The sounds of my natural world are cacophonous. I constantly hear the booming bass of heavy metal gates slamming against sheet metal walls, the rhythms of unintelligible loudspeaker announcements, and the volume of men yelling to one another, “Yo, you got my lighter?” This noise is distracting to most, yet I use it to write operas from a prison cell.
Nothing about me says “opera composer.” I’m Black. I’m 6 feet tall, 245 pounds, and I sport thicker-than-average dreadlocks. I’m from Brownsville, Brooklyn — one of the most crime-ridden and impoverished neighborhoods in New York City. And I’m incarcerated for murder.
I fell in love with opera at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a notorious maximum security prison located in the woods of Westchester, New York. From 2014 to 2023, I participated in Musicambia and Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections, programs that pair professional musicians and singers with incarcerated men to develop their musical talents through workshops culminating in concerts held for the incarcerated population and, since 2023, their families.
Workshops for each program were on alternating weeks. Our main gathering place was the music room, which was really a garage on the ground floor of the prison’s school building. The ceilings were high. The pipes were leaky. The window panes were rusted. The microphones, music stands and electric cables were caged.
Instruction for different instruments took place in the classrooms up and down the hallway. For the first three years, I did not have an instrument; they had run out. So I would wander from room to room as men bowed cellos, strummed guitar strings and blew horns. I would sit in the corner with a pencil and manuscript paper and jot down notes about how each instrument worked, what their ranges of sound were and what tricks they could do.
I would also play around with the harmonies and rhythms I found on the keyboard in the music room. More advanced students would often ask, “Is that what you meant to play?” Others would say, “That timing is wrong.” But the sounds I was making were not wrong or off. Without knowing what the techniques were called, I was experimenting with advanced Neoclassical styles and polyrhythmic and odd meters. As I learned music theory, I was opening my ear to new possibilities.
I discovered the possibilities of opera in 2015 when Grammy-winning opera singer Joyce DiDonato attended a session as a guest artist. She was inspired to volunteer with the program because of her performances in “Dead Man Walking,” an opera about a nun’s encounter with a man on death row.
I expected a Rubenesque woman in a stereotypical Viking costume to walk in, but Joyce was thin and sported a blonde pixie cut and purple suede boots. She smiled broadly and sang a song to introduce herself. Her voice filled the former garage, rising and falling over and under the exposed pipes and tumbling on the half-painted concrete floor. I felt the emotion of what she was singing, even though I could not understand Italian. The music played by her personal pianist was equally dramatic, shifting and blending harmony and melody with feeling.
The piece I had written, and that she agreed to sing with me, was subdued and conventional.
We performed it later that night in the dimly lit auditorium under bright stage lights. The audience was filled with boisterous incarcerated critics. I covered the microphone like rap artists do, and it caused feedback. A chorus of shrieking waves accompanied my voice each time I sang.
Joyce looked on, then smiled encouragingly as sweat cascaded down my forehead. But she also clenched her microphone tightly, holding it close to her stomach. “I wanted to help you so badly,” she said afterward. Before she headed out of the door, Joyce told us that she would return the following year. I promised that I would have something better for her. She gave me a weary smile.
When I returned to my cell, I pulled out my Sony Walkman and rolled the analog radio dial until I found a classical music station, WQXR 105.9 FM. I slowly walked from the bars, past the desk, and to the window that faced a brick wall until I found the best reception. As a makeshift antenna, I used a detached headphone wire sprouting copper threads rolled around a paperclip. I pressed the paperclip through the wire mesh window screen and lay on the cot next to it.
In the rare quiet of the night, as faint rectangular slabs of light crept through the bars of the window, I listened to a song that went on forever.
I was used to three-minute songs composed of a chorus, verses and a bridge.
I tried to discern this song’s structure, but it kept changing.
I connected with this music, digesting what the instruments were saying. They were together in unison, then arguing in dissonance, then agreeing in harmony. After about a half hour, the jockey announced that it was a symphony. I didn’t even know what that was at the time.
As I listened to it more and more, I learned that classical music is like life — full of precious but fleeting moments. Even when you’re playing the same notes, how it sounds depends on the instrument you’re playing. I didn't get that immediately. That took time.
Joyce lent her voice to Sing Sing from 2015 to 2018 and then in 2023. In 2017, as she was promoting her latest album, “In War and Peace — Harmony Through Music,” she was accompanied by her personal pianist and a string orchestra, including small double bass, cello, viola and violin sections.
This was the closest I was going to get to writing for a symphony orchestra in a prison, and I took full advantage of the opportunity to hear live instruments playing my version of those tricky sounds I had heard on the radio and learned about in workshops. It was not a great piece. But it went over better than the last time.
Before that evening’s performance, we all sat in the facility's Catholic chapel, eating a catered meal of salad, penne alla vodka, eggplant parmesan and chicken and rice courtesy of Carnegie Hall. Stained-glass windows refracted sunlight. Painted religious sentinels stood watch as the musicians asked me questions about my composition choices and gave me feedback about my technique. One pointed out how the bow on a string instrument is but so long. Another reminded me that singers and players from the woodwind and brass sections needed to take breaths. I had been composing on a keyboard, pressing the keys of a synthesizer. I was not taking into account the human limitations of playing the actual instruments.
That night, Joyce's voice swooshed from the front of the stage to the guards’ desk in the back of the prison’s auditorium as she sang selections from her album. The album was a compilation of arias — songs that reflect characters’ innermost thoughts — from various operas. During that concert, I decided to write my own aria.
