{"id":714,"date":"2017-02-06T21:39:12","date_gmt":"2017-02-07T02:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=714"},"modified":"2017-02-06T21:39:12","modified_gmt":"2017-02-07T02:39:12","slug":"music-and-the-national-mood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2017\/02\/music-and-the-national-mood.html","title":{"rendered":"Music and the National Mood"},"content":{"rendered":"

PostClassical Ensemble<\/a> \u2013 the DC chamber orchestra I co-founded a dozen years ago \u2013 produced a concert at the Washington National Cathedral last Saturday night that seemed to address the national mood. These are fractious times \u2013 times in which the arts can acquire a special pertinence. Times in which music can be a provocation or a balm.<\/p>\n

We titled our program \u201cThe Trumpet Shall Sound.\u201d It intermingled spirituals with religious arias by Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Our inspiration was the example of Harry Burleigh \u2013 who more than anyone else was responsible for transforming spirituals into art songs.<\/p>\n

Burleigh \u2013 once Dvorak\u2019s assistant at New York\u2019s National Conservatory (1892-1895) — is a forgotten hero of American music. His seminal \u201cDeep River\u201d arrangement of 1915 electrified American audiences; it was instantly appropriated by preeminent white recitalists. It was later sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. It is still sung today.<\/p>\n

Burleigh\u2019s own recital repertoire also included songs by Beethoven, Faure, Grieg, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky. Mendelssohn\u2019s Elijah<\/em> was a Burleigh specialty. Doubtless for Burleigh all this music spoke a common language of uplift.<\/p>\n

Our soloist at the Washington Cathedral was the African-American bass-baritone Kevin Deas. I would say that he is today\u2019s supreme exponent of spirituals in concert. He made his early career singing Bach and Handel. He came relatively late to Burleigh\u2019s spiritual arrangements. For him the distance from Messiah<\/em> to \u201cGo Down, Moses\u201d is inconsequential.<\/p>\n

It has been my privilege to accompany Kevin Deas in concert for the past decade \u2013 but never before in such a vast and inspirational space. Burleigh himself advised that \u201csuccess in singing these Folk Songs is primarily dependent upon deep spiritual feeling.\u201d Kevin possesses a divinely mellifluous instrument (an audience member at one of our concerts confided, weeping, that she felt she had heard \u201cthe voice of God\u201d). But his performances \u00a0begin not with notes; they begin with with feeling. I know from experience with other singers that an iota of ego is fatal in this repertoire. At the National Cathedral, the gravitas of the space informed all we did. My sense, on stage, was that the evening\u2019s eighth number, Burleigh\u2019s voice-and-piano arrangement of \u201cSteal Away,\u201d hypnotized the big room for good (the nave held nearly 1,000 listeners). It sounded like this.<\/a><\/p>\n

After that, seamlessly (we proceeded without applause), came Nathaniel Dett\u2019s galvanizing \u201cListen to the Lambs\u201d with the Cathedral Choir, then Kevin Deas singing \u201cFor the Mountain Shall Depart\u201d from Elijah,<\/em> with PostClassical Ensemble led by Angel Gil-Ordonez. The evening built to Burleigh\u2019s classic \u201cDeep River\u201d for mixed a cappella chorus, followed by two Messiah<\/em> selections: \u201cThe Trumpet Shall Sound\u201d and the Hallelujah Chorus.<\/p>\n

But if there was a signature number, it may have been William Dawson\u2019s arrangement of \u201cThere is a Balm in Gilead\u201d \u2013 a piece Leontyne Price used to sing. Many with whom I spoke afterward had found the evening a necessary balm.<\/p>\n

During the Cold War, the Kennedy White House famously hosted culture. JFK would talk about how the arts can only thrive in a harmonious \u201cfree society.\u201d That was either na\u00efve nonsense or cynical propaganda. The arts thrive in exigent times. In the twentieth century, the thirties and the sixties \u2013 the Depression, the Vietnam years — were decades remarkable for American artistic expression, decades in which music memorably voiced protest and compassion.<\/p>\n

We may well be embarking on another such trying period in our nation\u2019s history. In what ways will our musical institutions rise to the occasion? We shall see.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PostClassical Ensemble \u2013 the DC chamber orchestra I co-founded a dozen years ago \u2013 produced a concert at the Washington National Cathedral last Saturday night that seemed to address the national mood. These are fractious times \u2013 times in which the arts can acquire a special pertinence. Times in which music can be a provocation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-bw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}