Valerie Coleman (CFA’95) found out she had been nominated for a Grammy while she was teaching a master class at the Eastman School of Music. “We were able to turn it into a learning moment,” she says. Photos by Kia Caldwell

Music

Composer Valerie Coleman Explores the Dark Side of Jubilation

CFA alum earns a second Grammy nomination, this time for her contemporary classical work Revelry

When the Recording Academy announced in November that composer, flutist, and educator Valerie Coleman had been nominated for a Grammy for the second time, she was teaching a master class at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. 

“I saw that my phone had a bunch of text messages, and that’s how I found out—in front of my students,” says Coleman (CFA’95).

Recognition for Revelry, nominated for best contemporary classical composition, is nice, Coleman says, but the moment was sweeter because she was surrounded by her pupils.

“I was able to talk to them about the process of submitting work for consideration, and what it looks like to be a member of the Grammy Association, as well—the business aspects of things. We were able to turn that into a learning moment.”

The 67th Grammy Awards ceremony takes place on Sunday, February 2.

Coleman’s career is in part defined by her commitment to fostering the next generation of musicians. In 2023, the New York Youth Symphony made Grammy history when they won best orchestral performance with their album Works by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, and Valerie Coleman, the first youth orchestra ever to do so. The album also brought the first Grammy recognition to three Black, female classical composers.

“They won that award by virtue of the quality of their performance, beating out major symphony orchestras,” says Coleman, who attended the BU Tanglewood Institute as a high schooler and now directs its woodwind quintet workshop. “The biggest thrill for me is to see these young minds do their thing, to meet them year after year, to advise them, to write recommendations for them as they apply to college, to see where they go with their careers, and to help out as an orbiting mentor.”

Coleman’s first Grammy nomination, for best classical crossover album, The Classical Underground, was shared with her ensemble Imani Winds in 2005.

The nominations are an acknowledgment of her commitment to pieces with strong narratives, historical echoes, and sonic influences from outside the traditional classical canon. Echoes of jazz and Kentucky bluegrass, as well as gospel and contemporary music, can be heard in her compositions.

“The industry is going through a few changes and a few evolutions—sometimes we walk backward a little bit, sometimes we move a little bit forward,” Coleman says. “It all depends on our programming and how much we want to engage audiences with the traditional versus living art…. I find it really exciting that the Grammy Association is holding ground and advocating for new music and the works of contemporary composers.” 

Revelry is a 10-minute composition commissioned in 2018 by Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect fellowship program and performed by members of the Decoda ensemble during its Carnegie residency. In May 2024, Decoda included Revelry on their self-titled debut album. 

Coleman says Decoda wanted Revelry to be the focal piece of their Carnegie concert. “So I really started to dig into what ‘revelry’ means and what it looks like,” she says. “It can mean elation, but I think it’s what happens when things lose control.”

The piece is divided into movements focusing on the word in different contexts. The first, a lugubrious number evoking the woozy sway of a Cab Calloway tune, explores the dark side of jubilation—the party at 6 am, when the house is trashed and a harsh sun is on the rise. 

“It’s centered around certain behaviors of people when they drink, when they party too hard,” she says. “It has this sense of sinewy movement—there might be introspective feelings, or feelings of sadness or erratic behavior.”

The second movement, she says, is about warfare.

“It’s a circumstance that you would not think would lend itself to revelry, and it’s a little more spiky,” Coleman says. “There’s a lot of confusion: What do I do here? Do I walk this road? Do I run that way? I wanted to bring in crashes of bombs, with the piano crashing down, and really strong articulations, where you might hear little calls of patriotic triumph, but done in a more sarcastic way.”

That movement was inspired by what was going on in the world at the time. “That frustration manifested, and I decided to put pen to paper,” she says. “It has a visceral energy, and that’s probably what carried it through its orchestration.”

Coleman is known for her deep connection to history and the Black experience in America; her works include Wish: Sonatine for Flute and Piano, a dark tour through the transatlantic slave trade, and Umoja: Anthem of Unity, evoking the sharing of oral histories around a drum circle.

Over the summer, she’ll be working on a 20-minute commission from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra about the 2020 murder of George Floyd. It’s a meditation on one of darkest chapters in the country’s recent history, but she’s determined to find the light.

“My pieces are always centered, one way or another, around joy and celebrating the common threads of human nature,” she says. “So it’s been taking me a while to really find that in this piece. But what I’m leaning toward is that we need an end to division—that old adage that love can conquer hate.”