Maurice Weddington heard classical music for the first time in the late 50s, when he was attending Dunbar Vocational High School. “A very weird schoolmate introduced me to Stravinsky by playing a recording of Le sacre du printemps. It did impress me deeply. In fact, it changed my life. It showed me how serious music could be put together. So I signed up for a theory course.” He already knew how to play the trumpet, flute, and bassoon, and jazz was a passion. “I was of course in love with Monk, Miles, and Coltrane. Jazz gave me scope. Yet I’m still amazed that I didn’t think twice about becoming a classical composer. I knew at 16 this was the only way I could express myself.”
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But Weddington graduated in 1962, at a time when only a handful of blacks had managed to make a career as classical composers. “Given the institutional racism in this country, I wouldn’t have survived here back then. I felt Europe was my destiny and destination. There I could immerse myself in classical music. So I decided on Paris. What the heck! I wanted to study with Olivier Messiaen, who, I was told, would take in promising students regardless of their background. I bought a ticket on Pan Am.
He met a Danish woman in the Rodin Museum. “She offered me her food packages. We fell in love and did a lot of crazy things. At the end of our time together she told me to look her up in Copenhagen.” He spent the next year hitchhiking around Europe and writing music, and finally wound up in Copenhagen. He found the woman, but she was getting married the next day.
A couple of years ago he was in Paris for a recital of his latest works when he was approached by a sinologist named Peter Way. “Way said my music, in collapsing perspectives, reminded him of Asian art. So he suggested that I compose a piece to evoke and possibly duplicate the sense of an old painting. I felt very comfortable with the proposal. After all, painters, like composers, work with ideas about structure and perception. I said yes, then Way showed me photos of some scrolls.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
