Twenty years of work nears completion for local composer

NORFOLK

Composer Michael Raphael sat before his piano on the first morning of the new year to finish a musical he's worked on for two decades. Called "Children of the Night," it's a full-length musical about homeless youths. It will finally get a full production in what may be an especially apt year: With the economy crashing, homelessness is likely to rise.

"It might be the ideal time for it, but there's always been homeless kids in this area," he said. "We're just not as aware of it as up in New York."

The piece will be performed this year, possibly in the spring in New York, with Songs of Solomon, a youth choir from Harlem.

Raphael, who spent 20 years crafting characters and writing songs and tweaking lyrics, imagined the choir director was tapping her foot, eager for the orchestral score. So he worked all through the holidays, even on Christmas, his original deadline.

On Thursday, his home in the city's Berkley section was nearly as chilled as the outdoors. A space heater brought the temperature up slightly in his second-floor studio, which is the size of a child's bedroom and has peeling sky-blue walls.

"There's no sense in heating this whole house," said Raphael, who finds the cool air energizing. "I'd rather put that money to better use."

He prefers spending his income on bus rides to concerts of his work or on copying his scores, which he rents out to orchestras. He keeps his workload down - church music director on Sundays and three days a week as a librarian - to leave time for composing.

As composers go, Raphael, 45, looks like more like Little Richard than Leonard Bernstein. He's got a pyramid of dark, wavy hair framing a face made for the stage, with huge eyes and a beaming grin. He isn't afraid to stand out in a crowd - he wears his late mother's fur coat on cold days.

His credits are building. Raphael's work has been performed by the Topeka Symphony Orchestra and sung by famed operatic bass Kevin Maynor, who has helped the composer's career along since the late 1980s.

Maynor recorded Raphael's jazz hymns in 2000, and that CD still sells worldwid e. In October, Maynor presented Raphael's "Darfur! Darfur! A Dramatic Cantata" in Newark, N.J. From that benefit, the composer was invited to write a song for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, and it was performed at a Nov. 2 rally in the city.

Raphael wrote most of the song, "America's Son," on the bus ride home from Newark.

"That song came to me so fast it was scary," Raphael said.

Maynor said Raphael's "real genius" is his ability to touch people emotionally.

The first time Maynor heard his work was around 1988 at Lincoln Center, where Raphael's "Toccata for Piano" was performed by a pianist Raphael met while studying composition at the Cincinnati Conservatory. That piece "was quite stunning," Maynor said, speaking Thursday from his home in Newark.

The bass singer places Raphael among the top opera composers in the nation.

"He deserves the kinds of commissions that John Adams and Philip Glass get," Maynor said. "Michael is right in there. He can compete with anybody."

The seed for "Children of the Night" came in the mid-1980s, on a bus ride home from New York. On a stop at a Washington station, he got off and saw what he believed was "a pimp with a team of boys and girls."

Raphael watched the teens.

"They were like death walking," he said. "Their faces looked so worn. I'll never forget it."

He came home and wrote the show's first song, a soaring ballad called "Dreams." In his studio Thursday, Raphael punched in a CD with a recording from 1994, when Nita Booth, later Miss Virginia, sang the song at a local church concert honoring Raphael.

"This song, although it's not blatant, is about child abuse," he said, introducing it.

I was standing proud and tall,

Then I took a fall.

Then I heard my father's voice

Shouting above it all.

Raphael looked somber as she sang, then wiped his eyes as she finished.

The song's character was the first he created. She's an older teen among many living in an abandoned building. She yearns to exchange her life for a more normal existence.

Then a younger boy decides to leave his home and join them. Before the show ends, the boy is reminding the others of how good they had it back home, compared with the mean streets.

Raphael said he always relates to his characters.

"I didn't run away," he said, "but there were problems. I considered myself a loner all my life." He had asthma when he was young and often stayed home and made art. "I never felt a part of the crowd," he said. "I still don't feel part of the in crowd."

Raphael's subjects always involve social issues that have a special meaning to black audiences. He's written music about Nat Turner, a slave in Southampton County who stirred a rebellion in 1831 that led to the murder of slave owners, and about Emmett Till, a youngster who was killed in 1955 for flirting with a white woman.

"As an African American, you feel a certain commitment to your race and to the betterment of your race," he said. "To me, that's just natural. The art goes in conjunction with those feelings."

He said he hopes "Children of the Night" will open hearts and raise awareness about homelessness. And if producers see it and send it to Broadway, one of Raphael's dreams will come true.

"For me, as an artist, art comes first," Raphael said. "I want to tell a message, but not at the expense of art."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com