Seraphic Fire’s African-American program deep and vital
The African-American musical tradition is a vast one, extending as it does from that day 400 years ago that the first enslaved Africans were brought to the English colonies that became the United States, to the hip-hop titans of our current popular music universe.
And while much of that music is steeped in sorrow, there is also much of it that expresses joy in life, and Seraphic Fire’s current week of concerts does an exemplary job of drawing our attention to it.
I Have a Dream: Music from the African-American Tradition is compiled from a corpus of 20 pieces, most of them written by black composers, and led by Boston Children’s Chorus director Anthony Trecek-King, the guest conductor for this program. On Thursday night at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, the 13 men and women of Seraphic Fire ranged from fresh contemporary music to near-gospel stylings that drew effusive acclaim from the audience.
Trecek-King chose 15 of the pieces in the program to do Thursday night, two of which were freshly created by black American composers: New York-based Trevor Weston and Nebraska’s Marquese Garrett. Weston’s motet, Nigra Sum, drawn from the Bible’s Song of Songs, normally reads in Latin: Nigra sum sed formosa, or I am black but beautiful; Weston has changed it to Nigra sum et formosa, or I am black and beautiful, as Trecek-King pointed out.
Black spirituals are a crucial body of folksong in the American experience, and Trecek-King offered two of his own arrangements: “I’m Building Me a Home,” which opened the program, and “Ain’t Nobody Gonna Turn Me ’Round,” which is a spiritual that was transformed into a civil rights anthem. Both arrangements were straightforward and effective, with unison singing in the men’s voices answered by gentle minor-key harmonies by the rest of the choir in the first spiritual. The second, befitting its status as a song of defiance, was immensely forceful, with Trecek-King joining his singers on the altar halfway through to take part in the message.
Read the complete review here.