Deborah Greenman
Trevor Weston, Composer and Chair of the Music Department at Drew University, was born in 1967 and grew up in Plainfield, NJ. He began his musical career as a 10-year-old boy soprano in the renowned choir school of St. Thomas Church in New York City. And he was 34 years old and only a few years from receiving his PhD in Music from UC Berkeley when Gerre Hancock, his former choir director at St Thomas Church, commissioned him to write the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis that Cecilia will perform in its Evensong concert.
In a publicity interview with the San Francisco Symphony, Weston described his beginnings as a composer. “I was cleaning up the science room (we all had chores), and I started singing something, and I could hear the other parts while I was singing. I could hear them continuing even when I stopped singing. I didn’t know that was composing; I just thought I was having fun. I didn’t know it was a career option until I studied composition at Tufts University with T.J. Anderson, and he said I should go study with Olly Wilson. And that’s how I made it to UC Berkeley. And I guess the rest is history.”
First winner (2021) of the Emerging Black Composers Project of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony, Weston has talked of the challenges of being an African American composer: “And in this culture there’s such a distinction between what is popular and lowbrow, and what is from afar. And that affects people of color often because many of us write music that’s connected to our cultural background, which is usually a very American background…”. Weston, whose parents both sang in their church choirs, grew up hearing Duke Ellington and Bach in equal measure. In a recent podcast interview for Composer Connections, Weston noted that many of his compositions have been inspired by political and social issues and the suffering caused by hatred and racial injustice. In 2002, he composed a piece titled Ashes about the events of September 11th. In the program notes, he wrote “Ashes was written to work as an empathetic musical response for those who suffered due to 9/11 and all other acts of senseless violence.” More recently, in response to the horrific killing of George Floyd, he co-produced a video with Choral Conductor Marika Kuzma that is underscored by his 2004 composition Visions of Glory. The video includes scenes from the aftermath of Floyd’s death along with excerpts from the Mountain Top speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Trevor Weston is emerging as an important composer for our times, and – as noted - he was first a singer. He told one interviewer, “If I write for myself, I write choral music.” His Magnificat, written for organ and SATB chorus, begins with simply written lines for soprano and alto voices and then for the tenor and bass parts, and gathers harmonic complexity and fervor until it ends with a loud and jubilant declamation. The Boston Cecilia is excited to be performing a major Weston choral work for the first time.