For a night, ‘The Lost Village of Seneca’ springs to life in Manhattan

For decades, Seneca Village was a thriving 19th century community predominantly of Black New Yorkers, until city officials forced the residents out in order to make way for the development of Central Park. That history, largely erased, is being brought to life in a musical performance by students of Juilliard School.

The two-hour production of composer Thomas Flippin’s “The Lost Village of Seneca” and other works will take place at the Chelsea Factory on Friday, Feb. 23, and be livestreamed as well. Performers will include the Ivalas Quartet, the school’s graduate student string quartet, as well as Pre-College program students.

The production follows years of work by archaeologists who have attempted to piece together the lives of Seneca Village’s residents from its origins in 1825, when a Black shoeshiner by the name of Andrew Williams bought three lots for $125. The production is also the outgrowth of what a school official said was the continuing cultural introspection spurred by George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

In an interview, Flippin said he was “ashamed to admit” that as a one-time resident of Manhattan, he went years without knowing anything about Seneca Village, but upon encountering an article about it, dove into its history. The community grew until 1857, when the residents were displaced from the center of Manhattan–from along the Upper West Side, from 82nd Street to 89th Street.

“I kept peeling back one layer after another,” said Flippin. “And I learned more and more: amazing things about my ancestors in the Black community and the hardships that they had to endure, but also the resilience of this community.”

'Composing Inclusion'

Flippin’s composition emerged from a 2022 initiative known as “Composing Inclusion,” a partnership between The Juilliard School’s Preparatory Division, the American Composers Forum and the New York Philharmonic that aims to increase the ranks of Black and Latino composers in the field.

“The Lost Village of Seneca” is musically wide-ranging. At times, Flippin said, it recalls the “very dissonant” jazz of Charles Mingus while other passages draw upon “1980s classical music minimalism” and “a very white, Eurocentric classical style from the 1700s and 1800s.” The first movement of the composition, he said, evoked the music of juba, a dance form performed by enslaved Black people accompanied by complex hand-clapping and the slapping of thighs and knees.

“It's actually a plantation song that a lot of enslaved Africans did because they weren't allowed to have drums, for fear of sending coded messages,” said Flippin.

“I thought, ‘How cool would it be to have this traditional African American plantation [music] performed by these Pre-College and Music Advancement Program students at Juilliard, one of the most prestigious music schools in the world and a bastion of European classical music?’” he said.

Alma Wosner, a 16-year-old cellist in Juilliard’s Pre-College program who will be part of the performance at the Chelsea Factory, said the composition was challenging.

“There are some really tricky passages in terms of rhythm, and being able to stay with the rest of the group,” she said in an email.

“The big difference for me with this piece is that it's set in New York City, where I've grown up, and more specifically in Central Park, which is right by my house,” said Wosner. “Even though I've lived here my whole life, I've never really immersed myself in the history of the area, and it was really cool to be able to learn more about it through music, because it wasn't really something I was expecting to encounter.”

What once was there

This is the second time the composition will be performed, following a premiere at the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church last year in Harlem that included members of the New York Philharmonic along with Juilliard students.

Cynthia Copeland, a public historian who serves as president of the Institute for the Study of the Exploration of Seneca Village, said in an interview with the Museum of Modern Art that prior to their displacement, residents of Seneca Village “were considered tramps, squatters, and thieves” who weren’t entitled to the land.

“There was this smear campaign in the newspapers to say that these people lived in shanties and shacks,” said Copeland. “And all the research that we uncovered told a different story. It showed that the people actually did own the land. They did have rights to be there.”

Some of the homes, said Copeland, were two- and three-story structures. This wealth allowed certain residents of Seneca Village to qualify for voting rights, despite racially discriminatory laws that required African American men to own at least $250 in property in order to vote. Signage and easy-to-miss markers are all that signal what was there.

“Of the 100 black New Yorkers eligible to vote in 1845,” reads a 2018 article by the Central Park Conservancy, “10 lived in Seneca Village.”

Expanding the musical repertoire

Weston Sprott, the dean and director of the Preparatory Division at the Juilliard School, said Floyd’s killing was a formative event and had prompted introspection within the world of classical music along with efforts to make the curriculum less Eurocentric.

However, these same initiatives have also received opposition.

One article, published by the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, argued that “woke warriors” were attempting to “strangle” classical music. And in a 2021 piece published by the conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, titled “Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 1),” the author Heather Mac Donald wrote, “Classical music is under racial attack.”

Sprott, however, said efforts to expand the musical repertoire had been “incredibly rewarding for everyone involved,” namely students.

“Some of them have said that playing these concerts inspired them to understand that this is what they want to do,” he said.

For ticket information and other program notes, visit the Juilliard site online.