Gospel by Alvin Singleton & Swing Low, Sweet Chariot presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir

Описание: 1. Gospel by Alvin Singleton

Swing low so
I can step inside -
a humming ship of voices
big with all

the wrongs done
done them.
No sound this generous
could fail:

ride joy until
it cracks like an egg,
make sorrow
seethe and whisper.

From a fortress
of animal misery
soars the chill voice
of the tenor, enraptured

with sacrifice.
What do I see,
he complains, notes
brightly rising

towards a sky
blank with promise.
Yet how healthy
the single contralto

settling deeper
into her watery furs!
Carry me home,
she cajoles, bearing

down. Candelabras
brim. But he slips
through God’s net and swims
heavenward, warbling.

2. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot - African American Spiritual arranged by Alice Parker

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see,
A band of angels coming after me.

I'm sometimes up and sometimes down,
Sometimes I’m almost to the ground.

Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck:

“The poem “Gospel” is from the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Thomas and Beulah by US Poet Laureate, Rita Dove (b. 1956). Written as a tribute to the poet’s grandparents, the two halves of the collection are each devoted to one grandparent. In the opening poem, “The Event,” we learn that, as a young man, Dove’s grandfather Thomas migrated north from Tennessee to Ohio on a riverboat with his best friend, Lem. A night of singing and drinking ended in tragedy when Lem jumped overboard to try to swim to a nearby island and drowned. Lem’s absence haunted the remainder of Thomas’s life, and many of the ensuing poems in his section of the book refer to Lem’s tragic death in some way. The poem “Gospel” meditates on middle-aged Thomas’s experience singing tenor in the gospel choir of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Akron, Ohio. Dove employs water imagery—beginning with the “humming ship of voices” and ending with the tenor “swimming heavenward, warbling” as painful reminders of the lives of Thomas’s ancestors and the death of his friend.

Composer Alvin Singleton (b. 1940) has set many of Dove’s poems to music, including in Gospel, commissioned by Minneapolis-based Vocalessence in 1988. This work exhibits features common to Singleton’s music across many genres, including his flexible approach to rhythm, textures featuring interlocking ostinatos, and an unabashedly expressive harmonic language. Born in Brooklyn, Singleton lived and worked in Europe for 14 years before returning to the US, where he has worked closely with several American orchestras and numerous other ensembles. His choral ballet Truth, based on the life of nineteenth-century abolitionist, Sojourner Truth, premiered in 2006.

Rita Dove is also a trained musician, and much of her poetry alludes to music and musicians in various ways. In “Gospel,” the “single contralto / settling deeper / into her watery furs” evokes opera singer Marian Anderson’s legendary 1939 performance (in a fur coat) in front of the Lincoln Memorial, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the world-famous opera star from performing in Washington’s Constitution Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R. in protest, and the Roosevelt administration arranged the concert on the Mall. In front of an outdoor crowd of seventy-five thousand people, Anderson performed a set of patriotic songs, opera arias, and spirituals. A spiritual underlies Rita Dove’s “Gospel” as well: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which we present as a coda to Singleton’s Gospel. Although there are many moving, affecting, and even virtuoso choral settings of Swing Low to choose from, a simple version seemed to be called for. The most straightforward choral version to be found was a 1958 arrangement by Alice Parker (1925-2023), one of the most respected white scholars and arrangers of spirituals.”