- [Announcer] Funding provided by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the Amistad Center for Art & Culture.

- I think it's always important to know the full story.

(violin music) Whenever we trace back in history, we find remnants of the past that we have to piece ideas together.

But as we recover and discover more music, we realize that it's actually more to that story.

(lively violin music) - It's so cool to be able to play like history and what could be known as the first music ever written by a black composer who was in Connecticut.

We didn't always have all these white composers.

And there's also so many composers of color who also made like so many great works that were like not looked at and overshadowed because of the situation at the time.

- People need to know that we were here.

People need to know what our contributions to the history of this nation were.

I think that when people imagine the past, they often imagine a past where we weren't there or we were just sort of operating in the background and doing the drudgery work.

But I think that we were much more in the foreground and made many contributions that people have yet to know.

(lively music) - It also informs the younger generations of specifically Black string players that this legacy existed way before we even imagined.

And it's important for that fact.

I think as a testimony of this, you know, high art thing we call violin.

Actually being in Black hands back then already written music.

I think, you know, if you a little kid and you just think back, oh my gosh, that really did exist.

So I'm not that, you know, alone to want to play this rather than, I don't know, play drums or be a basketball player, which is great, but I'm not alone, when somebody else falls in love with the violin.

'cause Sawney Freeman, he could have picked any other instrument, but he picked the violin.

So it's important to know that people even then follow their passion when it was clearly not the norm.

(lively music) - My name is Jonathan Frelix.

- My name is Briana Almonte.

- My name is Jessica Valiente.

- My name is Ilmar Gavilan - And I'm here to record music by Sawney Freeman.

(birds squawking) (gentle music) - Sawney was born into Samuel Selden's house.

Samuel Selden was a major landowner in Lyme on the other side of the river, and he was a colonel in the Revolutionary War.

He was imprisoned in New York in 1776 and he died there.

And his estate inventory includes the name of two black children, Sawn and Chloe.

That was in 1777.

So that's the earliest reference that we have for Sawn, who we think is Sawney Freeman.

Sawney was later emancipated by Colonel Selden's son, who was also Samuel, didn't have much imagination in names, and that was in 1793.

What we also know about Sawney is that he was a musician and interestingly enough, a composer.

So in 1801 there was an ad in the Connecticut Journal in New Haven that advertised something called the Musician's Pocket Companion, written by Sawney Freeman, a free man of color from Connecticut.

So, you know, I think that was exceptionally unusual for the time.

Sawney continued to live in the town through the late 1820s.

And he died, I believe in 1828.

And is buried just about a mile from here.

- Talk about the manuscript music that we have of Sawney Freeman's.

- So it's in the Trinity College Library and it's in a copy book that belonged to a person named Gerdin Trumbull, who was from Stonington.

And so he must have had, you know, an original copy or access to an original copy of the Musician's Pocket Companion.

And he literally copied it out along with a number of other tunes that I thought, you know, I think he probably thought were interesting.

(lively violin music) - Yeah, so the first time I saw the copy of the manuscript and it looked just like Renaissance music when you have the music reading in just one line, which invites to use your own imagination and fill it up because that's what they would've done back then.

Just like in the Renaissance time.

And as a Black violinist myself that I was very surprised because I always thought this was a later event of people of color playing European instruments.

And also it speaks to the fact that music is universal language.

You know, being a tennis player, a golf players, it doesn't matter, you know, sports, music, this is all universal values that we all share.

And being able to touch with my own hands, this, you know, manuscript just is exactly, not that we need proof, but it's very redeeming the fact that it exists and that we're able to bring it to life.

(lively violin music) (both laugh) (gentle music) - The two things that we're looking at here is one, a copybook, a manuscript copybook dating from early 1800s, 1817 to be precise on which Gerdin Trumbull has written his name and where he lived at the time.

Stonington, Connecticut.

You know, as you can see, it is all done by hand in a very clear, I think, dark ink.

And you have tunes, the names of tunes up at the top, and then the composer of them where they're identified to the side.

- How many tunes?

- A total of 74 tunes, I believe in total that Trumbull compiled.

So they're tuned by a number of different people.

So 74 in all, 13 of them seem to be identified as by Sawney Freeman.

So that's about almost 20% of the total is by, well, this free Black early composer.

- What is your personal reaction to this whole thing?

- It's hard not to be, you know, terribly, terribly moved that someone who is associated with the founding of our library collected and preserved music that was composed by a free, Black, an early free, Black composer living here in Connecticut.

It makes me wonder tremendously, how did he know about Sawney Freeman?

How did he learn about him?

Why did he preserve so much of this music?

I'm so grateful that this was preserved because as I said, without it, we might not ever have known about Freeman's musical endeavors and his clear talent.

So it's really remarkable and I'd love to hear these pieces.

- You will (laughs) you will hear them.

- I feel like that was intentional 'cause we ended up just putting like (hums melody) - Especially since it's a copybook.

(somber music) (dramatic music)