World premiere opera about Fisk Jubilee Singers
I would love to be in Seattle for this!
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/classical-music/seattle-operas-jubilee-highlights-african-american-spirituals/
..."When nine students and a music professor set off on a fundraising tour from Fisk University in Tennessee in 1871, they had no idea what lay ahead. They just hoped their talents as singers and the beauty of their songs would be enough to keep their beloved university alive.
The students, ages 15 to 25, would eventually travel beyond American borders, to Canada and even Europe. Their journeys would bring financial, physical and emotional hardship but ultimately triumph.
This is the true story that creator, librettist and director Tazewell Thompson commemorates in the opera “Jubilee,” which will have its world premiere at Seattle Opera on Oct. 12, running through Oct. 26. It is filled with African American spirituals, such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Go Down Moses” — the songs the Jubilee Singers from Fisk — one of the nation’s first historically Black colleges and universities — helped introduce to America and the world.
Spirituals came out of the cargo holds that brought enslaved people from Africa, helped sustain them as they worked long hours in hard conditions, served as a balm when tragedy struck their families and gave secret directions to those seeking freedom. Harriet Tubman and other guides used one of the best-known spirituals, “Wade in the Water,” to tell those escaping slavery to thwart tracking dogs by crossing rivers.
A spiritual is “not just a beautiful song; it’s not just something that they’re singing with emotion; but they were sung with intent to inform, and inform they did,” said Jessilyn Hall Head, a Fisk graduate and vice chair of the board for Sound of the Northwest, a Seattle-based choir that specializes in African American spirituals. The choir, founded in 1987, will be part of a Jubilee Day celebration at Lagerquist Concert Hall at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma on Oct. 6, the date the Fisk singers embarked on their journey.
After the Civil War, the songs served to educate and connect Americans with their African American neighbors and their own heritage.
The Fisk students were all too aware of the music’s origins. “These were the songs that reminded them of grief and heartbreak. But they also represented coming together as a family,” Thompson said — and they were a way to honor their ancestors’ struggles and survival."...(more)