Musical Moments #33
“The music is slow, often mournful, yet syncopated, with the kind of marching bass behind it that seems to say, in spite of the fate, bad luck, these blues themselves I’m going on. I’m going to get there.”
Langston Hughes
The Ordering of Moses
R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943)
R. Nathaniel Dett was a Canadian-American composer, organist, pianist, choir director, and professor. He lived on the Ontario side of Niagara Falls until age eleven when his family moved to the New York side. His first-class education included a Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory and a Masters’ degree from the Eastman School of Music. He served as a professor for a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities such as Lane College and Lincoln Institute before settling into a long tenure at Hampton Institute. When not traveling as a recitalist, Dett’s quest for knowledge filled his summer breaks by studying at such prestigious institutions as the Fontainebleau School of Music in Paris with famed composer Nadia Boulanger and at Harvard where his essay "The Emancipation of Negro Music" earned him the esteemed Bowdoin prize, won by other notable recipients such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, and John Updike.
Dett expressed his compositional goals in the following way:
We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people…. But this store will be of no value unless we utilize it, unless we treat it in such manner that it can be presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music—unless our musical architects take the rough timber of Negro themes and fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characteristics, as have the European peoples whose forms we have zealously followed for so long.
After resigning from the Hampton Institute, Dett served as the choral conductor for NBC radio broadcasts. It was during this period that he wrote the oratorio, The Ordering of Moses, which we are offering today and for two subsequent “Musical Moments.” This work, true to his goals and depicting the Biblical story of Moses, was premiered in May 1937 at the Cincinnati May Festival with a chorus of 350 singers and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
This performance comes from our April 2018 concert where the Bach Festival Choir joined forces with the Bethune Cookman University Concert Choir, Terrance L. Lane conductor. It features soloists soprano Othalie Graham, mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann, tenor Samuel McKelton, bass Kevin Deas, and our principal cellist Brenda Higgins. We hope you enjoy this rarely heard, poignant masterwork.
-John V. Sinclair
“And so by fateful chance the African American folks song…the rhythmic cry of the slave…stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas….It still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of this nation and the greatest gift of the African-American music.”
W.E.B. DuBois