"The piece is amazing... all the audience members I spoke with, as well as the orchestra, agreed."
— Jed Gaylin, Conductor, Hopkins Symphony Orchestra
World Premiere · April 18, 2026 · Shriver Hall, Johns Hopkins University
The Art of Musical Portraiture
Musical portraiture represents a composer's attempt to capture the essence of a person through sound — much as a visual artist renders a subject through paint and canvas. Rather than depicting physical likeness, the composer reveals character, spirit, and symbolic meaning through carefully chosen melodic lines, rhythmic patterns, harmonic progressions, and orchestral colors. This art form belongs to the rich tradition of program music, where compositions transcend pure abstraction to evoke narrative, personality, and atmosphere.
In the case of portraiture, the music becomes a sonic biography — sometimes reverent, sometimes provocative, but always deeply engaged with its subject's humanity and historical significance.
Douglass Portrait draws profound inspiration from the life, words, and moral vision of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) — abolitionist, orator, writer, statesman, and prophetic voice for American justice. Following in the tradition of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, this composition weaves together original narration with excerpts from Douglass's own speeches and writings, creating a bridge between his nineteenth-century struggle for freedom and our ongoing challenges today. This work inaugurates my ongoing series of orchestral portraits honoring influential Black Americans whose legacies continue to shape our national conscience.
The Commission and World Premiere
Douglass Portrait was commissioned by Jed Gaylin and the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra at Johns Hopkins University in the summer of 2025. It received its world premiere on April 18, 2026, at Shriver Hall, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland — a few miles from the Fells Point shipyards where Frederick Douglass once labored as an enslaved man. The work was paired with Copland's Lincoln Portrait, with both works narrated by Johns Hopkins alumnus and Shakespearean actor Gerrad Alex Taylor. The performance concluded with a standing ovation.
The response confirmed what the score had always suggested: that Douglass's words, amplified by a full orchestra in the city that shaped him, carry a power that reaches every kind of listener.
Why This Piece, Why This Voice
I grew up on a sharecropper's farm in rural North Carolina — the landscape of poverty and racial injustice that Douglass wrote about not as ancient history, but as the living condition of Black Americans across generations. In my early teens, I spent two years on the streets of Baltimore in the 1960s — the very city where Douglass was enslaved, where he learned to read, where he worked the shipyards, and from which he escaped to freedom in 1838. I walked those same racially divided streets without yet knowing that I was walking in his footsteps. I know it now. And I have written music about it.
Tupac Shakur — one of the defining voices of his generation on the subjects of race, survival, and dignity in America — was the son of my first cousin. He and I were shaped, in different decades, by the same Baltimore world and the same family inheritance: a Black American family carrying the unbroken weight of this country's history, city by city, generation by generation.
During my 1970 military service in Vietnam, I recorded musical themes and motifs into a cassette recorder on a $35 guitar. Those melodies, shaped by wartime experience and the PTSD that followed, found their way into my later compositions — and ultimately into Douglass Portrait. In weaving those personal musical memories into the Douglass story, I bring together two American experiences of suffering, survival, and hard-won dignity that are rarely heard in the same room.
Douglass Portrait is not a work I wrote about someone else's history. It is the work that only I could write — the convergence of a life and a legacy that have been moving toward each other for decades.
Baltimore: The City That Runs Through Everything
Frederick Douglass was not merely associated with Baltimore — he was formed by it. He came to the city as a child, learned to read on its streets, labored in its Fells Point shipyards as an enslaved caulker, and escaped from its harbor in 1838, boarding a train at President Street Station — the oldest surviving railroad terminus in America, still standing today. Baltimore was both his prison and his school, and everything he became was shaped by what this city gave him, including its cruelty.
I arrived in Baltimore more than a century later, a Black teenager from the rural South navigating the same invisible walls of race and poverty. The layered Baltimore inheritance — Douglass's and mine, separated by more than a hundred years but connected by the same city and the same American condition — gives Douglass Portrait a depth of place that runs all the way through the score.
Structure and Musical Language
Douglass Portrait unfolds across two major parts containing eight narrative sections, each pairing spoken narration and oratory with orchestral textures that evoke the drama, urgency, resilience, and hope that defined Douglass's extraordinary life. Two recurring motifs anchor the score:
The "Passage" Theme — A connecting thread representing Douglass's metaphorical and literal journeys: from bondage to freedom, from America to Europe, from silence to eloquent advocacy.
"The Slave's Cry" — An ostinato (a repeated musical phrase) that echoes the persistent anguish and yearning of the enslaved, returning across the work as both wound and witness.
The score also incorporates melodic material I first played into that cassette recorder in Vietnam — themes that have evolved across decades of composition and find their fullest expression here, woven into the Douglass story as a thread of personal memory and historical witness.
Instrumentation
Piccolo · Flutes (2) · Oboes (2) · English Horn · B♭ Clarinets (2) · Bass Clarinet · Bassoons (2) · Contrabassoon · French Horns (4) · Trumpets (3) · Trombones (3) · Timpani · Percussion (4) · Drum Set (optional) · Strings · Narrator · Orator
Narrator text conceived and written by J. Kimo Williams. Orator text consists of direct quotations from the writings and speeches of Frederick Douglass.
Guest Artist: Vinnie Colaiuta
The optional trap set portion of the score was conceived in collaboration with legendary drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, who may be available as a featured guest artist for select performances, schedule permitting. Widely regarded as one of the greatest drummers in the history of recorded music, Colaiuta has performed and recorded with Frank Zappa, Jeff Beck, Sting, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and many others across a career spanning five decades. Where Colaiuta is not available, another professionally recognized trap set artist may perform the role.
A Work With Global Resonance
The international significance of Douglass Portrait extends well beyond the United States. In August 1845, Frederick Douglass arrived in Dublin — the first stop on a transformative five-month journey through Ireland that he later described as the moment he was received, for the first time in his life, "not as a colour, but as a man." Ireland has never forgotten that visit. Today his legacy is honored through monuments across the island: the first statue of a Black statesman in Europe, unveiled in Belfast in 2023; a 12-stop Douglass trail in Cork; and commemorative plaques in Dublin. Ireland was also the first country outside the United States to publish Douglass's autobiography, printed in Dublin in 1845.
Douglass Portrait has been proposed for Irish premiere performances with the National Symphony Orchestra Ireland in Dublin, the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast, and the Cork Symphony Orchestra — each in cities where Douglass himself stood and spoke. A performance in Ireland would not merely echo this history. It would complete a circle that began 181 years ago on a Dublin quayside.
Programming Note
Douglass Portrait — approximately 20 minutes — is ideally suited to American Voices programming, civic engagement initiatives, and concerts exploring the full arc of the American story through music. It is a natural companion to Copland's Lincoln Portrait, and a powerful standalone statement in any program centered on history, justice, or the Black American experience.
Score, parts, CGI video, audio modeling files, rehearsal tracks, teacher's guide, technical rider, and all supporting materials are available at:
kimowilliams.com/catalog/classical/dp/dp.html
— J. Kimo Williams