Five African American spirituals and Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time

Oratorio

The oratorio, or written text, of the choral pieces of A Child of Our Time, which would relate Grynszpan’s story, had a long and complex history. Tippett had originally approached T. S. Eliot to write it, as he was an avowed admirer of the latter’s experimental modernism in writing. When Eliot read Tippett’s original sketches for the oratorio, it was clear to him that Tippett’s text would be enough. Even reading it today can be a moving testament to Tippett’s almost mystical urge to solidarity with other human beings:

When I wrote the work, I was so engulfed in the actions of the period, I never considered its frightening prophetic quality. But it seems that the growing violence springing out of the divisions of nation, race, religion, status, colour or even just rich and poor, is possibly the deepest threat to the social fabric of all human society … I was committed when I wrote it: to all those rejected, cast out, from the centre of our society onto the fringes; into slums, into concentration camps, into ghettos. But in actual composition of the work, while never denying I think, this personal commitment, I got drawn by the work itself towards some deeper commitment which needed to embrace both sides: the self-righteous and the rejected. And yet with passion, and not an inert neutrality … We grope our way towards compassion and understanding, because the shock of the collective tragedy is so great each time any part of the archetypal drama of violence and division is re-enacted. ⁶

Tippett did not advocate that the oppressed commit acts of individual terrorism against power, but he did rearticulate a sense of darkness at the heart of human beings that any attempt to create liberatory political projects had to understand. Part of the point of A Child of Our Time was to understand the ways in which humanity expressed this sense of light and shadow. This was intimately related to Tippett’s own sense that individual human identities reflected vast and inhuman historical forces of domination, as well as the cosmology of the natural world. ⁷ In this sense, the oratorio and the whole work expresses a process of abstraction from the individual act to those unseen and misunderstood historical forces that can be reflected through individual action.

The oratorio speaks of war breaking out and the turn of the earth towards the natural cycles of darkness, where a lost humanity is led to a great slaughter, where there are ‘purges in the east, lynching in the west … and a great cry went up from the people’. ⁸ Importantly, the text also points to the idea that, in every epoch, one race becomes a symbol of universal persecution amongst tyranny: the Holocaust in one age, African slavery in another. Each race becomes hunted and finds itself on the margins of borders, with no camp or promised land proffered by a power that lets them ‘starve between the frontiers’. ⁹ The garden lies across the desert, says Tippett, and many die before that garden is reached. ¹⁰

The psalms of the Lutheran Passions were a way of expressing a hope in a promised land that would be without suffering – texts that rearticulated a route map out of slavery. There was something here, however, that lay out of reach of Tippett; he struggled to find a musical source of hope in European avant-garde composition and he desperately searched for some other form of musical expression. In the same way that the Psalms and biblical texts offered some counterpoint to the darkness of the reality of early modern life, Tippett had now to find some counterpoint or interruption to his vision in the language of the oppressed themselves. Frantically searching through Hebrew liturgies and Christian hymns, he discarded these ideas one by one, largely because of what he perceived as their lack of universality:

Christian hymns could not speak to agnostics or Jews: Jewish hymns could speak to the general concert-hall public even less. For to ‘speak’ in this sense is to do the operation which much-loved hymns do to the appropriate congregation of the faithful. But in what sense at all are listeners in a concert hall congregation of the faithful? … But it was not until after the world war which soon supervened that I could test in performance the fact that the Negro spiritual presented no expressional barriers anywhere in Europe. Nor maybe anywhere in the world. ¹¹

Tippetts’s discovery of the African American spiritual marked a turning point in the evolution of the work.

Spirituals

Tippett recounts that he was listening to the radio, as he was writing the oratorio, when he heard the spiritual ‘Steal Away to Jesus’. ¹² This expressed the longing to escape captivity and, importantly, the tangibility that there was some domain to escape to for which Tippett had been searching. Listening further to the spiritual ‘Deep River’ confirmed for him the idea that his own masterwork had to offer some sense of hope from the desperate, singular, isolated act of a Jewish youth towards some sense of reconciliation or homeland, even if it was only some ineffable expression of a longing for a distant place that one day others could reach. Listening to the words of ‘Deep River’, which talks about crossing the river to safety and ‘into campground’, postulated that music could hold some clues about such a journey. Certainly, the ideas about human solidarity and oppression that obsessed Tippett, as a white European composer, he discovered in a new and more exhilarating form in the spirituals of the African American South.

