Noctuary for Adé

Ensemble: for MC, singer, and wind ensemble

Duration: 8.5’

Written: 2024

Commissioned by: “Noctuary for Adé” was premiered by a consortium of ensembles in 2024-2025 led by Northern Arizona University and organized by CBDNA and Stephen Meyer.

Premiered: The first performance took place on November 22nd, 2024, conducted by Stephen Meyer, and consortium premieres will continue until the end of 2025.

This piece is exclusive to consortium members for performances until December 31, 2025. The score is available for purchase, with non-consortium performances permitted beginning in 2026.

PROGRAM NOTE:

“Noctuary for Adé” is a meditation on the writings of my close friend and collaborator, Adé Ra. A “noctuary” is a night journal, a record of happenings that occur in the dark. The piece unfolds as a sort of dream sequence, and along the way we are visited by multiple narrators: a singer, who is singing words written by Adé, the featured emcee, who has written original lyrics responding to those texts, and the instrumental ensemble. The instrumental music, singer lyrics, and featured emcee’s words act as three interconnected noctuaries, which lead us through the piece, through shadowy textures, shifting brass harmonies, and sudden bursts of energy. The focal point of the texts is the image of a moonflower, a species of night-blooming morning glory, which Adé had written about poetically.

Adé was the first emcee in ShoutHouse, and someone whose work encouraged me to begin experimenting with cross-genre collaborations in concert music. I played trumpet in an afrobeat/hip-hop band called Yes Noyes in college and she was one of the emcees. After Vassar, we moved to Brooklyn, where we played in small venues, basements, and even the subways. After rehearsals, she would freestyle over my piano improvisations in my room. Over time, these collaborations grew into pieces that I wrote for her and classical instrumentalists, which developed into my ensemble, ShoutHouse. After her sudden death in April 2022, I thought about the best way to pay tribute to her — to keep her creative spirit alive and to live with her work. She left words in handwritten documents, social media posts, and old songs stored on hard drives. Our mutual friend Chris Connors shared with me a full album of unreleased hip-hop tracks that she had recorded with him many years ago. One of those tracks was called “Noctuary”; I thought that was a beautiful word and image, one that would be mutually inspiring for the featured emcees, players, and me.

While I began with the intention of finding a single poem or text of Adé’s to set to music, I loved the idea of creating a musical noctuary guided by multiple excerpts from her words. For this piece, I decided to treat the composition process as a living collaboration, working as I often did with Adé over the years, adding to, excerpting, and adjusting phrases so that they felt cohesive with the music and narrative structure of the piece.

Unlike the classical tradition of having set lyrics, the featured emcee on this piece writes their own lyrics for the performance. This is an aspect of my collaborations that Adé inspired many years ago. She taught me the value of letting go of creative control, discovering a shared narrative with other artists, and watching how a project can grow beyond your original vision.

I want to thank Steve Meyer for organizing this consortium and for his enthusiasm and encouragement for this project. I am also grateful to all of the conductors and schools in the consortium who brought the piece to life. To the late Rob Carnochan, thank you for encouraging me to write Passages. Rob’s vision for my first multi-genre wind ensemble commission was an essential first step into the wind ensemble medium.

— Will Healy
Brooklyn, NY
October 2024