Program Notes​

The Negro Speaks of Rivers | Notes by Deb Reiner, adapted from William O'Hara and Penelope Peters

Words by Langston Hughes (1902-1967) | Music by Margaret Bonds (1913-1972)

Margaret Bonds was an African-American 20th-century composer from Chicago, Illinois. She attended Northwestern University, where she earned both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Music before studying Composition at Juilliard. Some of her most famous works were interpretations of poems by Langston Hughes. Bonds discovered Hughes’ poetry while she was an undergraduate at the deeply segregated Northwestern, and felt a powerful connection to it; the two met in 1936, and they developed a lifelong friendship and collaborative relationship.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was Hughes' first published poem; written in the first-person, it chronicles the history and migration of black people across the globe, from the River Euphrates ca. 3000 B.C.E. to the Mississippi River early in the 20th century. Bonds' setting makes use of a single motif, shifting from major to minor tonalities based on the nature of the memory; the overall image is that of a common river flowing through different geographic regions as well as eras in time. 

In the opening section, the piano introduces the melody, and accompanies the vocalists without a change of intensity; after a break from the motif, it then returns in a modified form. The line about the Euphrates contains the highest note in the piece on the word “dawns” - this is immediately contrasted in the next line, which depicts how the Congo “lulled me to sleep” by resting on the tonic and fading to complete silence at the end of the line. After a short pause, the piano accompaniment returns to the initial motif; when the vocals resume, the chorus is in unison, holding the same note on each word. This tension is broken when the singers move to the tonic on the word "Nile," then modulate into harmony for the phrase "raised the Pyramids." The next sequence has a jazzy, ragtime feel, evoking an antebellum cakewalk for the Mississippi with a reference to Abe Lincoln and New Orleans. The piece concludes by returning to the original melody, both contemplative and world-weary. 

Bonds' composition reflects both Hughes’ pride in the African diaspora and his deep reflection on its extraordinary but dark past. Their artistic partnership remains a shining example of Black excellence in the arts.

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PROGRAM NOTES by Deanna Witkowski

Jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-81) was born in Atlanta and grew up in Pittsburgh. From the age of fourteen, she began traveling as a professional musician, eventually becoming the star arranger and pianist of Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy, a Kansas City-based early swing band. After twelve years with Kirk, Williams made her mark as a soloist in her own right, leading trios and quartets in her new home of New York City. One of her most important pieces and recordings from this period, the Zodiac Suite, was inducted into the 2019 Grammy Hall of Fame. After living in Europe from 1952-54, Williams returned to New York where she converted her Harlem apartment into a halfway house for musicians who struggled with drug addiction. In 1957, Williams converted to Catholicism after a three-year, self-imposed hiatus from public performance, during which time she began a spiritual search in earnest. Composing sacred music in the 1960s and 1970s, Williams’s original compositions include three jazz Masses. From 1977-1981, Williams taught history of jazz classes as an artist-in-residence at Duke University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Throughout her music, she lived out her passionate mantra that “jazz is healing to the soul.”

Mary Lou Williams’s three jazz Masses

Williams’s first of three Masses, an untitled work known as the Pittsburgh Mass, was premiered on July 26, 1967 in a public liturgy at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Sponsored by the Catholic Youth Organizations’s Summer School of Christian Apostolate with Bishop John J. Wright as the celebrant, Mary premiered the work with a choir of thirteen girls from Elizabeth Seton High School in Pittsburgh’s Brookline neighborhood, where she had been working as a guest teacher. In a Pittsburgh Catholic preview, Mary explained that she tried to capture in the Mass “the way I feel when I’m praying.”[1]
 

Williams’ second Mass, Mass for the Lenten Season, was written in 1968 for Saint Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem. The work was sung weekly over the course of six Sundays in Lent. Three nights before Mary’s final liturgy on Palm Sunday, every television and radio in the country broadcast the shocking news that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. Mary responded immediately to Dr. King’s death by writing two pieces that she taught to the St. Thomas youth choir, “Tell Him Not to Talk Too Long” and “I Have a Dream." She performed her Lenten Mass in Rome in 1969 with a choir of seminarians at the Pontifical Latin American College.

While in Rome, Mary received a commission from the newly formed Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace to compose a votive Mass for peace and justice. This Mass, originally titled Mass for Peace (1970), was rechristened as Mary Lou’s Mass by Alvin Ailey on the collaboration of the two artists in 1971. On February 18, 1975, Williams performed Mary Lou’s Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York for an overflow assembly of 3000 people.

Mary Lou’s Mass is well-known—but Williams’s earlier two Masses remain in relative obscurity. Here is an excerpt from my biography, Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul that gives the history of Williams’s second Mass, Mass for the Lenten Season.

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Adapted from Chapter 8: “Eternal and Everyday (1967-69),” pages 93-98
In October 1967, Mary received a letter from Fr. Robert Ledogar, a Maryknoll priest in upstate New York. Ledogar was a new appointee to the Music Advisory Board, a national committee that sought to provide resources for parish musicians in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). With the Mass now being celebrated in English, rather than in Latin, local church music directors needed new music that would allow for the full participation of their congregations.

