Over the past decade, composer Anthony Davis has drawn inspiration from an eclectic mix of artistic collaborators. Some have been accomplished writers, directors and choreographers. And some have been students in his opera and jazz classes at UC San Diego.Since he joined the UCSD music faculty in 1998, Davis has written one opera and began another, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and toured the United States and Europe performing his compositions with his own ensemble. Through it all, he has remained grounded by working with young musicians – experimenting with improvisational styles, exploring new digital technologies – in classrooms and studios on the La Jolla campus.
"I love interacting with students," Davis said. "It's exciting to help them develop their talents and their ideas, and that brings a new energy to my own work."
One of the nation's most prolific composers, Davis is best known for operas inspired by iconic history. His first opera, "X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X," premiered at the New York City Opera in 1986. "X" played to sold-out houses and was praised by The New Yorker as "not just a stirring and well-fashioned opera … but one whose music adds a new, individual voice to those previously heard in our opera houses."
His third opera, "Tania," based on the abduction of Patricia Hearst, premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in 1992; subsequent productions and recordings have starred his wife, noted soprano Cynthia Aaronson-Davis, in the title role.
His fourth opera, "Amistad," about the legendary slave ship uprising, premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997.
Davis' large body of orchestral work, including the music he composed for Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches," fuses elements of European classical, American jazz, African and Indonesian music. Time Magazine has likened it to "Ellington's lush, massed sonorities propelled by Bartók's vigorous whiplash rhythms and overlaid with the seductive percussive haze of the Balinese gamelan orchestra."
His operas wrap that rich sound around compelling sagas driven by a central character Davis describes as "the trickster," like Elijah Muhammad in "X" and the reporter in "Tania."
"The trickster is the model for the artist," he said. "They translate the divine to the human. They imagine and create possibilities. And they are important in all the diasporas, African, Cuban, Native American. For African Americans, the trickster is symbolic of what we have had to do to survive, how we have turned the most adverse situations into powerful art."
Davis's fifth opera, "Wakonda's Dream," took root when he attended a Nebraskan pow-wow of the Ponca Indians and learned about a boy who communed with the spirit of legendary Ponca chief Standing Bear. With a libretto by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, "Wakonda's Dream" revisits a landmark court decision in which Standing Bear sacrificed his tribal birthright to gain his rights as a citizen, a first for American Indians.
"It was a Pyrrhic victory," Davis said. "There is a moment in the trial where Standing Bear takes off his headdress and says, 'I'm a man, the same blood runs through my veins as yours.' His rights are acknowledged, but only after he surrenders his culture."
Support from his 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Davis to finish "Wakonda's Dream" and to begin his sixth opera, "Revolution of Forms." With a libretto by noted Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto, "Revolution of Forms" opens with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on a golf course in Havana. It is the story of an art school the two revolutionaries founded but that was never completed.
"It wound up in ruins, with one of its architects sent to prison and the other forced into exile," Davis said. "It is a mirror of what happened to the hopes and aspirations of the Cuban revolution."
Davis composes at night, leaving his days free for teaching and collaborating. He works closely with graduate students in his opera music theatre workshop, which brings together young composers from the music department and young playwrights from theater and dance.
He enjoys the give-and-take of his undergraduate jazz courses because, he says, "there are no empty slates in arts classes. Strong artists have a point of view early, and they approach learning through a filter – they figure out how your teaching will fit into their cosmos."
Kate Callen is a staff writer in UCOP Strategic Communications.