"Education Denied", the fourth movement is through composed. Instrumental interludes lead to choral homophonic deliverance of the text. The chorus is joined by solo and ensemble instrumental commentary. This is followed by cadential gestures. This progression or a cadence rhyme is intended to trigger imagination for contemporary definitions to the present meanings of the text.

The last section, "Spirituals Sustain" begins with a ground bass theme that leads to a statement from Donald Sur's Slavery Documents, "Who is that Great God whom you and all men are here to serve?" When all hope is lost music has the power to sustain all dreams. The movement is a passacaglia which leads to a blues structure. All these forms; passacaglia, blues and spirituals, are extended into a technique that fits the character of the work.

The oratorio is influenced by the music of Africa as well as composers, Carissimi, Handel, Bartok, and Tippett. The African American tradition of Negro Spirituals, the Blues, and Jazz were also inspirational.

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Marilyn Richardson’s 2002 Program Notes on Anderson’s Slavery Documents 2

The distinguished American composer T. J. Anderson continues to enjoy a long and productive career as an innovative force in contemporary music. He is an admired teacher and influential scholar. He has published articles on the history of African American Music, the education of professional musicians, and the experience of composing opera, as well as essays on the lives and careers of Olly W. Wilson, Jr., Robert Shaw, and William Grant Still.

T. J. Anderson studied composition with George Ceiga, Philip Bezanson, Richard Hervig and Darius Milhaud. He holds a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Iowa. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Danforth and Mellon Foundations, the MacDowell Colony and the American Music Center among others. He was the first composer named a Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Anderson stands, as well, as a compelling figure in the extraordinary line of concert composers of African descent. Among the better known are the 18th-century French "black Mozart," Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint George (c. 1739-1799), Philadelphian Francis Johnson (1792-1844) who was an internationally acclaimed teacher, composer and arranger, and of course the Anglo-African Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) whose 1898 cantata on Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha was for years among the most widely performed works of modern English music. Anderson grew up with the music of William Grant Still; his career developed in the company of such luminaries as Howard Swanson, Margaret Bonds, Ulysses Kay, Hale Smith, George Walker and Olly Wilson.

Anderson's music is the subject of doctoral dissertations and he has long been included in the major national and international reference sources on eminent musicians. His orchestration of the score for the 1972 premiere production of Scott Joplin's complex and poignant 1911 opera, Treemonisha, had a significant impact on the world of American opera. His original operatic works include Soldier Boy, Soldier, with a libretto based on work by Leon Forrest, and Walker, a story of the firebrand black Boston abolitionist, David Walker, with libretto by Derek Walcott. Now in retirement from Tufts University as Fletcher Professor Emeritus, Anderson lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he devotes full time to composition.

The inimitable Nicolas Slonimsky wrote of Anderson in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians that "His own style of composition is audaciously modern, while preserving a deeply felt lyricism . . . his harmonies are taut and intense . . . he freely varies his techniques according to the character of each particular piece." That impressive range encompasses works for chamber ensemble, full orchestra, voice, solo instruments, and original combinations such as the intriguing Block Songs for Soprano and Children's Toys.

Recordings of Anderson's work include his Chamber Symphony, (1970), performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor James Dixon (Composers' Recordings); Variations on a Theme by M. B. Tolson, (1974) by the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble (Nonesuch); Squares, (1974) by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Columbia), and Intermezzi, (1992) performed by the Boston-area ensemble Videmus, (New World). For the acclaimed Smithsonian Collection documenting important American music, Anderson conducted and annotated the 1974 album Classic Rags and Ragtime Songs. Recent recordings are the 1998 Songs of Illumination (Centaur), and Chamber Concerto (Remembrance) the Cleveland Chamber Symphony (Albany); in 2000, b Bop in 2 (Arizona University Recordings), and in 2001, 7 Cabaret Songs (Capstone).

In discussing Slavery Documents 2, Anderson poses the question, "Why would anyone want to write a composition about slavery at the beginning of the 21st -century? He answers by asserting that "There is now a recognition that racism in America has its foundation in slavery and we as Americans must address the remaining issues."

Working with historian Loren Schweninger, Anderson had access to over 38,000 documents housed at the Race and Slavery Petitions Project Archives at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Together they delved into historical records that touched upon Anderson's concerns. "I began to look for words that would sing to me," he says. The resulting libretto incorporates petitions for justice, laments keened in response to unspeakable physical and psychological violence, the defiant words of fugitives acting against all but impossible odds to claim the right to their own lives, and transcendent expressions of deliverance.

Slavery Documents 2 illuminates Anderson's command of centuries of musical influences from African traditions to the work of composers Carissimi, Handel, Bartok and Tippett; from spirituals to the Blues to jazz. Throughout this provocative, bold and profoundly original work, T. J. Anderson calls us to recognize that even as we stand in the light of the early years of a new century, the lingering effects of American slavery cast a shadow we ignore at our peril.

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John Edgar Wideman’s Comment on Slavery and Music

Those Songs Still Follow Me ...

In the 1845 narrative of his bondage and freedom the ex-slave Frederick Douglass described songs his fellow bondsman "would compose and sing as they went along." These songs "told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension. They were tones loud, long and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains." Douglass believed "that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject."

The mythic African bird Sankofu that flies forward with its head tucked backward, the double-face Greek god Jarus, Jean Paul Sartres' passenger on a train rushing down the tracks in a seat facing the caboose are figurations of time's mysterious, multi-layered presence, the simultaneous, perpetual, inextricable weave of past, present and future - Great Time. In Great Time the voices of long-dead witnesses embodied in the cantatas can enter the present, alter it. The reason for attending to the voices of the dead is not to accumulate facts and figures nor to acquire some nodding, cocktail party acquaintance with a pantheon of former heroines and heroes. The voices of the dead can be revised through imagined encounters each listener constructs just as the rituals of Haitian voodoo attempt to summon the spirits of powerful ancestors so their wisdom can possess the living, strengthen and guide the living. The point of attending to the ancestors who speak in this music performed tonight is life, more life. Examined, the expanded life for those who were here before and for us, at this moment, here and now, this moment also and always bedded in Great Time.