The Cantata was composed as a tribute for the 200^th anniversary of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church. It was in that Church where I had my first job as a musician in the USA, leading their choir and playing both organ and piano in 1987, when I was elected by Rev. Edmonds to be their music director.  I wrote the piece intermittently between the years 2021 and 2022. I was asked to come back to the Church in 2023, but I was assaulted, and stabbed when I was about to start playing for them.

It is a three-movement cantata based on three separate texts. The three movements symbolize the Holy Trinity in the order Son-Father-Holy Spirit.

First movement – The Son

The first movement, called “My Lawd,” is based on the poem “Bury me in a free land” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), an American poet, abolitionist, suffragist, activist, and teacher. She was a fundamental figure who delivered anti-slavery speeches in the Northern United States and Canada. I took four stanzas from her original text (Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 5), starting always with “My Lawd”, and arranged the first for a baritone soloist, and the next three for a mixed chorus of eight voices. The stanzas are separated by interludes lasting three measures, symbolizing the insistence of Destiny. The musical language is dramatic, intense, and expressive: the movement finishes with a soft eulogy played by the strings.

BURY ME IN A FREE LAND

I

Make me a grave where’er you will,

In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;

Make it among earth’s humblest graves,

But not in a land where men are slaves.

II

I could not rest if around my grave

I heard the steps of a trembling slave;

His shadow above my silent tomb

Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

III

I could not sleep if I saw the lash

Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,

And I saw her babes torn from her breast,

Like trembling doves from their parent nest

V

If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms

Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,

My eye would flash with a mournful flame,

My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

Second movement – The Father

The second movement is a paternoster prayer sung in Gullah, the English-Creole language spoken by African Americans who live in the coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida. I took the transcription I found of it and developed the prayer into an antiphonal sequence between female and male chorus, which turns into a homophonic musical discourse over the course of the movement. The text of this Creole ‘Our Father’ is followed by an extended cadential Amen.

OUR FADDUH

Our Fadduh awt’n Hebb’n,

all-duh-weh be dy holy ‘n uh rightschus name.

Dy kingdom com.’

Oh lawd leh yo’ holy ‘n rightschus woud be done,

on dis ert’ as-‘e tis dun een yo’ grayt Hebb’n.

‘N ghee we oh Lawd dis day our day-ly bread.

“N f’gib we oh Lawd our trus-passes,

as we also f’gib doohs who com’ sin ‘n truspass

uhghens us. ‘N need-us-snot oh konkuhrin’ King

een tuh no moh ting like uh sin ‘n eeb’l.

Fuh dyne oh dyne is duh kingdom,

‘n duh kingdom prommus

fuh be we ebbuh las’n glory.

Amen.

During the composition of the prayer, I listened to some aged recordings of old African American people who were native speakers of Gullah. I wrote the rhythm of the speech in a transparent structure. I meant it as if it was a dialogue between diverse groups, discoursing and praying on the afterwards of a plantation slave work. It ends  with an “Amen” where the harmonic language seems to communicate an ecstatic, joyful praise to the Lord.

Third movement – The Holy Spirit

The last movement uses the famous text called “The Slave Boy’s Wish,” by an anonymous author, from which I extracted five stanzas, with the inclusion of a thrice repeated “singing a merry song.” From the musical standpoint, my intention was to emulate some turns and motifs in the style of the late Whitney Houston, who graced the world with unforgettable vocal fluidity and technical purity. Personified by a soprano, I intended to shift the voice of a child to a mother singing a prayer. Whereas the substantive melodic material is a simple line based on intervals of thirds, as well as a descending scale, the enharmonic transformations shift the movement to diverse tonal areas. Some clusters are tonally integrated: the flux between diverse voices produces the effect of consonant chords.

anonymous

I wish I was that little bird,

Up in the bright blue sky,

That sings and flies just where he will,

And no one asks him why.

I wish I was that little brook,

That runs so swift along,

Through pretty flowers and shining stones,

Singing a merry song.

I wish I was that butterfly,

Without a thought or care,

Sporting my pretty, brilliant wings,

Like a flower in the air.

I wish I was that wild, wild deer,

I saw the other day,

Who swifter than an arrow flew,

Through the forest far away.

I wish I was that little cloud,

By the gentle south wind driven,

Floating along so free and bright,

Far, far up into heaven.

The piece finishes with soft string chords, short segments of scales, and arpeggios by the harp. A final repetition of the words “to Heav’n” symbolizes the ascension to Paradise.