To start, I needed a good story. I looked around me. The story was right in my face. I wrote about a boy who was trapped in — and physically attached to — a cube made of dust containing the souls of his ancestors. The boy escapes the cube and enters a world that is hostile toward him. Unprepared to deal with the outside world and lacking conflict resolution skills, he commits murder. He pleads for mercy, but the ancestors of the murdered character want revenge.
After I sketched out the plot, I made a list of each character’s gender and assigned each a vocal range — soprano, contralto, countertenor, tenor, baritone and bass. I used my keyboard to pluck out the vocal ranges and scribbled the information in a composition notebook that I would carry in my netbag — a cotton mesh bag easily searched by guards when traveling through a correctional facility.
Next, I had to write a libretto — the text of an opera — and set it to a melody. Electronic recording devices are contraband, so I had to write down lyrics as soon as they came to me.
Lyrics were simple. Melodies were a lot trickier. They were not easy to retain and inspiration would strike at any given time. I would have to hum my melodies over and over again — even during a workout or a college class — until I could get to a piano to notate them. At times like this, I didn’t engage with my friends. I fist-bumped them, nodded my head and hightailed it to the cell or the music room.
Some of my friends reciprocated head nods and fist bumps. Others walked with me. “He’s doing that music shit,” they would announce to anyone else trying to engage me.
Musician friends would also walk with me. We would do ear training exercises, and that made it fun. “1, 5, 4, 3, 6, 5, 1,” my friend Xiaobao He would say, calling out the pitches by number.
I couldn’t focus solely on music. As a clerk for The Osborne Association, I was tasked with recruiting men to participate in their family- and accountability-centered programs. I was also an elected Incarcerated Liaison Committee member who brought population issues to the administration. I had to reply to my peers’ requests and complaints immediately and take them to the officers. I lost a lot of melodies that way.
When I made it to the cell with a melody intact, I would sit on the cot, hum the tune and search the piano for the notes. I would write out the notes on music manuscript paper. To keep a steady pace, I would tap my foot, saying “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4,” in my head. This helped me find which notes landed on the main beat.
The hardest part of keeping the beat was subdivision — breaking the time of each foot tap into three or four parts. I would make grids on ordinary writing paper to help me find the correct divisions of a rhythm that was too difficult or I was uncertain about. The most common grid was made up of four boxes of four. As I tapped my foot on the ground, I would use the pencil in my hand to tap each box on my grid. I did this while humming the melody.
I imagined composers of the past doing it this way, without recording devices or composition software. This made me feel more connected to these artists, to the roots of composition. With practice, I learned how to determine rhythms almost intuitively.
Once I’d written out all of the melodies with lyrics attached by syllable, I began to find harmonies that fit the emotion of the lyrics. I used major keys to express passion and joy. I used minor keys to display hate and pain.
Once I completed my aria, I turned it in for Joyce’s inspection. She selected my piece to perform in concert, so all of my hard work paid off. A few pitches were out of her vocal range, so I made the adjustments.
Joyce and I prepared to perform separately. My program assignment, which was in the room adjacent to the music room, allowed me some time to be alone and out of earshot of other prisoners. I used that space to rehearse. Paint-chipped walls were my audience members, and clanging radiator pipes my applause.
When Joyce returned to the prison in 2018, I was prepared to sing with her, but I wasn’t ready for the vulnerability I felt. This was the first time that I was allowing a group of people into my personal and emotional space, and I was petrified.
As an adolescent, I suffered physical and sexual abuse. In my bedroom, steam puffed from an open radiator valve, and the plastic taped to my broken window pane flapped in the wind. I would sit on my bed and write short stories, poems, and song lyrics about the love I longed to have and the abuse I suffered. I stashed my composition notebook in the back of a drawer, hoping it would not be found.
I listened to music constantly and wore headphones all the time. When I heard my name called, I would ignore it and swiftly make my way out of the house. Sometimes, I hightailed it down the steps. Other times, I jumped from the window two stories down.
I had to escape. Music and imagination were my guardian angels. They helped me cope with the most horrific moments of my life.
I was the boy in the cube. I was not the only one. Prison is full of people who have suffered abuse in silence. Most still suffer, transferred from one box to another, one hostile environment to another. Although trauma is at the root of a lot of criminal behavior, it doesn’t make me less responsible for my actions.
And in a way, prison can make you less accountable. You never have to face the people you’ve harmed or endure their pain.
Onstage that night, in the same auditorium full of critical men, I saw the harm and the pain on Joyce’s scowling face. I heard it when she sang, “I will not forgive, I will not forget. I want revenge.”
I had written the lyrics and composed the music, but I did not anticipate the impact. Spontaneously, I prostrated myself and sang, “I can be free again, if you forgive.”
After the concert, men approached me and shared how they were affected, too. “I didn’t even know opera could be in English; it was dope, though. That had to be tough,” one man said. He recognized it, the pain. I knew it was tough for him, too.
Even though I seemingly approached writing opera with confidence, I felt extremely inadequate throughout. I still do, at times. No other contemporary opera composer has lived experience like mine. I have access to stories that need to be told. The annals of human history are art. In 100 years, my music and the stories of people like me will be available for people to see, hear and feel because I am writing them. I only hope that we’ve found a better way to do justice by then.
Joseph Wilson is a father, composer, librettist, singer, songwriter, pianist, art curator, writer and co-founder of the Sing Sing Family Collective. He is currently incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York.
Regarding the leaking pipes in the Sing Sing music room, the NYS DOCCS public information office stated that, in December 2022, “the condensate return line was abated and repaired.”