Selected 1990 Reviews of Donald Sur’s Slavery Documents

Boston Globe | Music America | Marilyn Richardson

"As anyone who attends cultural events in Boston must have noticed, it was one of the most racially integrated audiences I have seen in this City. I commend you, David Hoose, and all the people who made this possible. We can only improve the racial climate in our communities by being intentional in all our programs and honest in our actions."

"The first performance of Donald Sur’s ‘Slavery Documents’ was an occasion as well as a concert, and the music rose to the occasion. It was impossible to listen to the work without emotion, or many of them, and the standing ovation that greeted the composer and the performers at the end was not pro forma politeness but an expression of catharsis."

"The group made a rich and emotional sound; the ensemble and what it represents should not vanish with this one performance."

"The performance may well be the culmination of conductor David Hoose’s career to date; he secured a performance that was not only formidably accurate but thrilling in its dramatic commitment."

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Musical America, July 1990

"An unusually integrated audience of over 2,300 attended the premiere at Symphony Hall – the result of intense outreach efforts at schools and churches by Sur and the Cantata Singers."

"…great pathos was reflected in Sur’s achingly dramatic choral music."

"This was as compelling and as effective as any music written. With its accessibility and undeniable racial ecumenism, Slavery Documents is worth being heard by new audiences, here and abroad."

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Marilyn Richardson’s 1990 Comments on Sur’s Slavery Documents

Notions of the separation of church and state notwithstanding, such status as a slave in this nation might have had as a Christian among Christians was implacably defined and superseded by his status as chattel. Protestant divines trod a tortuous and chilly path on the matter, debating the fine points of whether blacks might or might not possess immortal souls, while keeping a weather eye out for the off-chance that The Almighty might take a broader view of things and welcome all the righteous, without distinction, into the fellowship of the hereafter.

The vicious irony of this carefully rationalized system, a pathological mix of fear, sadism, and petty willfulness, spawned by economic expediency, drives Donald Sur's brilliant libretto for Slavery Documents. This many-layered text, whose facets gleam with angles of meaning as they are turned in the mind and through the music, is a model of indicting the guilty parties with their own words.

In setting the grating smugness of Grayson's pro-slavery propaganda piece, much admired in certain circles in its day, against the infamous classified advertisements placed by slaveowners attempting to reclaim their property, Sur establishes a link with a strong element of African American musical tradition, both religious and secular, that is the capacity to enunciate the raw integrity of a given theme.

It is the particular burden and triumphant achievement of many of our finest spirituals, those compositions which W.E.B. DuBois so aptly called the Sorrow Songs, to bear perfect witness. The urgent, anguished query, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"; the stark imperative, "Go down, Moses"; or the jubilant affirmation, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine," all draw us into a sense of participation in a most compelling and immediate way; at once magnifying and yet making personally accessible the power of the religious mysteries they address.

In many of the slave narratives which have come down to us, there is the recounting of a transcendent moment clearly remembered. From the depths of impossibility, a man or woman chooses resistance. It is the moment of fighting back in ways great or small; of choosing death over enslavement; the moment of flight into the unknown. It is the moment of fugue which sends the fugitive off into the night, shackled, branded, hunted, with only the north star, the drinking gourd for compass.

It is through the evocation of such moments that Donald Sur's monumental and impassioned oratorio shows us, in an age when we have yet to resolve the import of this aspect of our collective history, that there is no disgrace in having been enslaved. The history of slavery in America, from its inception, is a history of resistance, rebellion, and flight. Such disgrace as must be borne falls to those who presumed to claim ownership of another human being.

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