Ajibola Rivers: Change Requires Seeing and Moving Beyond Accepted Norms

December 1, 2024

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Johann Sebastian Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello are widely acknowledged to be the pinnacle of creation for that instrument. Composed between 1717 and 1723, they’re also among the most frequently performed music for solo cello. So, what does one do after studying all six suites? For cellist and composer/arranger Ajibola Rivers of Local 77 (Philadelphia, PA), the next logical step was to lean on Bach’s pieces as a starting point to write his own six suites for the instrument.

“The first pieces I wrote after college were for solo unaccompanied cello,” says Rivers, who studied cello and (briefly) composition at Temple University in Philadelphia. “The project started out as a training exercise and wound up evolving into a cultural initiative. I learned Bach’s language and took note of the structures he used.”

Bach’s cello suites use baroque German, French, and Italian dances as the bases for their individual movements. Rivers’ answer was to pair Baroque counterpoint with Latin and African American jazz.

“A big goal with my cello suites was to help address the historic underrepresentation of musicians of color in classical music,”
says Rivers. That’s not surprising given his own background. His mother is a first-generation immigrant from Nigeria, while his father’s side, from South Carolina, has Cherokee lineage going back several generations.

Cultural Melding

“On the Nigerian side, home life was pretty immersive—a lot of Nigerian music, and especially a lot of food,” says Rivers, who grew up in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. His Cherokee roots, by contrast, were more part of his blood than part of his story.

“We had family members just a few generations back that were in tribes, and I attended Native American cultural events when I was younger,” he says. Musical influences around the house ran the gamut. “R&B, soul, country, jazz, you name it. There was also a tradition of Nigerian music through my mom. When I was a baby, I would fall asleep to a Native American meditation CD. I guess it’s not a shock that part of my goal, especially through my compositions, is to give voice and acknowledgment to these cultures and influences, and also research my own cultural identity through my music.”

Rivers has been to Nigeria twice. “Once for the holidays, and once for a funeral,” says Rivers, drily. “You’d think they’d be very different occasions. But the Nigerian tradition of celebrating life, expressing gratitude, and celebrating our ancestors are integral parts of what it means to be Nigerian.”

That idea has also worked its way into his own life and creativity alongside the Cherokee influence. “Anything that contributes to where we are becomes part of where we’re going next,” he says.

The cello came into Rivers’ life pretty early. “In elementary school, I attended a musical performance and saw a cello for the first time in my life. I thought it looked pretty cool,” he recalls. Shortly after that, a teacher from the Settlement Music School asked if anyone wanted to learn a string instrument. Rivers jumped at the cello, and that teacher,
Dr. Kwang Yu, became his first private instructor.

The following year, he picked up the trombone. In high school, he studied jazz at the Kimmel Center Teen Summer Arts Camps. “After I stopped playing trombone, I still wanted to play jazz, so I used old trombone parts to teach myself jazz cello,” he says. This opened up opportunities to perform with notable jazz names in the Philadelphia area.

Self Guidance

Rivers received a cello performance degree from Temple’s Boyer College of Music and Dance in 2016. While in college, he also taught himself to play bass guitar. He is a largely self-taught composer and arranger, dating from his junior high school years. His plan was to pursue a dual degree in composition and cello, but he quickly found that the formal composition curriculum didn’t line up with his personal ideas.

“In later music theory classes I learned about tone rows and matrices, techniques adopted by the early 20th century avant-garde composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg,” says Rivers. “They were supposed to be the latest evolution of classical music. But I began to wonder why their music was so seldom performed. There’s something to be said for endorsement at the highest level, and their output was almost nowhere to be found in the concerts I went to.”

Rivers left the composition program after his first year at Temple and never took another composition course. After a two-year hiatus, he resumed composing, following his own instincts. It comes as no surprise that his subsequent approach to composition developed organically, as a synthesis of his cross-cultural upbringing and multigenre approach to performing. And food.

“A metaphor I love is to think of a single genre of music as a bowl of rice,” he explains. “Every culture has some kind of recipe with rice or potato as a base. But that bowl of rice doesn’t become an actual dish till you add other ingredients. It’s enriched by what you add to develop and personalize the flavors.” Similarly, he believes, music and its potential is greatly affected by what we add to it, and the intention behind those additions.

