TheGuardian.com: Passion, power and the parting of the Red Sea: Dett’s The Ordering of Moses

Rodrick Dixon

(Photo by Kristie Kahns)

R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943)

(Library of Congress)

The Guardian

Rodrick Dixon

Tue 22 Feb, 2022

 

Robert Nathaniel Dett’s sweeping oratorio had its first broadcast cut short and has barely been heard in the eight decades since. Ahead of its UK premiere, tenor Rodrick Dixon explains its importance, and how the composer’s grandmother played a part

Eight years ago this May, I was standing on stage at Carnegie Hall watching the audience waving green festival banners. The air was filled with nervous anticipation. The occasion was the New York premiere of The Ordering of Moses, an oratorio composed in 1932 by Robert Nathaniel Dett.

As a Black artist about to deliver the role of Moses in the Big Apple, I felt full of emotion. I was about to help free a piece that had experienced decades of bondage because of the race of its composer. Once the lights dimmed and the hall grew silent, maestro James Conlon signalled the bassoon to begin playing a slow, mysterious melody. Brass responded with shimmering bluesy chords. It wasn’t long before one of the most famous spirituals filled the hall. “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land. Tell Pharoah, ‘Let my people go!’”

Dett, the Black Canadian-American composer, pianist and poet had finally arrived in New York, 71 years after his death aged 60. His oratorio depicts biblical scenes of the enslaved Israelites, Moses being called by God to lead them out of bondage, the parting of the Red Sea, the Egyptian pursuit and the Israelites rejoicing in their freedom. Dett had said that he wanted to create something for African Americans that would be “musically peculiarly their own and yet which would bear comparison with the nationalistic utterances of other people’s work in art form”.

His music was unapologetically African American, yet universally “classical”. You can hear influences of the likes of African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Nadia Boulanger – with whom he studied in Paris at the American Conservatory (where I myself also studied decades later) – and Antonín Dvořák, particularly the Czech composer’s “American” quartet, Op 96. Its use of Negro spirituals reminded Dett of his grandmother’s singing, which inspired him to use the spirituals – born in America from the legacy of slavery – as thematic material and folk idioms in his compositions for the rest of his life.

Dett wrote The Ordering of Moses for his graduation thesis at the Eastman School of Music in 1932; but it remained unperformed until 1937. The work was premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the Cincinnati May festival and the performance was broadcast live across the US on NBC radio. And yet the network inexplicably stopped the broadcast suddenly three-quarters of the way through, claiming a scheduling conflict.