Before COVID struck, exciting things were happening in the neighborhood of Harlem. There were historical architectural renovations and rejuvenation projects, but most importantly there were a growing number of highly creative performing arts groups creating new and exciting programs.

Despite the tumultuous economic turns that came with the pandemic, when the rest of the world turned off, rather than just shut down the arts, the Harlem Chamber Players found creative ways to start a whole new presence and gain a following as an online performing arts entity with innovative, exciting, and fun programs.

I sat down with Liz Player, Founder and Artistic Director of the Harlem Chamber Players to find out how this NYC grassroots organization managed to grow and thrive despite the pandemic.

How did you first get into classical music?

Well, I grew up as an army brat. My father was African American and my mother was Korean. My dad just loved music and had a record collection but I did not grow up in a neighborhood that had classical music. My friend Sally, across the street, played clarinet and I wanted to play. First, I played in the band and then I joined the Mercer County Youth Symphony Orchestra,  which became the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra. From our little town of Burlington, NJ we would carpool there. The wind players all came from out of town. The string players came from wealthier neighborhoods. I loved it and it provided a lot of solace for me, but my parents both came from working backgrounds and they didn’t understand how much I loved music. They didn’t see it as a profession. So, I studied computer science...but then I went back to school for a second degree in music. I loved chamber music. I would program a recital once a year, which led to a wind quintet (the West Harlem Winds). Then I got involved with the New York City Housing Symphony Orchestra. It was predominantly Black and Latino and it was the first time I played with an orchestra where everyone looked like me and everyone was good. It was an incredible orchestra and the atmosphere was different than a traditional orchestra, where you might feel unwelcome since you’d be the only Black person or one of two people, there. 

How did that lead you to creating the Harlem Chamber Players?

When the New York City Housing Symphony Orchestra started to fade out and the funding was cut, it dwindled but there were still annual galas at Carnegie Hall, which is where I met a violist, named Charles Dalton and I told him about my series idea. In the summer of 2008, we started a summer festival of chamber music at St. Mary’s Church, which was an ambitious series of four concerts between June and August, 2008. It was all Mozart. Only 20 people showed up at the first concert and it was mostly friends and family but we decided to continue. We performed the Schubert Octet—which was tough—but suddenly the third concert was 50-60 people and we knew we could continue. By the second or third season we still didn’t have a name, and then….

Then I met Carl Jackson, who is now my professional and domestic partner. Carl came up with the name. He said “West Harlem? Why not take all of Harlem?"

Where do you get all these creative program ideas?

Terence McKnight (from WQXR) and his wife, who is the harpist and scholar, Dr. Ashley Jackson have both been passionate and actively involved in our organization before and even during the pandemic. This pandemic has forced us to think outside the box. In Song and Spirit is our first music documentary.

I’m also always getting ideas from our musicians, we just try to imagine how does this feel for our audience journey from beginning to end.

How does your work with the Harlem Chamber Players comment on current social or political issues?

Well, I curated our Black History Month program and this upcoming, world premiere commission: Adolphus Hailstork’s “Tulsa 1921: Pity These Ashes, Pity This Dust” with the title by his friend, the prize winning poet, Herbert Woodward Martin.

I was intrigued by those words, that idea, because growing up in a suburb of South Jersey, I didn’t know my history. We sort of think of slavery as this little clip in our past. It’s painful to learn this so late in life and one of the reasons I want to present these concerts is how important it is to know our history and to dispel the myths and lies we are told that we are inferior. When we first started in 2008, we loved Bach and Beethoven, but I wasn’t that familiar with Black composers. Learning a lot from Terence Mc Knight. I’d pick his brain. He and Ashley have both really inspired me. I started listening and realizing the wealth of gorgeous music and this wonderful history that we can share.

Do you have any fun memories of the New York Public Library?

My favorite library to go to when I was studying music was the LPA. I borrowed many, many cds from there just to learn about music. It was before YouTube exploded. Just going to the library, that’s where I learned about music and that’s how I learned growing up, too. I didn’t have a background in classical music, my parents didn’t know. I remember getting those excerpts, books and albums from the library. I was such a nerd in school, I’d come home with a pile of books and read—mostly fiction.

Has literature impacted your vision as a musician and a producer?

I used to love books that had a lot of fantasy: mythology, Ray Bradberry, Madeline L’engle, and then Gabriel Garcia Márquez—surrealism, magical realism—Toni Morrison, but I also love the passionate writing of James Baldwin. So I think I sort of have similar taste in music in that it has to be rich and lyrical or draw me away from my world right now. I think when people come to hear a concert, they want to be changed in a way—not just something that’s cerebral—but that really draws you, which is why I loved romantic era music.

Who are some of your biggest musical influences?

I remember the first time I heard Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Le Caprice de Nanette” and I listened to it over and over again. I love the lyricism of Adolphus Hailstork, which is why we program him a lot. Actually, my partner, Carl and I both love Bach’s music. Carl is a real Bach aficionado. He stays up all night listening to Bach’s lesser known work and it actually sounds like jazz. When he started playing it for me, I thought “wow that’s Bach!?! He’s the original jazz musician!” 

Would you say that there’s a second Harlem Renaissance happening now?

I absolutely believe that! There are so many performing arts organizations. I also work with the Harlem Arts Collaborative and we were actually planning our Harlem Renaissance Centennial Celebrations, when COVID hit. We were going to do Nathaniel Dett’s “The Ordering of Moses” as a way to partner up with some of the other Harlem-based organizations: Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, the Harlem Cultural Collaborative, and St. John the Divine. Now scheduled for June 17, 2022, Nathaniel Dett's composition is gorgeous music and it exemplifies the Harlem Renaissance. We enlisted Damien Sneed to be our musical director with soloists, 100 member choir for 100 years! So, after all that planning, we had to stop and change everything. We had to pivot to online programming but we scrambled and went from no online presence to “pandemic busters” emails, starting up our online videos of our world premiere “Nobody Know “ in 2019 by Hailstork, excerpts from Bach concerts, a George Walker string concert.

In a strange way, we thrived during the pandemic and were able to get a much larger audience. Seth Colter Walls of the New York Times reached out to us. He was meant to come to the world premiere concert and the "pandemic busters" email inspired him to do an article on how smaller performing arts foundations are doing. The "Death of Classical" series reached out and put together a cemetery-wide tour featuring music, song, poetry and dancing at different stations so that small cluster groups could go on a tour for small 15-minute performances.

 They are soul stirring works including H Leslie Adams "Sence You Went Away" and an altar by a Dominican artist dedicated to those in the immigrant community that died from COVID and inspired by the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, who was buried there, and people came away really moved. It was a reckoning with the pandemic.

 

What is the best piece of advice you have ever been given as a performer?

The best advice came from my partner Carl, who told me you have to think about the audience first. That’s why every time I now put together a program, I pretend I’m the audience and I sit down and listen to the program from beginning to end.

What would you like to see more of in the classical music world?

Diversity. I think the classical music arena is one of the last art forms to really diversify. Historically in philanthropy it has been the larger, white-led organizations that received 74% more general or unrestricted funding than Black-led, smaller organizations. We want culturally relevant programs for the community and I want to be able to raise the money so we can get to a regular rehearsal schedule with funding that the performers are paid, in order to create a source of pride for the community. That’s what I’m hoping for.

The Harlem Chamber Players will be performing next on June 19, 2021 at WQXR's Green Space. For more information, check out harlemchamberplayers.org. For more classical music from NYPL's collection, feel free to check out our online catalog or visit the online Naxos Music Library using your NYPL library card.