^{Ayanna Witter-Johnson (note by Kate Hopkins)}

I wrote Unconditionally as a tribute to my mother. It was originally scored for one person performing on voice, cello and cowbell, and it features on my 2019 album Road Runner.

The cello part employs techniques including pizzicato (plucking the strings), clapping on the body of the instrument, and col legno (tapping the strings with the stick of the bow). The bowed passages are reminiscent of the famous moto perpetuo opening of J S Bach’s first cello suite. The lyrics describe a mother and daughter’s mutual love (‘nothing comes between me and you’) and a mother’s generosity (‘the hard roads you walked so I could fly’). The song ends in an ecstatic repeated affirmation: ‘I see you in me’.

^{Ayanna Witter-Johnson/Gwilym Simcock}

Chariot, another song from the album, co-written with songwriter Ofei Sakyi, is the story of how a daughter perceives her father through the eyes of a child. Reminiscent of a classic soul song with its roots in gospel music, it takes on a fresh perspective with a new reimagining and extended introduction, All Roads by pianist/composer Gwilym Simcock for voice, cello, piano and percussion. This reworking uses the mallet percussion to accentuate the different layers of time within the original lilting groove, whilst staying true to the spirit and feel of the original track.

^{Ayanna Witter-Johnson}

Falling, which is also featured on Road Runner, is a song about unrequited love co-written with pianist/songwriter Alex Webb. This evening is the premiere of an intimate new arrangement of this soulful lilting ballad for voice, cello, piano and percussion. 

^{Gwilym Simcock}

The world premiere of Holding took place in 2021, although I'd actually performed the piece dozens of times before! To explain, my son Rowan was born a few months before the premiere, and part of my daily routine involved taking him for a walk around our local park in Berlin. This could take up to two hours – depending on how successfully I could get him to sleep! – so I started thinking about how to use that time creatively, getting into the habit of inventing melodies and various musical things in my head, and then writing them down when I get back home. 

One of the routes in the park is a circular running track. Whilst on this I thought I'd write the most incredibly simple thing I could, something that would seem like it had a constant cycle – going round and round – with the connections being disguised by the piece having an irregular length. Each bar has exactly the same rhythm, and I realised that this never-ending cycle would hopefully be most useful in the (considerable!) efforts to put little Rowan to sleep each night. Until last year, I had sung this to him dozens of times, but never actually played it on an instrument – hence a world premiere but not a first performance!

Usually I like the pieces I write to have an arc and a clear narrative journey, but this one is just meant to exist and hopefully be pleasing to listen to. I hope you enjoy it, but please do try to remain awake!

^{Ayanna Witter-Johnson}

As a young child, I often spent the six-week summer holiday season in Jamaica, staying with extended family and taking trips to a particular beach along the south coast of the island. On a more recent visit to this familiar spot, I bore witness to a fatal drowning of a young man. The sea was rough, he was drinking alcohol and refused to heed the warning of his friends and indeed the violent waves, that he must not go into the water for a swim. Ignoring the local pleas, he proceeded to enter the water and after half an hour was not seen again. A search party of fishermen was sent to investigate, but it was too late.  They recovered his body and brought him back to shore. They say he heard the Angel of Death calling and could not resist her voice. 

This piece is my response to the intensity and tense atmosphere that led up to that moment – the conflict between having a beautiful day along the coast and then being thrown into an emotional cocktail of disbelief, sadness and acceptance at the fleeting nature of life. The ostinato rhythm in the marimba part holds the essence of basic dancehall rhythms, which were playing through the restaurant speakers at the time, and underpins the entire piece like the constancy of time passing. The other instrumental parts weave in and out, at times in harmony, and at others in odds with one another, searching for a consensus and state of peace amidst an uncertain moment in time.

1 The Darkest Hour
2 Pioneers
3 Ocean View

^{Ayanna Witter-Johnson}

Ocean Floor Suite pays homage to a major historical event that affected my ancestors in the 18th century and reflects upon the fateful day I had at the beach along the south coast of Jamaica a few years ago, the same event depicted in Tidal Warning.

In 1781, the Zong – a British slave ship – left Ghana with twice the number it was designed to carry, bound for Jamaica. The ship’s owners claimed that water was running low, and the crew threw more than 130 living enslaved people overboard. Evidence to the contrary suggested that there was heavy rain and that the ship had enough water. The ship owners had taken out insurance for their 'cargo' of enslaved people and made a claim for compensation upon their return to England.

Over 200 years later, a young man lost his life to the powerful ocean currents in what felt like a senseless death the day I was at the beach along the south coast of Jamaica. What and who did he leave behind? A young life cut short. At the same time, a baptism in the water was taking place further along the coast and in the other direction along the beach children were playing: splashing in the shallow waves, building sandcastles and burying each other knee-deep, completely unaware of the mourning party that was gathering around the dead body of the young man that had now been brought back to shore. I scanned the horizon in awe of the spectrum of events. Even amidst the darkness of death, there is still room for joy. 

The rhythms, choice of percussion and harmony all have symbolic meaning in relation to the inspiration for the songs. 

^{Ayanna Witter-Johnson}

I composed Forever as an accompanying piece to my song Unconditionally, dedicated to my mother, that opened this performance. Forever expands upon the gratitude that I express to her for nurturing my musicality in my early childhood. When I was three years old, my mother was a dancer in a Ghanaian West African Dance Troupe, and I would dance with them on a few of their shows, becoming the ‘baby’ of the troupe. Those dances are embedded in my soul, especially the grounding drumming rhythms of the Atsiagbekor dance of the Ewe-speaking people of Southern Ghana, Togo, and Benin. It is this sound that opens the piece, forever combining my earliest memories of my love for dance and music.

Thursday 17 November 2022 7pm

Barbican, London

Carlos Simon This Land
John Adams Saxophone Concerto
-Interval-
Leonard Bernstein Divertimento for Orchestra
George Gershwin An American in Paris

Gianandrea Noseda conductor
Jess Gillam saxophone
London Symphony Orchestra

Tickets from £18