Like so many of us, Charles Overton was trying to make the best out of 2020. The Berklee grad and classical/jazz harpist juggled practicing his instrument and figuring out how to transition to online teaching as a new instructor at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Then he heard about George Floyd.
“As summer rolled around and I got back into playing a bit more came the tragic and untimely death of George Floyd,” Overton said. “Trying to deal with it internally was a whole reckoning. It was a big moment for my community.”
Shortly after the death of Floyd, Boston Symphony Orchestra associate principal horn Richard Sebring reached out to Overton, his former student. Sebring had sat down to practice but, stuck by the epidemic of racism and violence, he improvised a melody and sent it to Overton. The two began collaborating through the internet on a piece that Overton would go on to title “Listen, to the Cry of Your Fellow Man.”
The horn and harp duet will be available Thursday (and through Nov. 19) as part of the symphony’s Encore BSO Recitals, a weekly online series featuring 50 musicians in nine video streams available at bso.org. The Thursday edition also showcases the world premiere recording of Sebring’s “Awaken! A New Day! For Alphorns” and other selections including two Mozart pieces.
“What resonated with me was how honest (Sebring’s music) felt,” Overton said of the pair’s work together. “Here I was so uncertain. I was wondering if making sound right then was even appropriate. … We can get so tied up, so locked up, we can get into a stasis and then what are we accomplishing.”
“The important thing was that what we created was of this moment and it was honest,” he added. “For me it felt like less of a political statement or artistic statement and more like therapy. It helped me reconnect with music in a really meaningful way.”
Partly because Sebring’s horn is so soaring and Overton’s harp is so calming, “Listen, to the Cry of Your Fellow Man” doesn’t feel as dark as the moment it responds to. The piece has a contemplative and, in flashes, optimistic air to it.
“Music expresses what words can’t so I think both of us trying to be as honest as possible in the creation of something comes across here,” Overton said. “We have to be hopeful that our country, our world, can become a better place. But it’s also impossible not to feel a sense of melancholy, of dread.”
The pair didn’t try to edit or push the work to ram home a message. But the two made one conscious decision in shaping their collaboration.
“The ending isn’t quite resolved,” he said. “The moment we are at, there isn’t a resolution to it, so we didn’t want to end with some grand Ab major, have some grand thing superimposed on the ending. What we wanted to say was, ‘Take a breath and listen to what’s around you.’”