“Falling back on my Nigerian roots, I always seem to talk about food in my presentations,” he laughs. “When you’re welcomed into someone’s home, often the first thing they do is introduce you to their food. These are the things that literally nourish us, and they’re enhanced by what each culture adds. If we approach our music the same way, it’s inevitable that we will also be enriched by the things people use in their music.”

Expanding Experiences

Immediately following graduation from Temple, Rivers was accepted as an artist fellow for the founding year of the Iris Orchestra Artist Fellowship Program. Iris, a program for engaging music as a tool for social impact, was designed to address the underrepresentation of Black, African American, and Latino artists in classical music. Rivers spent a year with the program, performing in chamber and orchestra concerts, participating in interviews and presentations, and giving lessons, lectures, and masterclasses to groups, from elementary school students through to the collegiate level.

“The experience was completely life changing,” he says. “I grew up in a fairly affluent community. In Memphis, we worked with underserved communities, which was a paradigm shift for me. Their relationship with all kinds of music, especially classical music, was different from mine. I learned that music is very much a universal language, and that when we connect with our audiences, the words might be a bit different, but the message is the same.”

Rivers says this is where he came to understand the value of writing music to bridge these gaps. “As performers, our agency is only as strong as the rep we’re able to choose and the venues where we perform. Being a composer, however, allowed me to go deeper. A string quartet in an underserved community, for instance, might not have music readily available to communicate in a language these communities are familiar with. The Iris Fellowship wasn’t really designed to address this, but I recognized the need and was able to meet it as a composer. It changed a lot about how I saw music. It became about connecting with people, creating a voice, and advocating for them. We become ambassadors for all the communities and cultures we’re representing through our work.”

By way of example, Rivers conducts a social experiment at concerts, playing the famous first few notes of Beethoven’s 5th symphony and asking who recognizes it. “Almost everyone’s hands go up. And then I play something from the second movement, same question, but far fewer hands. Then I play a bit of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and almost all hands go up again. It reaffirms my idea that there’s an unfinished conversation between genres.” And this isn’t something new, he adds. “Beethoven’s 9th symphony incorporates choral music and references his encounters with military bands. Gershwin was influenced by jazz. Almost all music has components of other music, and all music is representation.”

Back to Bach

And thus, we come full circle back to Rivers’ suites for solo cello. “After I left the composition major behind, I knew it was still going to be part of my life, and I wanted to make sure that I had the right skills,” he says. “I gave myself a curriculum of sorts and made a list of what skills I needed to have before I graduated from each level. I had planned to go largely in chronological order, so of course, I started with Bach. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I thought imitating the best would bring out the best in me.”

Composing these suites, 300 years after Bach’s suites, took Rivers six years—also in line with Bach’s own timeframe. “Lots of jazz musicians have studied Bach to improve their improvisations. But making the patterns is just as important as breaking them,” says Rivers. “The work of these master composers represents the pinnacle, but it can also serve as a platform for future exploration.”

In keeping with Bach’s Baroque dance-based individual movements, Rivers’ suite incorporates jazz and Latin dance. There are also elements of his Native American and Nigerian heritage.

A relative newcomer to the AFM, joining just four years ago, Rivers has quickly become an avid advocate. “The network is extraordinary,” he says. “It’s a web of support and musical connections. A bass player I work with knows a sound engineer, for example, and so on. The industry as a whole becomes so much more accessible, with opportunities you’d never hear about otherwise.” Also, he adds, the union facilitates collaborations with other artists, not just musicians.

This dovetails neatly with his penchant for melding ideas from different spheres—and more ingredients to add to his rice bowl. Rivers says the interconnective aspects of the AFM help him to continue to forge his own approach to a career in music.

To other musicians seeking to follow a similar path, he has a few words of guidance: “Don’t be afraid to ask questions,” he says. “But also, don’t be afraid to hear the answers. The worst thing you can possibly get is a different perspective.”

Such questions, he says, can be as simple as what music to work on next, or as big as where the industry might be headed. No matter where the answers come from, he says, just asking the question is vital. “Your instrument is your voice. Any room, any space, can be turned into a forum once we start speaking. And then, we can ask even more questions that get answered.”

And always, there’s his favorite buzzword, “representation.” “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in a community of color and being a person of color, representation is huge—along with support. We rally behind talented members of our community. If we are promoting and showcasing music that celebrates communities of color, others will be drawn to it and find their own voice in it,” says Rivers.

Rivers' final concert will premiere Suite No. 5 in Bb Minor and Suite No. 6 in D Major on December 29, at St Paul's Lutheran Church in Glenside, PA. 

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