The Soweto audience erupts. Video by Mathew Pimental
Among my most telling experiences of South Africa, when I first visited in 2023, was encountering a group of uniformed schoolchildren passing through security at the Johannesburg airport. They were all singing, beautifully and happily.
It is a singing country. Jeremy Silver, Director of Opera at the University of Cape Town – a program that quite famously produces Black opera singers in profusion – moved to South Africa from Great Britain. In the NPR show I produced on South African opera – “You Get What You Deserve” (2024) — Silver says of his students that theirs is “a completely different world [from the US]. . . . It’s interesting: you might have thought that the experience of being segregated could have provoked exactly the same sort of emotions as with the enslaved population of the States. But in fact there’s an incredible energy and jubilation amongst the African community here. No matter how much people are suffering. There’s still a huge amount of poverty. But there’s always a smile, there’s always a hope.”
A similar observation, on the same NPR program, came from John McWhorter, a prominent African-American voice on race and culture: “To a Black American, some Africans can seem almost oddly secure and joyous – they don’t seem to have a basic sense of whiteness as an insult to them.”
Music in South Africa wears many faces. Seemingly always, however, it exudes resilience in the presence of adversity. It is both infectious and humbling.
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Soweto was the second stop in the current South Africa tour by Kenneth Kiesler and his terrific University of Michigan Concert Orchestra. The venue was the Regina Mundi Catholic Church, a historic landmark in the victorious struggle against apartheid. Bullet holes once inflicted by police guns have purposely not been patched.
In a previous blog I described the orchestra’s first concert, at the University of Pretoria. Upon hearing the musicians sing the beloved Xhosa song “Bawo, Thixo Somandla,” the inter-racial audience burst into rhythmic clapping and piercing ululation. In Soweto, where the audience was Black, the listeners burst into jubilant song. The church rang with “Bawo, Thixo Somandla,” and with the traditional hymn “Plea for Africa,” and again during Miriam Makeba’s iconic “Pata Pata.” The music grew tidal. The audience departed the church singing. Many in the orchestra wept.
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The generous program Kiesler has chosen for the tour – which ends at Carnegie Hall on May 30 (New Yorkers take note) – is both ingenious and empathetic. The main work – about which I long screamed in the wilderness – is William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1932), a profound narrative of servitude and liberation in which the excavation of African roots plays a key role.
Kiesler paired the Dawson with excerpts from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. That is: he coupled the two most fulfilled interwar realizations of Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 prophecy that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble school” of American classical music. In combination, they encapsulate a road not taken. Had Dawson enjoyed success and produced a series of African-American symphonies, had Gershwin not died at the age of 38, classical music in the US could have pursued a more distinctive, more protean path.
Kiesler also programed Harry Burleigh’s “Deep River,” as orchestrated by Carl Davis. Once Dvorak’s New York assistant, Burleigh was the first composer of high consequence to follow in Dvorak’s wake: it is he who influentially turned spirituals into art songs, with “Deep River’ (1913) coming first. The degree to which the “Deep River” we know is in fact a Burleigh composition is a fascinating topic. Equally fascinating is the version he composed for a cappella male chorus: it begins by citing the chordal introduction to the Largo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony. The iconic concert spiritual of the 1920 and ‘30s – its deliberate tempo and reverent tone (the earliest extant “Deep River,” from the 1870s, is upbeat) — was partly inspired by a visiting Bohemian genius with roots in the soil.
Dvorak’s symphony was also a lodestar for Dawson: that the Negro Folk Symphony, like Dvorak’s “New World,” is a Romantic national symphony is one reason for its neglect during long modernist decades that favored a leaner, cleaner “American“ sound. To my own ears, the symphonies by Aaron Copland and Roy Harris today seem less formidable than symphonies of Dawson and Charles Ives that more intimately hug the American vernacular.
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I listened to the Soweto concert alongside Andries Coetze, a University of Michigan linguistics professor who was born and raised in South Africa. When it was over – when the singing audience slowly and ceremoniously filed out of the church, with songs of liberation still ringing in the nave — Andries’s eyes moistened and he said:
“I’ve lived in the US now for 26 years and I come back to South Africa very often. But I have not felt as at home, as a South African, as I do at this moment – not for a very long time. When I became a United States citizen some fifteen years ago, I automatically lost my South African citizenship. It didn’t mean that I stopped identifying as South African — that is who I am. But I did feel as if I was robbed of a part of my identity. Two weeks ago, the South African Constitutional Court ruled that the law under which I lost citizenship is unconstitutional. So after nearly fifteen years of not being a South African citizen, I am all of a sudden one again. Or more accurately, according to the ruling, I have actually been a citizen all along. Tonight felt like a confirmation of my belonging – like a reaffirmation of my identity. It was a ‘welcome home’ from my fellow South Africans.”
And he hugged his nearest fellow South Africans, still swaying and singing, still reluctant to depart.
To listen to my NPR shows about opera in South Africa and about Harry Burleigh, click here.
To read about the Dawson symphony, click here.
My most pertinent book: Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (2021).
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