Rejoicing in the sound
Li Robbins, The Globe and Mail — Saturday, February 1, 2003
TORONTO -- R. Nathaniel Dett, Brainerd Blyden-Taylor. Names that somehow suggest anything but the ordinary. Dett, a composer and pioneer of the music known as spirituals, who died in 1943, and Blyden-Taylor, a choral conductor very much alive and leading the ensemble named in Dett’s honour, both defy any notion of commonplace.
As singer Mary Lou Fallis says of Blyden-Taylor in the Romalis Productions documentary, Carry Me Home: The Story and Music of the Nathaniel Dett Chorale, “His leadership, his vision, has allowed him to create something unique that the choral music establishment was crying out for and didn't know it.”
The vision of Blyden-Taylor’s, to establish a Canadian choir to sing both the music of Dett and other Afrocentric composers and arrangers, was shaped in a manner not dissimilar to Dett’s own: through music, religion, and the profound influence of a few musically imbued women.
In Dett’s case one of the women in question was his maternal grandmother, Harriet Washington, a former slave who came to Canada via that secret transportation network known as the Underground Railroad. Dett attributed a number of the well-known arrangements he created to music he heard his grandmother sing. Blyden-Taylor tells a similar story. “My earliest memories are of my mother singing all the time. Probably if I was given some regression therapy I would remember it in utero … her wealth of knowledge of hymns and songs is vast.”
Why the personal histories of Dett, born in Drummondsville (Niagara Falls), Ont., in 1882, the first African-American to receive a Bachelor of Music from Ohio’s Oberlin Conservatory, and Blyden-Taylor, a Trinidadian-born choral conductor who settled in Canada in 1973, should be linked today is what Blyden-Taylor describes as a “natural outgrowth” of his own musical studies. Sporadic but significant encounters over the years with Dett’s life story and music reinforced his growing conviction that there was a significant body of underrepresented music that ought not be confined to concerts during Black History Month. This music includes the concert spiritual associated with Dett, but also what Blyden-Taylor deems “the full range of Afrocentric choral music;” choral music shaped by R&B, jazz, gospel and blues, all having “come out of this root source.” Thus the Nathaniel Dett Chorale, begun in 1998 and comprised largely but not exclusively of black Canadians, contradicts a stereotype Blyden-Taylor has encountered again and again.
“I just knew that in this country, every time people saw a group of black singers, or predominantly black singers, they automatically assumed they were involved with the church and they sang gospel.”
Concert spirituals, arrangements of what was essentially religious-based folk music of southern American slaves, have seen their popularity wax and wan a number of times since their post-Civil War inception. And more often than not their contemporary use is as mere punctuation to choral group repertoire.
“Part of the job I want to do personally with the Nathaniel Dett Chorale is to let people know spirituals aren't just throwaways or just encores or feel-good stuff. They are serious major pieces of music … and Nathaniel Dett was one of the people that took the spiritual and using the Euro-classical forms and idioms, wrote these things into anthems, motets, and into oratorio and cantatas.”
It was in this spirit that Blyden-Taylor named his ensemble, as a form of honouring Dett as much as an attempt to resuscitate Dett’s music, some of which was falling into disuse.
“After all, here in Toronto we have the Mendelssohn Choir, and all over the world we have choirs named after Bach,” points out Blyden-Taylor.
To create a new choir of any kind, let alone one named after a figure with a recognition factor arguably lower than say, Bach or Mendelssohn, is a considerable undertaking. Blyden-Taylor acknowledges that acceptance in the choral community has been mixed. Certainly audience response has been nothing short of fervent, with additional boosters in the broadcast community such as CBC Radio host Andy Barrie and journalist Laurie Brown.
Dett, after all, managed to get his music to the ears of two American Presidents, Hoover and Roosevelt, and heard in such bastions of American mainstream culture as Carnegie Hall. That spirit inspires Blyden-Taylor to build his own “bridges of understanding,” which he sees as a necessary process of creating awareness through music and culture.
“Our diversity is really our major commonality — that we are diverse is our unifying factor. But how do we live with each other? We do that by telling each other our stories and by sharing who were are with each other. That’s what’s interesting, that’s what’s helpful.”
In light of this, it’s no surprise that the chorale’s next major concert will expand the group's repertoire again, with the works of Afro-Cubans, notably the poet, Nicholas Guillen, a sometime colleague of famed American poet Langston Hughes; nor that in the future, Blyden-Taylor hopes the chorale will broaden its “ethnic diversity” and “mix genres” even more, through collaborations with other ensembles and artists.
Blyden-Taylor delivers these hopes in a manner that his choristers, some audience members and people in the choral community alike describe as charismatic. It’s accurate. The man radiates a kind of joyful determination, even when cataloguing unpleasant financial realities, or any of the other fundraising and logistical challenges of maintaining the “company” as he refers to it.
Charismatic seems oddly apt in another light as well, if one is to take Mirriam Webster’s first definition to heart: “An extraordinary power (as of healing) given a Christian by the Holy Spirit.”
Blyden-Taylor, who counts among his own family numerous members of the cloth and whose full name (Dwight Brainerd Blyden-Taylor) serves as a tribute to four different ordained ministers, has himself considered the ministry. But at this point he sees his calling as a musical one.
“Words are inadequate when we start to talk about this stuff,” he says, referring to the emotional and spiritual reasons for continuing the Nathaniel Dett Chorale. A beat later he finds some of those words though, adequate or not, and says with a broad chuckle, “This is my ministry.”
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