A new work for string quartet by Columbus composer Mark Lomax, II, aims to offer a musical roadmap for making the world a better place.
The Carpe Diem String Quartet performed the world premiere of Lomax’s Ubuntu in Columbus recently on the opening concert of its 2024-25 Seize the Music concert series. Lomax’s Ubuntu is one of the 15 new works the quartet commissioned for its 15 for 15 commissioning series, celebrating the group’s 15th anniversary.
The Carpe Diem String Quartet also stopped by WOSU’s Performance Studio to share Lomax’s Ubuntu with us. View that performance in the video above.
Ubuntu, in some central and southern African languages, means “I am because you are” and “humanity toward others.” It’s a concept Lomax had viewed through a specific lens while composing his 400: An Afrikan Epic, a cycle of 12 original works exploring events and themes in African and African American history. Those works delve into African spirituality before the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, traverse the challenging terrain of slavery and offer visions for a future built on reconciling the human family.
After the 2019 release of 400: An Afrikan Epic, and in the midst of the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic and layers of widespread political division in the United States, Lomax expanded his focus as a composer.
“I had been really keen to shift from what I had been writing in terms of African and African American history, focused only with 400, to a broader kind of scope and frame,” Lomax said. “In the conversations with Korine (Carpe Diem String Quartet violist Korine Fujiwara), I was, like, we really just need music to help elevate our vibrations to this radical humanity that I think we’re missing,” Lomax said. “And so, ubuntu became the idea.”
Lomax’s Ubuntu musically embodies some of the fundamental principles of radical humanity. Over the course of the work, the four instruments in the quartet texture trace an arc from disparate individuality, suggested in each instrument’s unique rhythmic profile, to metaphorical community, manifested in unison texture passages and a final uplifting major chord.
The idea, Lomax says, is that the whole of humanity can be greater than the sum of its parts.
“Particularly in America, we have this false sense of individualism – you know, the bootstrapper argument, the sense that I can get something done and make a huge impact on the country, the world, my community all by myself,” Lomax said. “Instead, I think what serves humanity and our society best is when we realize that operating in what I call collective individualism is a way to move forward. Your individuality is what makes the collective special. So, what starts out as these disparate rhythms evolves into rhythms that are complementary because we start to understand over time – time in the piece and time in the real world – that we’re better together.”
The lean instrumentation of the string quartet, Lomax says, can convey collective individuality more clearly than most musical genres.
“The string quartet, I think, is a really interesting model for how society works or should work, in my view, because there’s no room to hide. Every part is purposeful, every part is important, every part has value. Everybody has to be engaged in order for the thing to work,” Lomax said.
And if diverse musical lines and timbres can find a way to work together and support each other over the course of a string quartet, maybe Ubuntu offers a musical snapshot of how we all might do the same.
“That was kind of my prayer,” Lomax said, “that we realize that our individual selves and expressions are what makes the tapestry of America great.”
