The topics of the traditional song cycles we know and love range from unrequited love to adventure-filled journeys, but Damien Geter’s 2022 song cycle Cotton undertakes themes of greater magnitude than Schubert or Schumann ever imagined. Stimulated by John E. Dowell’s extensive photography of cotton fields in the American South, eight African-Amercan poets submitted poems to Geter that encompassed aspects of the African-American experience from working the cotton fields before the Civil War to the great migration to the North in the early 20th Century.
On Friday at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, Metropolitan Opera stars mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and baritone Justin Austin, accompanied by pianist Laura Ward, performed Geter’s cycle of eight gripping songs, a program jointly sponsored by the La Jolla Music Society and San Diego Opera. This compelling multimedia production also featured videos projected above the onstage musicians of each poet reciting their text prior to the poem’s sung version as well as Dowell’s inspiring photography.
Under Dowell’s massive close-up photos of cotton in full bloom, Austin sang the cycle’s opening song “The Cotton Weeps” by poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Joseph transfers Billie Holiday’s “strange fruit’ appellation to cotton, and Geter communicates the cotton pickers’ travail in dramatic declamation, powerfully delivered by Austin. But the crucial musical interpretation of this song is found in the harsh, discordant piano harmonies in interspersed phrases of the patriotic song “America.” Poet Samuel Francis Smith’s opening line of his 1831 song, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” certainly did not describe the enslaved workers of the South.
Alora Young’s “The Night Before the Run” portrays the cross currents of hope and fear that course through the imagination of a young woman on the night before she and her mother escape to freedom in the North. She is eager to trade the white snow up North for the white cotton blooms in the South, but she fears that she may become separated from her beloved mother as the two navigate their dangerous escape. The rich timbre of Bridges’ glorious mezzo-soprano and her eloquent phrasing made Geter’s supple melodies particularly compelling.
Bridges gave an equally moving account of Lauren K. Alleyne’s “They Took My Sister” recounting a young girl’s agony and identity loss after a slaver has taken away her dear sister. Geter underlines this pain musically by quoting the familiar tune of the Scottish ballad “Auld Lang Syne,” whose first line asks “Should old acquaintance be forgot?”
Dowell’s photos of rows of rugged tombstones in a long neglected cemetery accompanied the song “Homecoming for the People of the Sun,” poetry by Trapeta B. Mayson. Austin nobly intoned Geter’s setting of the poet’s proud lament that honors those field workers who were denied proper burial, promising their arrival in the celestial kingdom will be as glorious as the radiant imagery of classic spirituals proclaims.
Damien Geter serves as the Music Director of Portland Opera as well as the Composer-in-Residence for the Richmond Symphony. His rugged postmodern musical idiom suggests the unlikely fusion of the melodic angularity of Anton Webern’s austere Canons and the rapturous cadences of traditional African-American spirituals. Geter’s complex, dense textures and frequently ominous ostinatos in the piano score—powerfully delivered in this performance by pianist Laura Ward—are consistently balanced by more hopeful expressions in his vocal line. Clearly, the sumptuous vocal timbres of Bridges and Austin, as well as their compelling dramatic flair, boldly communicated the deep convictions of Geter and his cadre of poets.
Geter crafts gentler, consoling moments in Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Cotton in the Arms of the Mountain” and Glenis Redmond’s “When the Ancestors Speak.” Aafa Michael Weaver’s “When the Angels Come,” emerges as a gentle lullaby for justice, and in Charlotte Blake Alston’s “The Struggle Goes On: A Mural Speaks,” a vibrant cityscape leaves Dowell’s cotton fields far behind. The field laborer’s pride has transmuted into impassioned protests for justice too long denied.
Cotton was commissioned in 2022 by Philadelphia’s Lyric Fest organization under the direction and visionary video design of Suzanne DuPlantis. In 2023 Cotton was premiered in the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral and then at The Kennedy Center Terrace Theater in Washington, D.C. In 2024 it was presented at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
This performance was presented by the La Jolla Music Society and San Diego Opera at The Conrad in downtown La Jolla on January 16, 2026.