Voices of the Diaspora: Dett to Africa
Nathaniel Dett Chorale
At Glenn Gould Studio
in Toronto on Wednesday
In James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a light-skinned black abandons his efforts to create a high-class kind of African-American music, so as to live out his adulthood passing as white. In other words, he decides not to become Nathaniel Dett, the Canadian-born musician who spent his entire career trying to make art from what he called the “rough timber” of African-American folk music.
Dett was still a student when Johnson's novel was published anonymously in 1912, but seems to have already decided that the music formerly sung by slaves would be “of no value” unless it were “presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music.” His main public instrument for pursuing this aim was a celebrated choir he founded at Virginia's Hampton Institute, a traditional seat of black learning.
Ten years ago, Toronto choral conductor Brainerd Blyden-Taylor established a choir for the same purpose, and named it after Dett. On Wednesday, Blyden-Taylor and his 20 choristers gave an anniversary concert that featured several works by their namesake, as well as newer pieces of what Blyden-Taylor calls “Afrocentric music.”
The phrase is no doubt a handy one when trying to explain what the Dett Chorale is about. When you actually spend time listening to Dett's music, however, it becomes rather ambiguous. Dett steeped himself in the techniques of European-style composition, and applied them very earnestly to the black spirituals. I would say his works on Wednesday's program were basically Eurocentric variations on African-American themes.
His setting of a Bahamian melody in Gently Lord, Oh Gently Lead Us, for example, was a textbook example of standard harmony and proper voice-leading. His souped-up motet Chariot Jubilee treated its famous tune to a degree of contrapuntal overload that begged to be compared to what J.S. Bach sometimes did with Lutheran chorales. But while Dett was sometimes prepared to go crazy, relatively speaking, with counterpoint, he took a very sober attitude toward the one element that everyone agrees is central to African-American music: rhythm. His rhythm is mostly the foursquare rhythm of a white congregation singing Rock of Ages.
At this distance in time, it's easy to see how issues of class animated Dett's work. He felt that black music needed to be lifted up, socially speaking, which meant adapting it to musical practices that middle-class people of all races could understand and approve. Those did not include the kind of blues and jazz that Dett might have heard a century ago. They certainly wouldn't have included the kind of profane hip hop you hear on the radio today.
To judge from Wednesday's concert, the Dett Chorale remains devoted to Dett's vision, with some allowances for the freer attitude toward the “rough timber” taken by more recent composers. Africa, a multipart new piece by Vancouver composer Brian Tate, extended the evening's rather restrained palette both ways, into a modest tone-cluster style at the beginning, and a foot-stamping, djembe-beating simulation of African music at the end. The dramatic, rather blunt style of much else in the piece reminded me of the choral music of Carl Orff, another skilled hand at brokering between perceived differences in cultural class. Robert L. Morris's And the Angel Spoke was one of those contemporary choral pieces that flaunt their modernity by inserting a bit of dissonant grit into almost every chord, though the orientation of the music was resolutely tonal.
Stewart Goodyear's suave Go Down, Death, a setting of one of Johnson's poems (with piano played by Gregory Oh), was perhaps the best thing in the show in terms of presenting a text in a clear, idiomatic and moving fashion. But my favourite items on this long concert (nearly three hours, including Blyden-Taylor's leisurely introductions of every piece on the program) were those that made the least show of compositional prowess: Rosephanye Powell's Drinkin' of the Wine, Dett's Listen to the Lambs, and Moses Hogan's Walk Together, Children. They were subtle, skillful arrangements that had none of the reverent condescension I hear in Dett's more ambitious music. At such times, the Dett Chorale came across as a fine gospel choir, not as an instrument in a kind of pious culture war that must have seemed well worth fighting a century ago, but now looks archaic.
The Nathaniel Dett Chorale repeats this program at the CBC's Glenn Gould Studio Saturday at 8 p.m.
