Something Completely Different
The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance’s 2021-2022 Schuster Center season wraps up on June 17th and 18th. “Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Juneteenth Celebration” is a DPO SuperPops Series concert unlike any other.
Like most pops concerts, it’s filled with entertaining, inspiring, uplifting, and toe-tapping music. But it also addresses serious issues, some of which controversial.
Like I said: a pops concert unlike any other.
How’d We Get Here?
This program began to take shape in the Spring of 2020, at meetings of the DPAA’s Audience Development and Community Engagement Committees. We started by talking about creating a concert to follow up on a January 2017 performance that featured a mass choir of singers from churches that have participated in our Stained Glass Concerts. As I looked at the 2021-2022 calendar one particular weekend jumped out at me… a June SuperPops Series slot two weeks before Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 150th birthday that was also Juneteenth weekend. Enthusiasm all around the table (well, it was Spring 2020, so I was at the table…everyone else was at home either on Zoom or on speakerphone!)
Last summer, as I began shaping the program, I consulted with three “repertoire doctors”: soprano Dr. Minnita Daniel-Cox, who’ll be singing classical, spiritual, and gospel numbers, and who knows more than anyone else about musical settings of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar; poet and Dunbar expert Dr. Herbert Woodward Martin, who’ll be reciting several Dunbar poems and will also narrate Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait; and Dr. William Henry Caldwell, who’s working with me on recruiting and rehearsing the “small, hot choir” that will sing spiritual and gospel numbers to bring the evening to a rousing and inspiring close. The doctors’ advice and counsel was invaluable every step of the way as I worked out how to build a program that addressed the important themes of the concert and was also entertaining and musically satisfying.
Dunbar
I hope everyone knows this by now, but Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of Dayton’s greats, right up there with the Wright Brothers, Erma Bombeck, Charles Kettering, Billy Strayhorn, Allison Janney, Edwin C. Moses, Mike Schmidt, Jonathan Winters, and all the rest in the Dayton Pantheon. Dunbar was Dayton’s first great poet and is often considered America’s first great African-American poet.
He was born 150 years ago (hence the sesquicentennial celebration) and died from tuberculosis just 33 years later. During his short life Dunbar wrote hundreds of poems as well as novels, short stories, plays, and song lyrics. Though the final years of his life were marred by disease, drinking (actually prescribed as therapy by his doctors), depression, and domestic violence, his art nevertheless shines as a beacon of beauty and inspiration “beyond the years” (to borrow a line from one of his greatest poems).
Dunbar’s poems have inspired a century of composers working in all kinds of musical styles, and our concert will feature several works based on his words. And there’s something that I love about a concert program filled with music of many styles built around Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote beautiful, moving, and inspiring poems in both “the King’s English” and also in the everyday vernacular language of African-Americans. And audiences will hear examples of both Dunbar “voices” in Herb Martin’s recitations.
Juneteenth
Given today’s fraught world, riven with political, social, economic, and racial divisions, some people might worry that the Juneteenth holiday is just another opportunity for us to take sides and yell at each other. I have a completely different thought. I believe that Juneteenth—and this concert—is a chance for us to come together.
Juneteenth became an official federal holiday just last year, but the very first Juneteenth was June 19, 1865, they day that news of the Emancipation Proclamation—signed by Lincoln two and a half years earlier—finally reached Galveston, Texas.
Juneteenth celebrates emancipation. And we can’t talk emancipation without talking about slavery.
The practice and institution of slavery is an evil stain on human history. Slavery has been wrong. Slavery is wrong. Slavery will always be wrong. It was wrong in antiquity, when wartime victors held their defeated enemies as slaves. It was wrong when it came from Britain to colonial America 400 years ago. And it’s wrong today in its modern guises of human exploitation, human trafficking, and forced labor.
Slavery casts a long shadow. The Bible tells us that Israelites were enslaved in Egypt thousands of years ago. Yet every year the rituals of the Passover Seder remind modern-day Jews of their ancestors’ enslavement and liberation. Similarly, the legacy of skin-color-based chattel slavery in the United States echoes through American history: sharecropping, Jim Crow, segregated schools, restrictive housing covenants, redlining, sub-prime lending, voter suppression, wealth- and earnings-gaps, police violence, and a hard-to-eradicate tendency to judge people by their skin tone rather than their humanity.
The shadow of slavery doesn’t fall only on enslaved people and their descendants. The moral harm of slavery affects both the enslaved and the enslaver. Lincoln put it succinctly in a line you’ll hear in Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”
But Lincoln’s “Great Emancipator” reputation isn’t all it seems. Before the Civil War Lincoln wanted enslaved Africans and their descendants freed—so they could be returned to Africa. The Emancipation Proclamation that led to Juneteenth only freed enslaved people in Confederate states. Lincoln’s aim was to reinforce the Union Army with emancipated Black men. The Proclamation didn’t free any slaves held in the North or in the border states over which Lincoln had actual control—only in the Confederacy, where he did not.
I believe—and hope—that for us in the 21st century the Juneteenth holiday represents an opportunity for America to celebrate emancipation in the fullest sense of the word: freedom from bondage for those who had been enslaved; freedom from the evils of slaveholding for those who had been enslavers; freedom from slavery’s echoes for all of us who still live in its long, tragic shadow.
The Music
They say music is a universal language that brings people together through its beauty, its emotion, its inspiration. That’s what I aimed for in choosing the music for our Dunbar/Juneteenth celebration. It’s music inspired by the moving and rousing verses of Paul Laurence Dunbar. It’s music of sorrow and suffering. It’s music of joy and celebration. It’s music of spiritual redemption. It’s music of renewal, of commitment to a better, freer, and more just world. It’s music that will move, inspire, and uplift all of us.
It’s Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 150th birthday. It’s Juneteenth. Let’s celebrate!