Biola Symphony Orchestra plays Beethoven pieces as well as a composition by interim conductor Elliott Bark.

The orchestra began to trickle onstage, taking their seats, and within moments arose the faint warm-up tunes of the strings, the brasses, the woodwinds and percussionists. It mixed with the murmurs of the audience, a quivering of excitement and anticipation in the air. The lights dimmed. The conductor, Dr. Elliott Bark, interim director of Biola Symphony Orchestra and adjunct professor of composition and conducting, took to the stage — and Beethoven’s music filled the air.

BEETHOVEN AND “REMINISCENCE”

Biola Symphony Orchestra performed three songs: Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Egmont Overture, Op. 84;” “Reminiscence,” by Dr. Bark himself; and “Symphony no. 7” by Beethoven. 

“Beethoven’s 7th Symphony is the most joyful and not too tricky,”  Bark said. “It is a very exciting and energetic [piece].” For Beethoven’s Overture, he said, “It’s a little bit different from [the] 7th Symphony … it has a lot of political [ideas] going on … it has a bit of a different story.”

With the energetic and fast-paced nature of Beethoven’s songs, Bark wondered how the orchestra would manage. Coming in as an interim conductor, he did not know what to expect. But Bark was very pleased to see how quickly the musicians progressed and could attain the liveliness of Beethoven’s pieces. 

“We focused a lot on the tempo,” Bark said. “The tempo we took [is almost] the same as Berlin or New York [Philharmonic] — it’s a very fast tempo, especially the fourth movement.”

Despite the initial challenges in rehearsal, Bark and Biola Symphony Orchestra achieved that spirited tempo performed at that night’s concert.

In addition to performing Beethoven’s dramatically energetic pieces, the orchestra also performed one of Bark’s own compositions titled “Reminiscence.” The gently-stirring and slow-moving song, a contrast to Beethoven’s pieces, was written during Bark’s days of studying composition. 

“Everybody was expected to write very complicated music, [and] more intellectual than emotional,” Bark said. “So I was writing something like that … but then I was tired of it.” He talked with his professor, relating his need to write something more emotionally driven. “He said ‘yeah, go for it,’” — and from his heart poured out “Reminiscence.” 

The song first premiered at Indiana University (where he attended) and later was performed in Finland, Brazil, Korea and several other locations worldwide.

THE JOY OF MUSIC

Magic flowed in the movements of the conductor. Energetic and spirited, mystical and enigmatic; his gestures pushed, pulled, swayed the music, like a current he could tug and release with supernatural power. A wild and frenzied rhythm lay in his left hand, and in his right he conjured with sweeping motion vigorous surges of power, turning and capturing the flow of music, transforming it to his will.

One of Bark’s greatest joys in his musical journey lies in performing at concerts with Christian musicians.

“An amazing conductor [can] come to New York Phil, and they can make, like, super amazing music, maybe the best music I’ve ever heard,” Bark said. “But will Christ be happy with that? I don’t know, I can’t tell … But then, when I work with the Biola Symphony [and] with the Christian youth orchestras, I can feel [that] God is glorified through it. It doesn’t matter what piece is played, whether it is Tchaikovsky or Beethoven. We’re doing everything for Christ’s glory.”

FUTURE TUNES

In the future, the orchestra plans to play some cheery, festive music for Biola’s Christmas concert in December, and next year they will perform with Biola Theater for the spring musical. Bark also hopes for the Biola Symphony Orchestra to perform some romantic-era pieces for the final concert of the year in April 2023.

The sound of clapping resounded in the auditorium after Biola Symphony Orchestra strung the final note. With a standing ovation, the audience applauded the orchestra and Dr. Elliott Bark, echoes following him as he bowed and exited the stage.

Within the canon of classical-music misfits, a formidable lineage including scruffy luminaries like Harry Partch, John Cage, and Lou Harrison, it’s possible no one has ever not belonged as fiercely, as pointedly—or, at this point, as famously—as Julius Eastman. A Black gay man with an astonishing array of musical gifts as a composer, singer, dancer, and pianist, Eastman gained admission to the prestigious Curtis Institute in 1959, five years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only nine years after Nina Simone herself had been rejected due to her race. Eastman spent the rest of his short, eventful life surfing turbulent sociopolitical cross-currents, earning a Grammy nomination in 1974 for his stunning vocal work on Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King while also performing his music at gay pride festivals, playing in jazz combos, and fighting against perpetual economic precarity. It was the kind of tortured duality out of which grand allegories are fashioned and dynamite biopics are made, but which mostly felt, for Eastman, like constant struggle: As anyone who knows Eastman’s name by now knows, he died homeless and alone at age 49 in a New York hospital.

Over the last decade or so, there has been a slow-dawning recognition of the singularity of Eastman’s voice, catalyzed by the restoration work done by composer Mary Jane Leach, without whom it’s conceivable Eastman’s music would still be forever lost, as well as committed patrons like Jace Clayton, aka DJ /rupture. In 2013, Clayton released a tribute album that concluded with a piece, called “Callback From the American Society of Eastman Supporters,” daring to imagine a world in which Eastman’s acolytes had grown so numerous they had to be turned away via a polite outgoing message (voiced, as it happens, by Arooj Aftab). It is both a testament to the efforts of people like Clayton and a bittersweet irony that, nearly a decade later, the world envisioned by “Callback” has been slowly taking shape, in the form of multi-part public radio tributes, studies, countless articles, and, most importantly, a fervent new crop of musicians, performers, and artists who found themselves enraptured by the spirit of Eastman’s music.

One such performer is Loraine James, a London-based experimental electronic musician and relative newcomer to Eastman’s music, a fact she writes about in a poignant Guardian editorial: “When the label Phantom Limb got in touch about me creating music inspired by the late New York avant garde composer and pianist Julius Eastman, I had barely heard of him,” she admits, noting that even with a modern-day syllabus that touched on his peers, “it felt like there was effort made to leave him out.”