9 minute read
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
Plagues, War, and Wondrous Love A Journey of Resilience
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–Thomas Nashe, A Litany in Time of Plague, 1593
This year, we invite you to take a pilgrimage with us – a Pilgrimage of Hope. We begin this season in a place of unrest and uncertainty. Through the course of the year, music will remind us of what’s most important – our shared humanity – and by spring, it will lead us to a celebration of Nature. But tonight, music will remind us most of our resilience.
Thomas Nashe’s Litany in Time of Plague, quoted above, is a catalogue of the inability to escape death: the rich, the beautiful, the strong, the witty… none has any special claim to immunity.
Dating back to the ancient world, few diseases have caused as much panic and destruction as the bubonic plague. From medieval times to the 19th century, outbreaks of the plague or the “Great Mortality” have transformed society about six times.
Looking back at these six historical pandemics with a long lens, one begins to see some patterns. For example, virtually every pandemic in the northern hemisphere has begun in December or January. Past plagues have generally peaked in August-September, and then mutated in autumn and returned again in a different form – either more virulent or less virulent. This pattern applies to the Black Death in the 14th century, the Spanish Flu in the 20th century, and nearly all other past pandemics. Tonight, we focus on two particular moments in this saga: 1665 and 1865.
Two men discovering a dead woman in the street during the Great Plague of London, 1665. Wellcome Collection.
Part 1: The Great Plague of London, 1665
Henry Purcell was a child during this plague, but fortunately he survived to became England’s greatest composer of that century. His duet We the Spirits of the Air, which opens our program, evokes two spirits who descend to earth to warn the public that great suffering is about to unfold. They also suggest that this suffering is due at least partly to the society’s arrogance and cruelty towards the vulnerable among them.
The Great Plague of London first arose in December in the suburb of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. By March it had traveled into the cramped and filthy neighborhoods of the city proper. The wealthy, including King Charles II, fled to the countryside – leaving the poor as the plague’s main victims. At the plague’s peak in September, about 8,000 people were dying each week.
“Never did so many husbands and wives die together,” a reverend named Thomas Vincent wrote. “Never did so many parents carry their children with them to the grave.” As the sickness spread, London’s authorities tried
to contain the infected by quarantining them in their homes, which were marked with red crosses. Somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 people eventually perished before the outbreak died down in 1666. As if to finish off what Nature had started, the devastating Great Fire of 1666 consumed much of the city center, leaving Londoners wondering if their city and their kingdom could ever recover from this terrible year.
Londoners knew that the rate of infection was far higher in densely populated cities than in the country. So those with the means to do so escaped to the countryside. Civic officials, realizing that crowds heightened contagion, took measures to institute what we now call social distancing. Collecting data from parish registers, they carefully tracked weekly plaguerelated deaths. When those deaths surpassed thirty, they banned assemblies, feasts, archery contests, and other forms of mass gathering. Churches were exempt from this ban, but infected persons were not permitted to attend.
The public theatres in London, which routinely brought together two or three thousand people in an enclosed space, were ordered shut during plagues. There were particularly severe outbreaks of plague in 1582, 159293, 1603-04, 1606, and 1608-09 – in other words, throughout much of Shakespeare’s career. It actually appears to me that Shakespeare used the lockdown periods for writing his plays, and then used the healthy periods for performing them. If that is not Resilience, I don’t know what is.
JOHN DOWLAND
England’s greatest mournful composer, John Dowland, had been dead for 40 years when the plague of 1665 broke out, but his music still lingered in the air. Famous for such songs as Flow My Tears and Fortune My Foe, Dowland captured the longing and melancholy of the British soul. His music certainly must have sustained Londoners through this terrible year.
In our third set, called Quiet City, we present Thomas Tomkins’ Sad Paven for These Distracted Times. Like J.S. Bach, Tomkins was a conservative composer who preferred to write in a style that was
already considered old-fashioned in his lifetime. Though writing in the late 17th century, his musical language was actually that of the Renaissance. His striking Sad Paven (or Pavane) is a piece for viol consort. It was inspired by political turmoil in the 1640s, when a siege caused enormous suffering in London. With St. Paul’s cathedral closed and its choir disbanded, Tomkins turned his talents to composing keyboard and consort music. Tomkins composed his striking Sad Paven when King Charles I was executed in 1649.
