Press

BBC Music Magazine

Professor Nathan Holder highlights Umoja as one of the ten great classical music works by black female composers that you should know.

We Heart Music

This is great modern classical music, while still being very accessible.

WMUK

Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra music director Julian Kuerti explains their choice to program Umoja on the orchestra's spring concert.

Take Note:Taking history by the Tempo

Valerie Coleman is recognized alongside William Grant Still in a celebration of Black History Month

Bostonia

The nominations are an acknowledgment of her commitment to pieces with strong narratives, historical echoes, and sonic influences from outside the traditional classical canon. Echoes of jazz and Kentucky bluegrass, as well as gospel and contemporary music, can be heard in her compositions.

Louisville Public Media

Valerie sits down with WUOL to discuss her return to Louisville for her residency with the Louisville Orchestra.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

'For myself, growing up in Louisville, Ky., not far from where Muhammad Ali grew up and not far from where Breonna Taylor was shot and killed, my mom being that person who is a matron of a neighborhood — things like that really inform my purpose as a composer. I’m grateful to be able to have an imagination to create sound and create melody, but the idea of writing where it’s necessary to solve social-political issues is where I am right now in my life.'

I Care if You Listen

Valerie Coleman’s Tracing Visions, one of the two works written specifically for the ensemble, is the emotional heart of the album. Coleman’s gorgeous orchestration pulls every bit of color from the string orchestra to bring this piece to life.

Lenox Cultral District

'Know that the learning process is quite the journey. There’s a restrictive environment within music composition that still exists – it’s an old boy’s club that validates composers based on how much theoretical knowledge you know over creativity. But the art of composition is broader than that and is much like how painters blend colors to depict life or fantasy.'

New York Classical Review

Coleman is an heir to the great mid-20th century American orchestral music.

The Boston Globe

At this year's Grammy Awards, the New York Youth Symphony, a tuition-free orchestra made up of musicians ages 12 to 22 under the direction of conductor Michael Repper, was nominated for an album of music by Black women composers, including Valerie Coleman’s Umoja: Anthem for Unity.

WQXR

Coleman musically weaves these perspectives into a sonic mosaic of classical, folk, and urban traditions. As she told New Music USA, 'it’s my job to create music that allows that transformative power to happen.'

Washington Classical Review

The most capable handling of the orchestra came in Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout... Shimmering trumpet solos introduced this initially delicate piece, featuring superb solo work from practically every woodwind instrument.

Los Angeles Times

Coleman’s tribute to Serena Williams features wonderful virtuoso bassoon writing, played with flair by Monica Ellis, and amusing tennis sound effects.

Violinist.com

Valerie Coleman’s two-movement "Tracing Visions" is masterfully orchestrated and permeated with emotion.

Rhapsody in Black

You can easily see why Valerie Coleman will be remebered in the future: she's a flute virtuoso, she's a popular composer, she's a role modle for black musicians around the world and a mentor to her students here at home.

Lake Champlain Weekly

Yet even as she writes the music of current events, her deepest passions seem to come from what stands ahead. 'I want to really invest in ‘Generation Z,’' she proclaims. 'They believe that they can do anything. We’re teach- ing them the traditions of the past. But they are teaching us to step into the future.'

The New York Times

There was grandeur, too, in Valerie Coleman’s ‘This Is Not a Small Voice,’ her new setting of a poetic paean to Black pride by Sonia Sanchez that weaves from rumination to bold declaration. The soprano Angel Blue was keen, her tone as rich yet light as whipped cream, in a difficult solo part, which demands crisp speak-singing articulation and delves into velvety depths before soaring upward to glistening high notes.

The Philadelphia Enquirerer

an energetic statement of Black resilience

NPR's WHYY

The piece starts out quietly, suggestive of a small voice before it swells into fuller orchestrations describing the enormous power inherent inside children. Their voices may not cry for social and political change — as Sanchez’s has for decades — but rather carry the formidable force of innocence and grace.

Broadway World

BUTI offers a dazzling array of offerings for young musicians ages 14-20.

Acclaimed composers and program advisors Valerie Coleman and Missy Mazzoli have collaborated with Boston University's Martin Amlin, CFWS Director, to create a new pathway for aspiring composers at the beginning of their creative journey.

The New York Times

This five-minute score has become the orchestra’s unofficial anthem for this difficult period. Inspired by Boccaccio and the 7 p.m. cheers for frontline workers during the pandemic, the piece offers a hard-won vision of a more beautiful place.

ABC-7

Valerie Coleman wrote the piece last year when the orchestra pivoted to online performances. 'That in and of itself was really a symbol of the times, but now to perform it live on stage really brings new depth and meaning to it, and it's going to reach us in all new ways,' Coleman said.

