8 Bars with Alicia Hall Moran
Our guest is multidimensional conceptual vocal artist Alicia Hall Moran
8 bars with, is a series on Educated Guesses where we offer up 8 questions to a special guest for them to ponder and freestyle on. The questions aren't necessarily questions as much as they are prompts or linguistic ink blots meant to stimulate thought. The responses can be short and pithy, long and loquacious or somewhere in between.
Alicia Hall Moran is a classical-trained, jazz-informed artist who - with passage and purpose - reimagines everything from the main aria of Madame Butterfly to Motown. She debuted on Broadway in the 2012 Tony-winning revival of Porgy and Bess, and has received many commissions, fellowships and residences. Moran has made memorable and moving art with many artists, including choreographer Bill T. Jones, artist Carrie Mae Weems and jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd. Moran released two albums, Heavy Blue in 2015, and Here Today in 2017, with a new album debuting this year. Moran’s performance works include Black Wall Street, inspired by her father’s Wall Street career and the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and her musical Breaking Ice, and its sequel Cold Blooded dealing with race and ice skating.
Moran was born in Redwood City, California to a family who passed their generational improvements in education, the arts, and finance down to her. Moran’s father, Ira D. Hall was an engineer, treasurer, and investment banker. Her mother, Carole F. Hall worked in the book publishing industry. The family lived on New York’s West Side, and later moved to Stamford, Connecticut. Moran earned a BA in Music from Barnard College (with a minor in anthropology), and a BM in classical vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music, where she met her future husband, pianist/composer, and MacArthur award fellow Jason Moran. Their most celebrated 2019 collaboration is Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration: a Carnegie Hall commissioned concert. The Morans live in Harlem with their teenage twin sons.
1. Bloodlines: Al Hibbler and Hall Johnson
What did I understand of the great Al Hibbler back then? I knew he was my grandmother’s cousin. I knew that his was the great big barrel wave of a voice on the whopping hit Unchained Melody (1955). He brought [his musical] language to Jay McShann’s band, Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, singing on all 8 of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall concerts in the 1940s.
Per my maternal family tradition, my mother told me I would be named for Alice, who was the grandmother of Hall Johnson. But the improvisation to Alicia suits me just fine. Alice, a former slave, sang the songs that formed in Hall Johnson, my great great uncle what Alvin Ailey called the “blood memory” that inspired Johnson to an international and Hollywood career as choral director, arranger, composer, educator, violinist, and musical director. Johnson taught German diction to opera singers including Shirley Verrett and famed Lincoln Memorial contralto, Marian Anderson. He created arrangements of spirituals sung to this day.
2. The Great Migration to Connecticut
My mother was born in Pennsylvania, but her family migrated to the West Coast during WWII. My father’s family originated in Oklahoma. He went to the West Coast for college, where he met my mother. So I was born on the West Coast, but my parents moved to New York City just before my sister was born. Following the dream of working in the city, but living in the country, they moved us all out to Connecticut when I was 8. If people ask me where I’m from, I usually say Connecticut because that explains me: I am a Black suburbanite living in Harlem.
3. Skating while Black
I’ve been skating since I was a kid—I was on a synchronized figure skating team, sort of like a drill team on ice, called the Shadows. We wore half black and half white uniforms and skated to That’s Amore by Dean Martin. I was one half of the anchor, or the pivot center, of the pinwheel. You dig your toe pick in the ice, link arms with the next tallest girl, and pull in (with grace) for your life as these elite skaters on either side of the pinwheel fly on skates like dolphins swim. I was forced to quit when I joined the high school chamber choir. But clearly I never got over it because now as an adult I’m back. And adult skating is booming.
I don’t want to be too basic about it, but brown skin shows up extraordinarily beautifully on the ice. We dazzle out there. I love how time suspends on the edges of my blades on the ice. I love how my legs feel. Did you see Usher on roller skates in the Super Bowl? How he glided by the cameras? It’s such a powerful sort of stance.
4. The Eureka moment when you fell in love with opera
I fell in love with opera so many different times. Watching Shirley Verrett put on a scarf and look in the mirror, that made me love opera. Hearing Kathleen Battle on record singing Purcell, and then seeing that she was a Black woman with a perm—or a billowy blowout—in the 1980s, that made me think I could sing opera. New York City Opera’s Dialogue of the Carmelites directed by Tazewell Thompson, showed me just how racing and immediate opera could be. Hearing Jessye Norman sing live during the Olympics in Atlanta, and watching Leontyne Price, in the middle of her book signing at Tower Records become Aïda, impromptu, in the middle of signing somebody’s book…
I add the moments and glimpses, and gestures; my voice teachers sitting at their pianos during my lessons over these many years: when the warmth of Hilda Harris’ mezzo floated a major scale, or Adele Addison caressed a word in a poem—these make you fall in love with opera, too. Opera embodies a belief that the most important things that need to be said can only be sung. If you don’t believe that, then you cannot do this.
5. "Who gets to be on stage?"
I was interviewing Tania León for the New York Amsterdam News for a feature on Black Music Month. The editor’s idea was that Black people in Classical music should also have a part in the celebration. Tania won the Pulitzer for her symphony, Stride, writing her way through thick orchestration and polyrhythms with sheer mastery and care. During the interview she asks me, “who gets to be on stage?” at a point when our conversation touched on her colleague and friend, the late avant-garde classical composer Julius Eastman…
Tania asked a rhetorical question about this conflict between what artists sacrifice for Art: Do we build our stages, or do we need somebody’s permission? Who gets to be on stage?
6. Working with Jason
When we hit that wavelength, the apartment shakes! We don’t have to always discuss history or musicology anymore. We live here, and it is close. Sometimes even the pigeons coo along. What we make is in nature now, and it’s beyond art forms or criss-crossing genres. I think Jason and I are at that place where we are growing closer, by not changing with the changing winds around us. I think we are there. We've been through some shit, and artistically we have never stopped making things together.
7. Fun with Alicia and Jason
During the pandemic, we were blessed to make Family Ball, a theatrical starring just Jason and I scrolling through our record collection, for ICA/Boston; and we made Chantal, an opera aria for mezzo-soprano with orchestra, commissioned by Washington National Opera that premiered at the Kennedy Center. We also brought Two Wings to the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art, backed by Black female curators. For us, that was Two Wings history!
8. Raising Twins
God outdid Himself with the multiples. These guys of mine, who are 16 now, are phenomenal. My mother once told me that all I’d have to do as a parent is just create a child that I would want to be around. And honestly, that has been the only real advice I needed. That alone will keep you busy for 18 years. When they leave for college I am definitely going to be a puddle of tears. I could not be prouder of them. They will be my people, sent off into the world.
9. Bonus Question:
The future of Blacks in opera
It is a fact. Can there be any question?