“Songs In Flight,” a cycle of art songs related to the Cornell-based project Freedom on the Move, has been nominated for a 2026 Grammy Award. The cycle’s composer, Shawn Okpebholo, is up for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Based on poems by College of Arts and Sciences alumna Tsitsi Ella Jaji, M.A. ’06, Ph.D. ’08, Okpebholo’s songs bring to life individual stories preserved in more than 30,000 advertisements in the database of runaway slave ads.
The cycle, which premiered in January 2023 in New York, is available as a recording featuring singer and instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, soprano Karen Slack, baritone Will Liverman, countertenor Reginald Mobley and pianist Paul Sanchez. Poets Crystal Simone Smith and Tyehimba Jess contributed to the song lyrics.
“With this album, I’m working with the best of the best,” Okpebholo says in a trailer for the recording. “I’m pinching myself because I get to work with the most extraordinary artists.”
The Freedom on the Move database puts a human face on history, said Ed Baptist, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences and a principal investigator (PI) on the project, teaching us that ordinary people can “resist profoundly evil systems.”
“‘Songs in Flight’ brings the clarity and spiritual inspirations of artistic vision to help us understand others and ourselves,” Baptist said. “Though it is art, it demands that we look in the mirror without the artifice of false stories about the past. It confronts us with the banality of the evil we do when we hunt other human beings like prey. It confronts us with the reality that courageous acts can make us feel lonely. It reminds us that in the end, solidarity can have an infinite cost, and yet it is the only way we can save ourselves.”
Funded in 2021 by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Freedom on the Move has digitized newspaper ads and flyers posted by enslavers before 1865 to locate runaways. The funding was slated to continue through 2026, but Baptist and other researchers received a stop work order from the NEH in May.
The initial work in developing the song cycle was partially funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant to Cornell, Baptist said. He credits Martha Guth (then of Ithaca College, now of Oberlin), Lucy Fitz Gibbon (then an adjunct instructor at Cornell, now teaching at Bard College) and pianist Erika Switzer, (co-founder with Guth of the Sparks & Wiry Cries project), as the key administrative architects of the grant. Jaji and Okpebholo, joined soon by Giddens, developed the creative project.
“Cornell was in effect able to play a role in administratively and intellectually supporting the creatives who did the actual transformative work,” Baptist said.
The 2026 Grammy awards event will take place Feb. 1 in Los Angeles.
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