Songs by Trevor Weston, with Words and Music by Ignatius Sancho

In this concert, soprano Sonya Headlam and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess present the world-premiere performance of Reflections, a song cycle for voice and historical piano by New Jersey-based composer Trevor Weston. Weston’s pieces are based on excerpts from the correspondence of Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century Black writer and composer who was also the first Black British person to cast a vote in an election. Sancho’s writings address topics ranging from everyday life to religion and family to the horrors of the international slave trade, and he encoded subtle antiracist messages in his music. The concert also features songs and instrumental music written by Sancho himself, as well as works by other composers and writers of African descent from the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.