Working with a group of Harlem Catholic parishes to commission a series of seasonal Masses by local African American composers, Fr. Ledogar approached Mary about writing a Mass setting for Lent. The Masses were to be a part of a series of “experiments in Sunday worship of a more contemporary style”[2] to take place at St. Thomas the Apostle Church on West 118th Street.

Excited by the prospect of writing a new Mass to be sung for all six Sundays of Lent, Mary readily agreed to write the second Mass in the series. After meeting in person, Fr. Ledogar sent Scripture text for Mary to consider as a starting point, writing, “I hope you take them as ideas to work with, not as something that can’t be changed . . . The most important thing is to have parts that the people can all sing, that can be taught to them in a few minutes without their having to read music.”[3] Ledogar contributed his own text to the Kyrie, adding, “For our lack of hope/for our failure to care/for letting ourselves be paralyzed with fear…”[4] Mary wrote an easy-to-teach setting, with the youth choir singing the new text and the assembly joining in on “Lord, have mercy.”

To augment St. Thomas’s youth choir, Mary recruited children from the community center where she taught during the week. She also formed an instrumental sextet including saxophone, flute, guitar, bass, and drums with herself at the organ. Honi Gordon, the vocalist who had sung Mary’s “Our Father” at the 1967 Carnegie Hall concert, Praise the Lord in Many Voices, led the congregation as cantor. 

On March 3, 1968, Mass for the Lenten Season premiered at St. Thomas the Apostle with Mary at the organ and Eddie Bonnemère conducting. As evidenced on a homemade recording,  the Psalm 27 setting of “The Lord is my light and my helper/of whom shall I be afraid?” comforts and encourages in a melody that stays in one’s ear and the “Kyrie” with Ledogar’s new text enlivens the assembly cries for God’s mercy. Perhaps most dramatically, Mary’s use of solo voice and acoustic bass on the “Anamnesis" (“dying, you destroyed our death/rising, you restored our life”) with the entire assembly joining in singing the final phrase (“we will sing of you...to all the world”) feels like a resurrection in body, spirit, and community.

Three nights before Mary’s final liturgy on Palm Sunday, every television and radio in the country broadcast the shocking news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day wrote in the Worker’s weekly newspaper of her experience on receiving the news, describing how music—and Mary’s in particular—had helped her: “Always, I think, I will weep when I hear the song, ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and when I read the words, ‘Free at last, great God, free at last.’ But the healing of grief is in those words that I had been hearing sung every Sunday at the Church of the St. Thomas the Apostle, in the Mass composed by Mary Lou Williams, herself a Black composer and jazz musician, herself internationally famous. ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me shall never die but have life everlasting.’”[5]

Mary responded immediately to Dr. King’s death by writing two pieces that she taught to the St. Thomas youth choir. “Tell Him Not to Talk Too Long” sets a portion of King’s February 4, 1968, sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Mary’s birthplace of Atlanta. Mary only slightly paraphrases King’s original speech in the first verse: “If you’re around when I meet my day/don’t want a long funeral/and if somebody delivers the eulogy/tell him not to talk too long. Just say I tried to feed the hungry/tried to love somebody/If you’re around when I meet my day/tell him not to talk too long.”[6] The blues-inflected song contrasts with the jazz waltz feel of “I Have a Dream,” based on a portion of King’s famous speech from the 1963 March on Washington. Day invited Mary to share her musical tribute the following July at the annual Pax conference held at the Catholic Worker Farm in Tivoli, New York.

Two days after Easter Sunday, Mary wrote to Day from Pittsburgh, saying that she was taking “a breathing spell.”[7] But Mary never rested for long. She now expressed her desire to do a concert for the Pope. She had been trying to find a way to get her Lenten Mass performed in Rome, writing to her close friend, Br. Mario Hancock for assistance. A Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, Br. Mario was one of the first Black male religious that Mary had met on a visit to Greymoor in Garrison, New York. Br. Mario had recently been transferred to Rome, where he worked with seminarians at the North American College. While he assured Mary that he could form a choir of seminarians to sing the Mass, Br. Mario explained that an audience with the Pope would probably be impossible. But with her typical determination, Mary worked on lining up gigs in Copenhagen, figuring that if she could get herself to Denmark it would only be a short matter of time before she could travel to Rome and have her Mass performed there.

Adapted from Chapter 9: “A Musical Contemplative (1968-74),” pages 104-105

Mary’s tenacity paid off: in October 1967, she performed an extended engagement at Baron Timme Rosenkrantz’s new club in Copenhagen. After remaining in Copenhagen for several months, Mary boarded a train to Rome, where Br. Mario introduced her to the abbot general of the Benedictines, Fr. Rembert Weakland, OSB, a Juilliard-trained pianist who was one of the key players in the implementation of liturgical music reform after Vatican II. Fr. Weakland shared another connection with Mary: he was from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, just forty miles east of Pittsburgh. He was also a colleague of Fr. Bob Ledogar: both were on the Music Advisory Board, the committee that had drafted the Place of Music in Eucharistic Celebrations in 1968.

