God Forbid

Program Notes

God Forbid came to be as part of the YOU ARE HERE project, curated by the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) and by Matt Albert, Chair of the Chamber Music department at Michigan. For this project, we were asked to write a new work to partner with an extant work of art in the UMMA’s core collections—and I had the great luck to be assigned a work by the late great Louise Nevelson, specifically her Black Excursion No. 13.

Almost all anecdotes around Louise Nevelson position her as “the most forceful,” a juggernaut of an artist who aimed for the top and didn't let up until she arrived, challenging the male-dominated field in which she had to fight for every inch of space she gained. God Forbid reflects both the orderliness of Black Excursion No. 13 and the unrelenting artist behind the pristineness. The title references a Nevelson quote about her former in-laws, art “connoisseurs” who disliked Nevelson's artistic pursuits, largely for misogynistic presumptions of who could be an artist, a “genius.” To this, Nevelson said: "Within that circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.”