Black Composers To Be Celebrated At HoustoN Chamber Choir Concert

Nathaniel Dett is hardly a household name. Neither is Harry T. Burleigh, nor Undine Smith Moore. Anthony Trecek-King is doing what he can to change that. Saturday evening he’ll guest-conduct Houston Chamber Choir’s Ancestor’s Dream concert, which he describes as a journey through the choral music of the African diaspora’s North American branch. 

Moore and Burleigh were the grandchildren of slaves. Dett’s ancestors had escaped to Canada; his family moved back to the States in his teens. All three were among the most prominent African-American composers of the late 19th and 20th centuries, yet Trecek-King — associate professor of choral music and director of choral activities at the University of Hartford’s Hartt conservatory — says he has to dig pretty far into the history books to find any mention of their names.

“By just presenting this music, hopefully people are like, ‘I’ve never heard of this composer; I want to know more'," he says. “And then they're able to kind of launch their own journey.”

Simpson, the chamber choir’s founder and artistic director, and Trecek-King were not acquainted when Simpson hatched the idea of a concert like Ancestor’s Dream. But once he started asking around, Trecek-King’s name kept coming up. Simpson extended the invitation, and the two quickly found themselves on the same page. Trecek-King had carte blanche to program the concert as he saw fit. “Once I asked him to be our guest conductor, we have had a number of conversations,” Simpson says. “Each one has given me a greater sense of admiration for him and a greater sense of comfort with the fact that he and I, although coming from different backgrounds, share many common visions that will be represented in this concert.”

Besides Dett, Moore, and Burleigh — who introduced African American spirituals to Antonin Dvorak, who then incorporated them into his ninth symphony, “From the New World” — Trecek-King has filled out the concert with living composers and arrangers such as Adolphus Hailstork, Rosephanye Powell, Marques Garrett, and current Houston Grand Opera composer-in-residence Joel Thompson. Also on the program are Houston native Robert T. Gibson’s arrangement of “We Shall Overcome,” which Simpson believes will be “one of the magic moments of the concert,” and three numbers arranged by Trecek-King himself.

In one way or another, the songs of Ancestor’s Dream explore the rich legacy of spirituals, which form a fundamental building block of American folk music. These songs have endured as history has been less kind to Black composers’ more classically minded efforts: despite the rapturous reception William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony received at Carnegie Hall in 1934, it never really cracked the standard repertoire. The composer was so discouraged he never wrote another symphony, instead sticking to works he knew had a chance of being performed. (Interest in the symphony has ticked up in the past few years.)

“The spiritual itself was a means of survival,” says Trecek-King, also resident conductor for the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston. 

“If you think about the conditions in which the spiritual was created, it’s one of the most horrific conditions that have ever been kind of placed upon a body of people in our history,” he continues. “And so the singing of the spiritual, it was a way to create community. It was a way to create connection when connection was constantly being broken.”

These songs’ narrative of oppression, Trecek-King explains, exists alongside opposing threads of hope and protest. All three must be present in order for the music to possess such power.

“That’s hopefully what we're going to achieve next week, in our rehearsals and in performances: finding that balance that when you’re singing a single piece of music, that there is this oppression and fear and just a horrible situation; but then there’s also this other side of it,” he explains. “That through the singing of it, we’re coping and we’re finding hope, and eventually we’re in a search for freedom.”

Although these songs may have arisen from a specific set of historical circumstances, Simpson sounds confident that they will strike a chord with people of all backgrounds.

“It’s one of the things that has galvanized the choir,” he says. “As we come to this music recognizing that, to a certain extent, this is music that doesn't represent our particular background, it does speak to us nonetheless at a very deep, personal level.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.