Weakland organized a tribute Mass for Martin Luther King Jr. to feature Mary performing her Mass for the Lenten Season at the Pontifical Latin American College. The event was publicized heavily, and over fifty television and newspaper reporters came to cover the liturgy. But the evening before the service, Weakland informed Mary that she would have to perform the music as a post-Mass concert. The sudden change had occurred after a conversation between Weakland and Cardinal Angelo Dell’Acqua, vicar general for Rome. Dell’Acqua was opposed to the use of drums and canceled the jazz Mass. The irony is that Mary had planned to use bongos, a hand percussion instrument with much less sound than a standard drum kit, and was not asked if she would consider omitting the instrument for this particular liturgy.

Just prior to the Mass, Weakland announced to the assembly of mostly Americans that “unexpected interest from the scores of newsmen who filled the modern circular chapel . . . made it necessary to have the music played after the Mass was complete.” He also said that it had been his decision to have the music performed separately “as an examination of conscience to know whether we have really come here to hear Mass or hear a jazz concert.”[8] But anyone who had followed Weakland’s work knew of his strong support for experimenting with different musical styles in the liturgy. The sudden change was a blow to Mary, though she shrugged off the press in her usual manner, replying to inquiries from reporters that she was not hurt by the decision. But she was. Several months later when Mary read an article saying that Cardinal Dell’Acqua was pro jazz Masses, she complained that “everything is jazz now—and everybody receives recognition ‘cept us.”[9]

Even with the last minute setback, Mary’s concert was an overwhelming success. Along with a student guitarist, bassist, and bongo player, Mary accompanied a choir of thirty seminarians from the colleges of North American, Propaganda Fide, and St. Anselm. Titled “Jazz for the Soul,” the performance featured the full Mass for the Lenten Season as well as “Tell Him Not to Talk Too Long,” Mary’s Martin Luther King Jr. tribute. The following day newspapers worldwide reported on Mary’s blues-informed setting of Dr. King’s words as well as Weakland’s reaction: “Weakland was smiling broadly and repeated several times, ‘I am very pleased.’ . . . When asked if he would consider doing the same thing in the future, he laughed and said: ‘If we do, we won’t let anybody know about it.’”[10] And Mary said, “I would have liked to play my music at the Mass but I understand the way it is.”[11]

Two days later, Mary visited the Vatican in a semi-private audience with Pope Paul VI, who gave her a blessing and a rosary. Seizing her chance, Mary “blurted out that I’d like to do a concert for him. He almost blushed and smiled like a little boy, but nothing said.”[12] While a concert for the pope never occurred, Mary performed twice on Vatican Radio, playing her two Martin Luther King Jr. tribute pieces with the North American seminarians in February, and giving a solo interview/performance in April just prior to leaving Rome.

Excerpts from Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul included by permission of the author. © 2021 Deanna Witkowski. Published by Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved.

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Where the Mind is Without Fear

Finalist, 2018 18th Street Singers Choral Composition Competition

One of India’s most quoted poems, “Where the Mind is Without Fear” was originally written in Bengali under the title “Prarthana” (“prayer”) as part of Rabindranath Tagore’s 1901 volume, Naibedya (Offering). Tagore subsequently translated the poem into English and included it as poem 35 in his 1913 Nobel Prize-winning poetry collection, Gitanjali (Song Offerings).

The poem speaks of a “heaven of freedom” where truth and knowledge govern one’s thoughts, words, and actions. In our own time where fear, division, and not knowing what is true permeate our society, Tagore’s plea for his country’s awakening can become our own.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action;

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

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—From Gitanjali (1913). In the public domain.

[1] “SSCA Mass Will Feature Subtle New Jazz Music,” Pittsburgh Catholic, Vol. 115, no. 20 (July 20, 1967): 9.

[2] Mary Lou Williams Collection (IJS 0119), MC 60, Fr. Bob Ledogar, Subseries 3D: Correspondence with Religious, Box 20, Folder 8, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ.

[3] Williams Collection, Fr. Ledogar.

[4] Mary Lou Williams and Fr. Robert Ledogar, “Kyrie,” from Mass for the Lenten Season, 1968.

[5] Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage,” Catholic Worker (April 1968): 1.

[6] Mary Lou Williams, “Tell Him Not to Talk Too Long,” as recorded on Mary Lou’s Mass, Mary Records, 1975; re-released on Smithsonian Folkways, 2005.

[7] Letter from Williams to Day, April 16, 1968, Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collections, Series D-1, Folder 6, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.

[8] Louis Panarale, “TV Cameras Upset Plans for Jazz Mass,” NC News Service (foreign) issued by the Press Department, U.S. Catholic Conference (February 3, 1969): 15.

[9] Williams Collection, Br. Hancock.

[10] Panarale, “TV Cameras Upset Plans for Jazz Mass,”15/

[11] Panarale, 15.

[12] Mary Lou Williams, quoted in Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 306. Used by permission of Linda Dahl.

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