Lake Champlain Weekly features Valerie Coleman

“Band class was the most beautiful haven of all. For the child who played in the yard with tree branches, holding them to her mouth as if those wooden limbs were a flute, her instrument felt pre-ordained.” -Benjamin Pomerance

Lake Champlain Weekly Features Valerie Coleman
By Benjamin Pomerance
Lake Champlain Weekly
August 17, 2022

IN THE WOMB, Valerie Coleman heard Beethoven. Her mother had been born into a family of 13 children, seven of whom were women. All of the girls sang, somehow knowing how to harmonize without ever being trained to do so. The music was in them, as natural as breathing. Somewhere along the way, the woman who would become Coleman’s mother developed an affection for Beethoven’s sixth symphony. While she carried Valerie inside of her, she played recordings of that symphony over and over again for her unborn child.

Maybe that is why this story ends differently. Perhaps that is why this child born in the West End of Louisville, Ky. — a neighborhood that Coleman has described as “about as inner-city as any inner-city can get” — winds up where she is today. There are sinews that can stretch from those pre-birth strains of Beethoven and an artist’s life that includes creating a trailblazing wind quintet, composing symphonic works for the Philadelphia Orchestra and earning Classical Woman of the Year honors from Performance Today in 2020.

She will share components of that story on Aug. 20, relating her journey in a Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival program titled Illuminated. She has done this often through the years, sharing the still-evolving tale of how she got to this place. Yet she does not do so for gaping mouths of praise or sympathy and certainly not for the clucking of pundits who gaudily marvel that she, a Black woman from the inner city, wound up in the classical concert hall. The story, she emphasizes, is not about her. Instead, it is about tomorrow and the day after that.

Yet there is no understanding tomorrow without 5 comprehending yesterday. The West End felt different in that era, a land brimming with tunes. On the radio, she listened to Motown and rhythm & blues. During trips on the school bus, she’d sing the latest hits with her friends. In class, they passed notes back-and-forth containing the letter names of the notes for those songs.

Band class was the most beautiful haven of all. For the child who played in the yard with tree branches, holding them to her mouth as if those wooden limbs were a flute, her instrument felt pre-ordained. She started playing that instrument in fourth grade and quickly felt an itch not only to play the notes on the page but to write down some notes of her own, memorializing the music that was swimming in her mind. By middle school, rehearsals with her school ensemble had become her favorite time of the day.

It wasn’t all nirvana. When she was 9 years old, her father passed away, leaving her mother to raise Valerie and her two siblings alone. Around the neighborhood, the seams were starting to show. A vivid memory lingers of her cousin being chased down by a group of boys because they wanted him to join their gang. “There was always a new gang,” she recalls.

But even when the downsides of life in one of America’s poorest zip codes started to emerge, a universe awaited in which she could instantly make reality evaporate. A new hobby enraptured her in high school: composing symphonies. On her mother’s typewriter, she pounded the underline key repeatedly until she had created the proper lines to turn the blank page into homemade staff paper. From there, her creativity took over, weaving her own melodies and harmonies. “In those blank staves in my hands, I saw a world of possibilities,” she states.

Then somebody else saw that a world of possibilities exited within her. One day, Robert Sirota, the prolific composer who directed Boston University’s School of Music, showed up at a Louisville Youth Orchestra rehearsal. Without any time to prepare, Coleman performed for him on the flute and piccolo. A few weeks later, a letter from Sirota showed up at her family’s home, offering her a scholarship to attend Boston University’s summertime Tanglewood Institute.

That summer proved to be the prelude to her college life, departing the West End for Boston University to doublemajor in flute performance and composition. The latter curriculum, she recalls, posed greater barriers to her than the former. Her mind raced with sounds beyond the traditional Western classical realm. When she tried out those ideas, however, the professors generally scowled. “There was a lot of intellectual gatekeeping going on,” she declares.

Other factors troubled her, too. “I walked out with a degree in music composition,” she explains, “but I still did not think that I could call myself a composer because I was a woman, and I was Black. There was not much support for somebody with either of those characteristics, much less both of them, to gain a foothold in the composition world.” Instead, she decided to focus on flute performance, moving to New York City and enrolling at the Mannes College of Music to earn her master’s degree.

Still, the old voices kept on calling, filling Coleman with sounds that demanded to be heard. Finally, she resolved that she had no choice but to do something about it. She would form her own ensemble, she decided, a wind quintet — the same grouping of instruments for which Arnold Schoenberg wrote his first boundary-shattering 12-tone composition, defeating the rigidity of conventional classical ears. With this ensemble, she determined that she would become a groundbreaker, too.

Read the full article on Coleman here.