Below is an excerpt from an interview with the Palm Beach Arts Paper about the I Have a Dream concert with Seraphic Fire. To read the complete article click on the link below. Additionally the review of the concert can be found here.
Seraphic Fire program to explore African-American musical legacy
By
When Seraphic Fire takes the stage tonight at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton for a concert called I Have a Dream, they’ll be doing more than bringing attention to the vital literature of the African-American spiritual tradition.
In addition to such beloved examples of black American sacred folksong as “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” and “Go Down, Moses,” the concert will feature newly written works by contemporary African-American composers Trevor Weston and Marques Garrett, as well as pieces by female black composers such as Florence Price, whose life and work has been getting long-overdue attention in recent years.
“I wanted to follow the music of black composers from essentially the 1860s and 1870s to today … so that we can see that the legacy of black composers is alive and thriving,” said Anthony Trecek-King, who is conducting Seraphic Fire in this week’s concerts. He asked his two commissioned composers not to write spiritual arrangements so that the audience could discover “the depth and array” of black composition outside the older tradition.
The program holds 20 songs, about half of which are spiritual arrangements, he said. With the exception of two of them (Lewis Allen’s “Strange Fruit” and Norman Luboff’s arrangement of “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho”), all of the works were composed or arranged by black Americans.
“I wanted to show the array of what that was,” he said. “So not just spiritual arrangements, but also looking at music that was perhaps inspired by spirituals but aren’t spirituals at all.” Price’s “Resignation,” for instance, “is certainly influenced by spirituals, but is not a spiritual.”
The same goes for the pioneering Canadian-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), represented here by his arrangement of the spiritual “Hew ’Round the Tree” but also his sacred motet Listen to the Lambs. All this music deserves to be in the regular aural diet of Americans, he said.
“For me, it’s just something that should be part of the canon. Nowadays, people in choral music, they know Moses Hogan, but do they really know William Dawson, or [Francis] Hall Johnson or [Harry] Burleigh?” he said, adding that Hogan’s popular spiritual arrangements are not included on this program. But Burleigh’s arrangement of “My Lord, What a Morning,” is, and Trecek-King finds the first eight bars of that piece among the most beautiful of all such arrangements.
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