Conversations With Primous

WHAT HAPPENS TO AN UNHEARD SYMphony? To paraphrase the old expression, does it make a sound? Or does it percolate in purgatory, never leaving the mind of its creator?

That question used to keep me up at night. Through my teens and early 20s, classical music was my consuming passion: I’d pipe symphonies through my earbuds until the sun knocked at my window. But sometime after I graduated from college and started writing about music, that passion faded and soured. I didn’t initially have the words for it, but fundamentally, I felt I’d devoted my life to a patrician art form entrenched in exclusivity.

Then, last year, in , I read about a composer named Primous Fountain III. Raised in the now-demolished Ida B. Wells Homes in Bronzeville and completely self-taught, he’d had his music performed by