If love will not swing wide the gates (clarinet concerto)

PROGRAM NOTE

When Anthony McGill and I began discussing a clarinet concerto, we settled on a concept around the winding relationship between Black and Jewish communities in the 20th century: in music and civil rights, through moments of allyship and of ugly prejudice. I compiled a reading list and began my research.

Almost at once, I ran headlong into a quandary: there is, of course, no single Jewish community, just as there is no single Black community. One can hardly define a single community, let alone the dynamic between two, without being wildly reductive. Indeed, contemporary politics in the West is poisoned by the tendency among many to reduce large groups of people to cartoonish monoliths, while demonstrating little curiosity about the contradictions that exist not only within a group, but within a single person.

I abandoned the extramusical concept and began writing intuitively, thinking only of the glorious sound that emerges from Anthony’s instrument, which is itself a conduit to his capacious heart and mind. What emerged was a work in three continuous movements, with an intermezzo and cadenza between the second and third, all bookended by a mirrored, languid introduction and coda.

When it came time to give the work a title, I studied the score, looking for clues as to its “theme.” I’m a skeptic as far as fixed meaning in music is concerned, but there seemed to be something openhearted in the piece: no matter its tempo, texture, or character, I thought, love was never far from the surface.

A few days later, I stumbled upon this quotation from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time:

The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.

Ours is an era in which love is mostly absent from politics and the public square. So perhaps, in the end, I wrote the piece I’d set out to create in the first place. I had wanted to examine the relationship between two communities as a case study in coalition building whose goal is the creation of a more humane society. While there is little about which we can generalize, I will say confidently, with Baldwin, that if love will not swing wide the gates, nothing will.

— Gabriel Kahane, September, 2024

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If love will not swing wide the gates (excerpt)

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