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Raehann Bryce-Davis Sings With a Sense of Grandeur
Lisa Hirsch of San Francisco Classical Voice
January 30, 2024
Over the last few years, mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis has gotten top-notch reviews of her stage appearances from SF Classical Voice’s writers. On Jan. 27, she presented a recital called “In Honor of Women” at Herbst Theatre for San Francisco Performances. Her wonderfully diverse program also honored Blackness, Black composers, mothers, and her own mother’s Jamaican roots in particular, and it gave Bryce-Davis every opportunity to show the depth of her artistry. [...]
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On the second half of the program, following brief songs by the 20th-century Black composers Margaret Bonds (“Birth”) and Florence Price (“The Crescent Moon”), Bryce-Davis sang Melissa Dunphy’s “Come, My Tan-Faced Children.” This song sets excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” It was written for Bryce-Davis and is specifically intended to be sung by Black mezzo-sopranos.
In the composer’s words, it “recontextualizes” the text “in a way that the poet almost certainly never intended,” because Whitman, while opposed to slavery, also held racist views about Black people and thought they should not have full American citizenship. The original poem “was Whitman’s call to arms for white pioneers” to fight in the Civil War, but the particular excerpted texts carry “an entirely different meaning” when sung by a woman of color, “especially now during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The song is by turns lyrical and dissonant but above all dramatic and exciting, covering a wide vocal range. The excerpted texts evoke danger, weapons, and being in the vanguard — and of course, the song fits Bryce-Davis like a glove. [...]