Beyond the Power of Any to Deny

Excerpts from Beyond the Power of Any to Deny

for Soprano and Piano

with Text adapted from Susan B. Anthony

2020 ca. 5:00

Excerpts from Beyond the Power of Any to Deny for Soprano and Piano

Vocal Range

D4-A5

Program Notes

In 1872—long before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which affirms women’s right to vote—Susan B. Anthony and fourteen other women voted in the presidential election. Anthony, the other women who voted, and the election inspector who permitted them to do so were arrested. Prior to her trial, Anthony toured the towns near the courthouse, giving a speech titled “Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?”

That speech, which was presented approximately thirty times and printed in a local newspaper, exists in a variety of forms. Anthony’s central argument stems from the premise that voting is a natural right of all citizens and is “beyond the power of any state to deny.” She draws on evidence from the Constitution as well as the Fourteen and Fifteenth Amendments to make the case that she and her companions committed no crime in voting.

Beyond the Power of Any to Deny grew out of a desire to set excerpts from Anthony’s speech. Originally, I thought I might create a single song, but as I went through various versions of the speech, I realized that I had too much material I wanted to include. The text and music included here thus are the beginnings of what will eventually be a longer dramatic song cycle. The words are adapted from Anthony’s speech, preserving most of her language and main ideas. I have left out much, reordered some sentences and phrases, and occasionally reworded things for clarity or to enhance the universality of her argument.

Anthony’s ideas resonate strongly with the current struggles against voter disenfranchisement. An ardent abolitionist as well as a suffragist, Anthony believed that all citizens —regardless of gender, race, or other factors—have the right to vote. By emphasizing that underlying sentiment in the adapted text, my goal is to highlight the relevance of the argument for today’s society.

The present excerpts were written for Jasmine Muhammad as part of The American Opera Project’s Composers & the Voice program, where they will be workshopped in 2020.

Performance Notes

Recitatives are presented in meterless notation (with an X time signature). For the purposes of measure numbering, each system of recitative is counted as one measure. Approximate durations for each system of recitative are given at the start of the system above the vocal part. Stemless noteheads are used and their placement indicates approximate pacing within the given duration. Individual notes may be held and breaths taken where needed or for expressive purposes.

The included MIDI file gives one possible interpretation of the recitative sections. However, performers are encouraged to interpret the recitative in whatever manner seems most natural and effective to them, altering pacing, inflections, and dynamics to create a particular dramatic effect.

Text

Nowhere can you find a word in any of the grand documents left to us by the founders that assumes for government the power to create or confer rights. And nowhere is there the slightest permission to discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote.

It was we the people—not we the white male citizens, nor we the male citizens—but we the whole people who formed this Union. And we formed it not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them. Not for half of ourselves, and not for half of our posterity, but for the whole people, women as well as men.

No one denies that before governments were formed, each individual possessed the right to protect their own life, liberty, and property. And when one hundred people—or one million people—enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights.

And yet today, more than half this nation’s people are utterly powerless to blot from the statutebooks an unjust law, or inscribe there a new and just one.

The moment you deprive a person of their right to a voice in the government you degrade them from the status of a citizen to that of a subject. And however destructive this government might become, a disfranchised class could neither alter nor abolish it. They are powerless subjects, serfs, or slaves. They are not citizens.

And it matters little to them whether their monarch be an individual tyrant or a fifteen-millionheaded monster.

Contact Information

Jessica Rudman

Email: jessica@jessicarudman.com

Website: www.jessicarudman.com

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