Spectrum News 1

'It means so much. It tells me this piece has a place in the cannon,' said Coleman. 'It tells me the message for the piece of solidarity, that we can survive this pandemic, and this message of humanity is something that aligns with Carnegie Hall and Philadelphia orchestra. I think when that happens from a musical standpoint it moves mountains. It’s magical.'

The New York Times

These threads [of the Black experience] — and the emotions entwined with them — come through vividly in Coleman’s six-minute piece [Fanfare for Uncommon Times]. It begins not with a typical fanfare salute, but a quizzical, searching line for solo trombone that soon is cushioned by pungent, soft-spoken brass chords. Unrest amid determination stirs as the music shifts into agitated episodes for percussion. The mood seems at once reflective and restless, uplifting and ominous. The elements of the Black experience during a challenging time that Coleman described come through during a passage alive with riffs for mallet percussion instruments, hints of dance and bursts of anxious frenzy. By the end, with spurts of four-note brass motifs, echoes of Coplandesque affirmation arise, but also a breathless flurry that feels bracing yet challenging.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

It was the feeling of hope and renewal, though, that prevailed, and it ran through the repertoire. Nothing could have come across as more spring-green than Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout’ What’s great about it is how it transcends its programmatic mission. The short piece has been performed before by the orchestra online with real impact. The music builds into something momentous, recalling the proud spirit of Copland’s Third Symphony.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Coleman’s music has a special kind of joy. It’s not ecstatic, but, rather, carefree – the same sense of liberation and goodness that has been central to a certain American sound in classical music for decades.

Performance Today

Her work as an instrumentalist alone would be enough to win. She's an extraordinary flutist with wide-ranging interests and talents...To add to that, she is now channeling her immense creativity into composition, with works that speak in her own compelling voice. That would be enough. Our choice was clear.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Let’s start off by calling Umoja, Anthem for Unity exactly what it is apart from the question of who wrote it. It’s a terrific work. The piece — umoja means unity in Swahili — arcs from serene peace to racing tension before emerging in sunlit joy. That’s a lot in 10 or so minutes.

The Washington Post

Coleman effortlessly veered into jazz styles, such as the smoky tango in the “Maya Angelou” movement, and used percussion strikes humorously to evoke the smack of tennis balls in “Serena Williams.” The virtuosic playing of flutist Brandon George lit up the “Caravana” movement, dedicated to immigrant women crossing the U.S. southern border only to be separated from their children.

The New York Times

Ms. Coleman’s “Phenomenal Women” is a six-part concerto grosso for wind quintet, written for the ensemble Imani Winds. (She was the group’s founding flutist.) The juxtaposition of instrumental solos, chamber ensemble and orchestral textures created moments of memorable freshness and color.

The New York Times

Coleman’s Phenomenal Women is a six-part concerto grosso for wind quintet. The juxtaposition of instrumental solos, chamber ensemble and orchestral textures created moments of memorable freshness and color. Five movements are dedicated to women who inspired Ms. Coleman — Maya Angelou, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, tennis star Serena Williams, Michelle Obama and Olympic boxer Claressa Shields. This allowed Ms. Coleman to show off her gifts for tone painting. She brilliantly captured the thwack-thwack of a tennis ball bounced in preparation for a serve. Staccato oboe notes tapped out a stream of digits in the movement dedicated to Johnson, while excited ascending figures traced the eventual liftoff of a spacecraft. The five Imani players performed the music with charisma and verve. Tucked between these portraits was a poignant movement dedicated to the mothers walking in the caravan of migrants headed for the American border. A solo flute wove echoes of Brahms’s classic Lullaby into a series of increasingly agitated flourishes. The music spoke of both tenderness and terror.

Washington Post

In 1997, Coleman, unhappy with the underrepresentation of musicians of color in the classical music world, founded Imani Winds, a wind quintet whose name is the Swahili word for "hope." The group has gone on to considerable success, and Coleman remains its flutist and composer in residence...

Chicago Classical Review

The evening’s finale was also its most successful work, Coleman’s Bronzeville...Throughout Coleman used Morse code for the words “sisters,” “Bronzeville,” and “God” to create rhythmic ostinatos—a particularly inventive touch.

The Washington Post

Red Clay and Mississippi Delta, by Valerie Coleman, was terrific. A family portrait in sound, all the warts and quirks of querulous aunts, sleepy, slow-walking uncles and playful kids were vivid in this short stunner, and the performance captured the essence of each character. In the two klezmer dances, the clarinet wailed as though the sound were being extruded from some rusty pipe and then took off in ­cantillation-like spirals of ecstasy.