Story by: Marin Wolf
Conductor Tonu Kalam glanced back at the clock in the brightly-lit Kenan Music Building practice room. The UNC-Chapel Hill Symphony Orchestra was halfway through its Monday night rehearsal, and it was time to move on to the next piece. The musicians in the string section were penciling in notes on their sheet music.
They didn’t notice the man dressed in all black clothing sitting in the shadow of the door frame, but he noticed them.
Kalam grabbed their attention with the tap of his baton. He invited the man in black, William Henry Curry, music director and conductor of the Durham Symphony Orchestra, up to the make-shift podium to introduce the next piece.
Curry began with a story. The composition, titled “Dark Testament,” honors the lives and work of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and civil rights activist Pauli Murray. It draws inspiration from African American spirituals and features a train whistle to signal the Underground Railroad.
“It should be a primal scream,” Curry said, throwing his hands in the air. “You have to have some sort of strength in you. No one is playing loud enough!”
He should know. He wrote the somber-yet-hopeful music on commission for the university.
And with that, the orchestra picked up their instruments for the only Black conductor in the South and started to play.
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Born the same year as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Curry faced a world that was a confusing combination of racism and feigned societal change. Every day on the bus ride to and from his integrated elementary school in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, he passed a whites-only swimming pool.
“I don’t know if I acknowledged how grim it was to be Black,” Curry said.
In response to this bleak reality, he buried himself in books and his budding love affair with the piano.
His family couldn’t afford a piano, so he took any chance he could to get his hands on the black and white keys of his friends’ and neighbors’ instruments. Once Curry was seated at the piano, no one, not even his parents, could pull him away from tinkering with the notes.
“I don’t know why that interested me, but why does a kid want to be a ballet dancer or an astronaut?” Curry said. “You know, these things are innate, unexplainable, irrational.”
His mother, Florence “Kitty” Hamilton Curry, saw something extraordinary in him — the way he was drawn to music, the tenacity with which he charged through novels, the empathy that radiated from his young body. She couldn’t give him a piano, but she could give him a library card and her stern wisdom.
Every Tuesday Curry checked out 12 books that he’d finish by the family’s next trip to the library. Lost in the world of Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” he realized what his mother had seen all along.
“That was what they had been saying to me,” Curry said. “You will be allowed to do stuff your parents weren’t able to do if you’re disciplined and you concentrate.”
And he did.
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Curry is always looking for his so-called earth angels, the individuals who’ve watched over him his whole life. They’re people such as his mother, or the music teacher that came into his under-funded school to teach him viola, or Michael, his partner of 30 years.
They’re the people who pushed Curry to pursue his obsessive passion for music. He picked up the clarinet in addition to his string instrument and practiced until he was good enough to play in youth ensembles.
It was at a youth symphony rehearsal that Curry realized this is what he was meant to do.
“I had a lightbulb over-the-head moment, literally,” Curry said. “I was playing a piece by Wagner in the youth symphony… and all of a sudden I started to float around the room. I had an out of body experience.”
Soon he became interested in conducting and his earth angels brought him to the podium. For hours, he poured over the works of classical composers like Beethoven, Brahms and Bach, trying to identify why the artists wrote each note.
At 14, Curry conducted his first youth concert, and by 21, he was named assistant conductor of the Richmond Chamber Orchestra. He filled his life with symphonies, ballets and operas.
Curry’s fascination for reading and learning carried into his career. Each new score meant a new biography of the composer and an intense review of the piece’s historical context.
“I know he does score study passionately,” said John Lambert, editor-in-chief of Classical Voice of North Carolina. “He knows what he wants to elicit in his instrumentalists.”
Despite his success on stage, Curry was nervous to compose his own works. The idea of competing with the great musicians he’d spent so long analyzing was daunting.
“You have to be what, I don’t know what combination of things: insane, oblivious, or you really want to express yourself through the creative act and everything else flows from that,” Curry said.
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Though he didn’t know he needed it, along came another earth angel in the form of a handsome young man named Michael while Curry was conducting in Baltimore.
Curry was 26 and just beginning his promising career. He and Michael were set up on a blind date and they agreed to meet at Curry’s apartment.
It was love at first sight, Curry said.
Michael, who passed away in 2013, was a chef, not a conductor or a professional musician. He didn’t like all of the same composers as Curry, and he wasn’t concerned with why Wagner wrote certain notes in a certain order. None of that mattered.
That night the radio played Curry’s performance of Brahms’ Symphony Number One. Curry was so enamored by his date that he forgot to listen.
“I knew Michael for 33 years and he was boring for all of six seconds,” Curry said.
It was Michael who encouraged him to start composing, giving Curry a confidence he struggled to find on his own. In 1999, he premiered his original composition “Eulogy for a Dream,” based on writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with the Indianapolis Symphony.
With Michael by his side, Curry went on to conduct at nearly every major symphony in the United States. He was nominated for a Grammy and won the Leopold Stokowski Conducting Competition. And he kept composing.
“All the music I have in my room, stacks and stacks and stacks, should all have his name on it,” Curry said. “Because otherwise it wasn’t going to happen.”
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Curry retreated to the shadow of the Kenan Music Building door frame once more. He listened intently to the sound of his musical baby being played by the students in front of him.
He scribbled notes on his sheet music. The somber minor key of the song’s introduction didn’t slow any of his enthusiasm. He focused on the entry of the cellos, urging them to sneak into the song.
Every day, Curry said, he tries to be someone else’s earth angel. In his 20 years as the resident conductor at the North Carolina Symphony and his 12 years at the Durham Symphony Orchestra Curry dedicated himself to making the music come alive for his players.
As a gay Black man in a largely white industry, it hasn’t been easy.
“The idea of me being a conductor was suicidal,” Curry said. Still, he knew he couldn’t ignore the feeling he has up on that podium.
It may be impossible to connect with music the way the Curry does: wholly, vulnerably, with reckless abandon. But Curry has made it his mission to bring younger musicians into the ethereal realm in which he resides while conducting.
“He raised the bar for us,” said Suzanne Bolt, a violinist and board member at the Durham Symphony Orchestra. “We come to rehearsal everyday now nervous and excited.”
As the UNC-CH Symphony Orchestra wrapped up the last play-through of “Dark Testament”, Curry stood behind the podium, giving time for the musicians to ask questions. He would stay as late as they needed him.
“We can’t talk to Beethoven, but we can talk to Curry,” John Lambert said. “And that’s a wonderful thing.”
The online concert is at 7:30 p.m. April 28. View here.