He chose five spirituals, including ‘Deep River’, and incorporated them into the work, merging the culture of American slavery and oppression with a Europe erupting into genocide and mass war. Unlikely as it might be, he found universality in the songs of freedom and a commentary on humanity at war with itself. Discourses of racism and oppression originating in a specific space and time now became a map towards human solidarity that Tippett was desperately trying to find, and the consequences of this stayed with him for the rest of his life. Certainly, in terms of popularity, Tippett’s settings of the spirituals far outweigh other later works, which, to some extent, haunted his later musical output. But, fundamentally, it was the sheer power of those settings in the context of a composition that was profoundly experimental (lyrically, musically and, most of all, politically) that changed the whole course of late twentieth-century music and its attitude towards cultural hybridity, the domination of European forms over non-European forms of culture and, of course, race and culture per se. The victory of A Child of Our Time is certainly more than a musical one; it is one of vengeance, and it is a vengeance that Grynszpan’s father witnessed in the audience when it was performed in Israel in 1962:

It is probably every composer’s dream that something he or she has written will reach an audience in the world at large. In my case, A Child of Our Time really does seem to have spoken its message in most parts of the globe. It was a long time before it could be performed in Israel as, for a short time, the word ‘Jesus’ in the text was disallowed. When it did get performed in Tel Aviv in 1962, Grynszpan’s father was in the audience, manifestly touched by the work his son’s precipitate action twenty-four years earlier had inspired. But the work was not about the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews and, as I have found, people constantly relate it to their own concerns and difficulties. When I conducted it in Atlanta, Georgia in 1981, the predominantly black members of the choir regarded the piece as about their struggles against persecution; and the audiences (also mainly black) joined in the singing of the Negro spirituals. In Brazil in 1985, it seemed chillingly relevant to the acute situation of unwanted, abandoned children there. It has yet to be performed in South Africa and Russia. ¹³

Certainly, its production in Zambia was symbolic of slaves returning home – that lament for lost or future homelands found some resonance in the new African struggles for independence. The combination and unity of the folk idioms of the spirituals with the highest expression of the European avant-garde are most movingly expressed in that moment in the oratorio when the singer, representing Grynszpan, leads the choral section into the spiritual ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Lord’. Each image of barbarism is finally counterposed by reconciliation and generosity.

Yet, historically, the spirituals themselves are not simply ciphers to express something that the avant-garde felt unable to express. The living performance of African American spirituals and the documentation of their factuality and existence create a memory of sacrifice and resistance which can sustain contemporary political projects and solidarity. ¹⁴ When Slave Songs of the United States was first published in the 1860s by the northern abolitionists Allen, Garrison and Ware, this significantly developed not just the political memory of the songs, but testified to the living, vibrant presence of communities who had been forced into silence and subalternity. ¹⁵ Eileen Southern’s groundbreaking work on the history of black music in the US explicitly pointed towards the liberatory potential of music rather than having simply perceived it as a historical anachronism or the re-enactment of folk memory. ¹⁶ In one sense, the rhythms, song structures and textures of the spiritual reflected not only the forcible conversion of many slaves to Christianity and de-Africanisation, but also reprised the spiritual sense of the spiritual – the possession that would take hold of musicians and singers, and the spirits that would inhabit their souls. In other words, the investment in one piece of music of the entirety of faith and the slave experience, and the solidarity of a human culture that stands behind the song and stands against power in doing so, point to other promised lands.

Grynszpan

After his personal interrogation by Eichmann, the bureaucratic personification of the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt once said, Grynszpan himself died later in the torture cellars of the Third Reich, thus, unlike his family, not surviving the war. Ron Roizen has pointed out that there has been almost a forced amnesia and ambivalence about Grynszpan, largely that his actions were perceived as so significant for the development of an imminent Holocaust on behalf of many surviving European Jews, but also because of an abhorrence of a lone act of terror and whether it could ever be justified. ¹⁷ One of the few to defend him was Trotsky, not long before his own death at the hands of totalitarianism: ‘what is most astonishing is that so far there has only been one Grynszpan’ in the face of all the slaveries throughout the earth. ¹⁸ Grynszpan, and others like him in different but comparable situations across the world, face an awful existential choice, perhaps one that contemporary solidarities can avoid in the emergence of a universal and public project against indifference and racism. In the African American spirituals, not only were there abstract calls to salvation or freedom, but there were often practical codes to escape, evade capture and offer clues on the tangible paths to liberty. The songs were maps, as Tippett realised, to a different human future. This is the document that Grynszpan offered to the German diplomat in that office in Paris in 1938, not coded in his bullets, but in his act of resistance. ‘Here is your document’, says Grynszpan; here is your document and your route from Pharoah’s armies.