Sounds Continue to Migrate: A Conversation with Moor Mother
Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, is a poet, visual artist, touring musician, and professor of Composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.
Her recent large-scale work, The Great Bailout, uses as its starting point the United Kingdom’s 1837 Slave Compensation Act, which gave tax bailouts to former slave owners, but nothing to the liberated people. The resulting unwavering sonic meditation—dark, powerful, deeply political and personal—is a nonlinear word map that charts connections across colonialism, slavery, and commerce in Great Britain, along with its modern parallels in the United States.
Ayewa released The Great Bailout as a proper album in March of 2024. It was followed a few months later by an expanded edition, which included earlier versions of the pieces recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra. The upcoming site-specific Walker performance of The Great Bailout is the first large-scale presentation of the project in the United States.
This conversation between Ayewa and her collaborator Brandon Stosuy took place shortly before her performance of The Great Bailout at the Walker, presented in partnership with Liquid Music.
Brandon Stosuy
I’ve seen you perform dozens of times, and you never do the same show twice. Over the years, as you’ve worked more with classical music and in large-scale institutions like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, your live performances have grown more ambitious, with additional collaborators and variables.
When people perform the same set over and over, it offers a bit of a safety net, but you keep experimenting. What is it that inspires you to approach live performance this way?
Camae Ayewa
I love the concept of reworking: that the music continues to breathe, the music continues to live, and in different situations, the music continues to grow. That’s important to me. I never want to stay locked into the sounds. The sounds continue to migrate, they continue to grow—they continue to have their own life, shall I say. And it’s my job or my passion to keep finding new ways to approach the work, but also new ways for the work to still be grounded in the present. And that’s what’s really interesting to me.
My writing style is about leaving space for the unknown and for the stories of the present moment. I believe it’s all one continual story, one continuous moment, vibrating at different frequencies. It is important to bring out all the layers, present all the layers, as if it was an infinity mirror that continues to shine light, that continues to reflect.
BS
The Great Bailout, the basis for your performance at the Walker: Can you give a bit of background on it?
CA
The project came about when I was commissioned by the Tusk Festival in England to present a work with an orchestra and to create a theme. At that moment, when I was thinking what I could do, I felt it was imperative to focus on a historical moment that still has its residue, or remnants, here in the present. This was, of course, a risky move, to put this type of work out there, but I felt that we had to honor the creative mind and honor all the things that have happened on this planet, really. To dwell into that and close the timeline.
BS
This is the first full-scale performance of The Great Bailout in the U.S. How did you arrive at the approach for the Walker performance?
CA
My approach was to pick the right ingredients. It’s important to me to have elders who have set the foundation of this thing that we are doing, as a creative music, to continue to pull them in. To treat these moments as continual learning processes, not so much of a mastered work and then tour it around. Like I said earlier, this idea of the work being continuously able to move—not just forward, but back and forth in time.
It's important to do this work in America because the connections are so deep and so entangled with what is happening now with race, class, war, justice, and liberation.
There is a great tradition of creative Black music at the Walker Art Center, and it really comes like a full-circle moment—of presenting this work where it needs to be, where there’s a history of the avant-garde, where there’s a history of creative music. And not just creative for creative sake, but creative for the liberation of the art form. I think this is very important.
It’s important to continue the legacies, and not just continue them, but to continue the fire burning, the sacrifice. To acknowledge the sacrifice that so many of these great musicians, my heroes, put into the work. The dedication. It’s very important to me to play these institutions that have always had their pulse on what’s happening and creative music.
BS
What does it take for a live performance to feel successful to you? When it’s over and the crowd is there applauding, what do you, as the composer, think about? What do you take home with you?
CA
What does it take for a live performance to feel successful? What does it take? To me, it’s already a success just to be in the same space with my fellow collaborators. That, to me, is a success because we’re all learning and gaining from these experiences, and we take these experiences to the next one. This is a continuation of building a family, a creative family, a creative sound family.
That’s what this is about, more than it is about pleasing an audience. If the audience is aware and has an understanding, then we go there. The audience is just like us. We’re all students of this. We’re all learning. That’s just the success of bringing people together—the audience, the performers, the people commissioning the show—for all of us to get inspired and to come together.
So, what do I think about as a composer? Family. What do I take home? All the lessons, all the ways to go deeper into the work, to journey deeper without fear, and to understand that taking a risk is a part of that success.▪︎
Experience Moor Mother's The Great Bailout for yourself on Sept 14, 2024 at the Walker Art Center. Learn more and get tickets here.
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