Check Out "Words Like Freedom" by Leo Yablans

“Words Like Freedom” for piano and solo soprano
Composer Leo Yablans
Text by Langston Hughes
From the composer:
The brutal killing of George Floyd in June 2020 once again elucidated a racial problem and endemic to the entire United States. While I will never truly understand the Black American experience, I feel immense empathy and sorrow for the injustice constantly dealt to such a community. While continuing to apprehend information and arguments regarding incidents like Floyd’s murder, I consistently would think of the Langston Hughes poem “Words Like Freedom”, which displays a deep indictment of America’s hypocrisy surrounding race, so I decided to put those words to music. I found the soundscape that best articulated that hypocrisy Hughes exposes was atonality, as the “uncomfortable” intervals it emphasizes (semitones, whole tones, and tritones) gave a broken and eerily decrepit feel to the piece. The piece is performed generally at a lower volume, with a climax appearing in the poem’s second verse, emphasizing Hughes’ profound anger and grief. At the song’s end, I repeat the last word of the poem “why” in the form of a question, so as to pose a simple plea to the perpetrators of this egregious injustice - “why?”
Soprano: Christine Cornell
Piano: Emile Blondel
Recorded at Conveyor Studios, Brooklyn
Engineer: Peter Karl