Program Notes from March 23,1990 Slavery Documents Concert in Symphony Hall

Slavery Documents
Notes by David Hoose

This evening marks, for many people, the culmination of a long journey and, I believe, for Donald Sur's Slavery Documents, the beginning of an even longer one. For myself and for the Cantata Singers, the journey to this moment has been enlightening, draining, and inspiring. To Donald Sur, it has been transforming.

For an organization, now twenty-five years old, whose roots lie in the exploration of the cantatas of J.S. Bach, the distance between the relatively modest demands of that repertoire and those of Slavery Documents is staggering, even when increasingly frequent performances of large and challenging works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lie between. The stretch has been one of gathering all manner of resources necessary to offer this work an initial thrust toward its own life, and of trying to address the emotional demands of the music and its text. Many individuals, some steadfast, old friends, and many new ones, in addition to government agencies and charitable foundations, have helped us meet these challenges. Their doing so has been a gratifying act of faith.

While this experience has, for the Cantata Singers, seemed extremely unusual, it has also felt entirely appropriate. Virtually all of the musical activity of the Cantata Singers has held the sacred cantatas of Bach as a point of reference. The spiritual struggles, as much as they might be separated from the musical ones, have been the focus of the group's attention. Thus it was not surprising that the first three works commissioned by the Cantata Singers (of which Slavery Documents is the third) would all confront important social issues. John Harbison's The Flight Into Egypt reflected on the plight of the homeless through a setting of the Matthew story of Mary and Joseph, and Peter Child's Estrella: The Assassination of Augusto Cesar Sandino concerned political strife in Central America.

Over five years ago, when Donald Sur revealed to me his complete absorption in America's tragic and heroic era of one people's enslaving another, and spoke of the way in which the passionate voices of that day were fermenting into musical expression, it was clear that I needed to be an active witness to the work's creation. At that time, I knew Donald as a composer whose music was, besides some of the most difficult to execute, completely original. His music had the most unusual sense of rhythm. Coming even close to feeling it took nearly inhuman concentration, quickness, and patience, not so much because it was complex (which it was), but because it was terrifyingly unpredictable and traveled at lightning speeds. Composed for small, odd combinations of instruments, written in a spare, non-tonal language, most of his music was (partly because it was so impossibly fast!) unbelievably short. This description tells nothing, however, of the compelling qualities that I--and other musicians--heard in his music. Through all the difficulties, I heard an intense, fervent voice saturating every note.

In Slavery Documents it is this passionate voice that cries out. But nearly all else of Donald's language has changed beyond recognition. A triadic tonality has, for now, replaced the different kind of intense, non-tonal expression; an orchestra of nineteenth-century proportions has absorbed the chamber ensemble (though its use is anything but predictable); the irrational rhythm has grown more regular; and the typically fleeting expression has been supplanted by a form that takes well over an hour to unfold. Most significantly, that which had seemed inaccessible has now become approachable.

But this voice would not be passionate, only hollow--as so much work by artists who attempt either to relive the past or to simplify the present (the minimalists) seems to be--if it were not for the most crucial quality in Donald Sur's musical character that, through all the transformations, remains strong--its complete honesty and originality. His fresh authenticity makes us feel that we have heard this music before, and at the same time or a moment later, feel like it is form another planet. It is this voice that seduces us into seraphic comfort, only to shake us with more disquiet than we could have imagined. Through this powerfully subtle voice of irony little is as it first seems, and everything emerges at a disturbing angle. The voice of Slavery Documents is both on the scene and here and now, tearing open what we have wished to deny, or at least forget, and ensnaring us in what we are. The musical voice allows those human voices of ignominy in power, and honor within bondage to speak--frequently without words--unimpeded.