundtrack of triumphant, Lydian melodies. A brown folder labeled “HISTORY – MARY LOU WILLIAMS” was couched in the box, brimming with the most exciting archival discovery of my life: scores, notes, photos, and other related effects. It even included an audio cassette labeled with P.B.’s handwriting, “MLW History Rehearsal.”
After alerting my friends Mösenbichler-Bryant and Tammy Kernodle, Mary Lou Williams’ biographer, to the discovery, I began the one-year process of researching and listening my way to a reconstruction of the work that Williams might have intended.
“History…” was a culmination composition that demonstrated one of her favorite musical concepts. Its goal, like many of her solo piano performances around that period, was overviewing the history of jazz by connecting and referencing different styles — not necessarily in chronological order! — in a sonic tableau format.
Finding two important outlines in the handwriting of Williams and Bryan, I had a compelling set of directions to implement. Some early portions of the work were fully orchestrated with clear cadential points. Others were just brief, fleeting sketches or, more hauntingly, phrases that offer lighter and lighter fading pencil outlines of ideas.
I eventually came up with a first edition of the work that Kernodle integrated into a February performance in Miami, Florida, by the New World Symphony. This “preview premiere” enjoyed a warm reception, but I observed that a new edition of the piece must be crafted, integrating a much more substantial Blues component.
Through her solo piano work and in “History…”, Williams presented history as a relevant continuum informing all temporal frames of the human condition. She referenced the profundity of collective human trauma through the dense, uncompromisingly dissonant polyphonic explosions of sound in the opening strains of her wind band essay, appropriately subtitled “Suffering.” She addressed collective reconstitution inherent in crafting of the direct musical language found in the section called “Spiritual.” She explored the depth of human bonding, healing, and love in her reference to “Blues” — a form that has occupied lots of my compositional impulses since 2019. Her “Ragtime” sketch (16 enchanting bars of clarinet melody and harmony) captured the necessity of recreational joy and simple pleasure despite life’s adverse conditions. And the uplifting apotheosis of the finale section, labeled “Gospel,” offered a catharsis and unity available to believers in broader, positive universal forces that might direct human beings to their better selves.
Being at the nexus of such a momentous work as “History…: A Wind Symphony,” connecting the dynamic forces of Duke, archives, Mary Lou Williams, band music, the Duke Wind Symphony, archivists, biographers and friends has been the thrill of a lifetime and a testament to the possibilities afforded to a Duke alum — now faculty member — with the curiosity and imagination to interweave history with current and future circumstances.
The author would like to acknowledge three indispensable sources about Mary Lou Williams: Tammy Kernodle’s “Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams” (2008), Linda Dahl’s “Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams” (2001), and Robert Trevarthen and Virginia and Paul Bryan’s “P.B., Who He?” (2008).
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