JANE SEYMOUR
Jane Seymour For the many thousands of poor people who suffered in the Great Plague of 1665, the music of traditional ballads was a prime source of comfort. Our evocation of the Great Plague closes with two ballads about the death of women. If I Were a Blackbird is a haunting Scottish and Irish ballad about a young man’s despair over the death of his betrothed. “The Death of Queen Jane” is a British ballad most likely about Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII. This is one of the 300 ballads that was collected and catalogued by the great British ethnomusicologist, Frances James Child. These ballads are mostly texts that have come down to us without the music attached. So in our arrangement, I have set the text to two different traditional melodies from the period.
During our brief 10-minute interval, we cross the Atlantic and move forward in time exactly 200 years. Hold onto your hats.
On to Liberty, Theodor Kaufmann, oil painting, 1867
Part 2: America Emerges from the Civil War, 1865
When the Civil War ended, America was ravaged by death and destruction – not only from the terrible 4-year war, but also by epidemics of smallpox, cholera, and dysentery. Americans in this period showed extraordinary resilience – but certainly, none showed more resilience and courage than the escaped African American slaves.
By 1865, America had already been tainted with the stain of slavery for 250 years. For five generations, white slave owners had intentionally destroyed the institution of family amongst their slaves by routinely taking children from their mothers, taking wives from their husbands, and forcing married men and women to marry others instead. Great intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass, who were born into slavery, never knew who their fathers were, and were taken from their mothers as small children. Robbed of their culture and their language, the slaves managed to hold onto their identity and spirituality largely through one thing that could not be taken from them: music.
The spirituals of the African American slaves, sung à capella (unaccompanied) in the cotton fields, are perhaps the greatest cultural treasure of the American South. In our current time of struggle and disarray, the inherent power and resilience of these spirituals can give us new inspiration.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Our visit to the Civil War era includes encounters with perhaps the two greatest abolitionists and escaped slaves – the heroic “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, and the powerful intellectual and orator, Frederick Douglass. In his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he gives examples of how the songs sung by slaves had multiple meanings. Harriet Tubman used two or three of these “code songs” to communicate with fugitive enslaved people. She is said to have sung these songs at innocent-seeming gatherings, in full view of the slave-owners, who did not understand the hidden messages of the songs.
HARRIET TUBMAN
One of these code songs was Wade in the Water. Tubman used this spiritual to warn escaping slaves to get off the trail and into the water in order to prevent the dogs of the slave-catchers from sniffing out their trail. Through her many dangerous trips back into Confederate territory, the courageous Tubman used “Wade in the Water” to guide many dozens of slaves to freedom in the North. Tubman also served as a spy for the Union army during the war. The U.S. government gave her virtually no compensation, since she was both female and black. She lived into her 90s, renowned and respected, but lived and died in utter poverty.
MARY CHESTNUT
The perspective of white women in the Confederate South is a fascinating topic as seen through the Civil War diary of Mary Chesnut. An educated woman married to a prominent general, she was aware of the historical importance of what she witnessed. Though she and her husband owned slaves, she was forthright about the abuses of women’s sexuality and the power exercised by white men. She discussed the problem of white planters’ fathering mixedrace children with enslaved women within their extended households. As an example, Frederick Mary Chestnut Douglass, whose words are heard near the end of our concert, was the unacknowledged son of his white master – but he had two white masters and he never even knew which one of them was his father.
What Wondrous Love is This is a Southern shape-note hymn, published in The Sacred Harp in 1844. Shape-note notation developed in order to facilitate sight-reading by singers not trained in standard musical notation. The different shapes of the note-heads (triangle, square, diamond, etc.) correspond to solfège syllables – sol, mi, fa and la. Shape-note hymns are composed in a strikingly stark and open harmonic style, written in threepart harmony featuring mostly open fourths and fifths. Most commonly, the entire congregation would sing, so all parts had multiple voices. Since group singing is not an option during the coronavirus pandemic, we are performing an arrangement I created for two singers and instruments. This piece is placed in our program as a response to the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves. I hope that the beauty and spirituality of this hymn ring through – with Resilience.
© Jeannette Sorrell | Cleveland, 2020
