Cycles of My Being / Save the Boys

„America – do you care for me, as I care for you?“ Tyshawn Sorey‘s songs tell of racism, violence and discrimination, but also of hope. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music 2024 is just as adept at new music as he is at jazz and reinvents his forms of composing with every task he confronts. With the song cycle Cycles of My Being and the 20-minute-long aria Save the Boys, he takes his place among the great art song composers. He uses the intimacy of the genre to expose what it means to be a Black man living in America today. 

The abolitionist, writer and Black women's rights activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote Save the Boys in 1887, a poem addressing the dangers faced by young black men in society. More than 100 years later, the American poet Terrance Hayes deals in Cycles of my Being with the hardships of the Black population in the USA, primarily from the male perspective, echoing the Black Lives Matter movement. Although the texts are written more than 100 years apart, they still describe a contemporary reality.

The two soloists, the South-African tenor and Operalia prize-winner Levy Sekgapane and the multiple award-winning American countertenor Key'mon W. Murrah, contribute to the work not only with their voices, but also with their perspective. The prodigious multi-instrumentalist and composer Tyshawn Sorey appears here as a conductor.