Listen: New choral work by Wondemagegnehu explores repairing communities

Last summer, YourClassical MPR’s Tesfa Wondemagegnehu launched a project called To Repair. He traveled the rivers and highways across the United States, looking for ideas and people who could help repair communities. His first stop was George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and the Say Their Name Cemetery.

At the end of his journey, Wondemagegnehu composed a four-movement choral work, To Repair. The work had its world premiere at New York City's Lincoln Center in April and its Minnesota premiere on May 7 with the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club and the male voices of the St. Olaf College choirs. Listen now to the Minnesota performance using the player above.

Wondemagegnehu is a singer, composer, conductor, professor at St. Olaf College, and host of YourClassical’s Rhapsody in Black podcast.

Program

Here are movement-by-movement notes on To Repair by Daniel Walden:

When we ask what it means to repair, we should be clear about the terms of the question. The work of repair is carried out in the aftermath of a breaking. Repair is not restoration: we do not seek to bring back something as it was in the past. Indeed, when we consider the project of community repair in the United States, we are often dealing with communities whose memory is not of wholeness and health but of violent dispossession, dehumanization, and enslavement. In asking about repair, then, we look at the present and toward the future: what do the people who live in this country with us need to be whole? Time runs in only one direction: we cannot unbreak a limb or uncut a wound. But bones can be set and wounds can be stitched and bandaged, and with time and care a person can heal both without and within, as long as life remains. 

That caveat is a heavy one. So many are not alive who ought to be: dead from police violence, from uninvestigated murders, from AIDS complications and lack of healthcare. Their deaths are part of what needs repairing: the gaps where their lives should be are wounds in their families and communities that demand our care and attention. The word “reparations” in the present day sounds radical, and perhaps it is—but we should ask ourselves why. What is radical about giving people and communities, ravaged and traumatized by centuries of alternating exploitation and neglect, the things that they need to heal? This sounds radical only because we in the United States do not ordinarily permit ourselves to ask the simple question that gets to the root of the problem. Tesfa asks it with this work: what do our communities need, and what do we as Americans need, to repair? 

I. Truth

Confession is the spiritual counterpart to a medical diagnosis: we cannot heal properly unless we know what is wrong. For many, confession is the archetype of autobiography because the narrative of a life, and of our life together, begins with the narrative of our sin. The words of Thomas Jefferson give voice to the bad American conscience: we have long known of the moral rot at our country’s heart. James Monroe Whitfield’s indictment of America comes out first as a cry and then as a hymn before pausing at the false-ringing, unresolved “liberty.” The tune of colonial patriotism cannot be sustained: the “blood and crime and wrong” that stain our history need to be confessed and confronted. Heptametric measures bring urgency and excess to Whitfield’s accusations until the chorus pulls back into restrained and icy harmony, while the unruly piano that undergirds them does not forget.

II. Investment

Before anything else, to be human is to be born of other humans. We are invested from birth and before with the hopes, the anxieties, the sorrows, and the very bodily substance of those who beget and bear us. This continual investment, flowering, and reinvestment is the life-story of any people—what, then, does that mean for people whose care and cultivation of their children happens under the constant threat of state violence? They send children out into the world: the melodic line asks Jesus to walk with them and is answered immediately by the “motherless child.” The words of Anita Scott Coleman ask us what will happen to this black baby whose skin is like coal, the “costly fuel” that, if buried and hidden, will “be no longer coal, but diamonds,” flung into the sky by the ascending piano line like the Star of Bethlehem that marks the way to salvation. The cries to Jesus draw equally from spiritual and from Vic Mensa’s “16 Shots,” building to a crescendo that is at once prayer and plea and indictment: who walked with Laquan McDonald or Trayvon Martin or Tamir Rice? All were babies once, in whom parents invested their love. Perhaps their eyes, too, shone like diamonds.

III. Resilience

The resilience of Black communities is much admired by members of the press. What they usually praise under this name is the willingness to bear countless indignities and abuses in relative silence; those who claim their dignity out loud without any conditions rarely win such applause. And yet, as the rising in both voices and lyrics suggests, such dignity in the end is irrepressible. The words of Georgia Douglas Johnson “ask, nay … demand of life” “the right to make [her] dreams come true,” and will brook no opposition. The black baby’s musical theme returns to extends this demand on behalf of future generations as it descends to confront the weight of history: “Too long my heart against the ground / Has beat the dusty years around,” until “at last” it turns its gaze to the future to “stride into the morning break,” toward a future higher and brighter than anything we can imagine.

IV. Renewal

The time to repent is always now. Too many are suffering; too many are dead. “Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child,” says scripture. “If thou afflict them in any way, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry; and my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.” The cries of the oppressed begin this last movement. What will the justice of God work on a country whose regime of police violence churns out widows and orphans by the thousands only to grind them up again to fuel the engines of capitalism? The powers of the earth sing “Liberty” to justify themselves: their liberty, they say, excuses all this blood. It’s too late: judgment is here, and “God’s gonna set this world on fire.” The words of the apocalyptic spiritual and the music of Bach warn us against our hypocrisy: “God don’t want no part-time soldiers.” The incipit to Bach’s chorale was put onto the gate of the Buchenwald concentration camp: we know precisely where legal regimes of deliberate cruelty lead, and what we are complicit in if we fail to oppose it. Such sinners, say the chorus, will turn up missing, and as each is snatched away they can no longer sing: all that remains is the wreckage of their works. Handel furnishes the music for the judgment, when the “refiner’s fire” comes and the world is made clean. What will be lost when the fire burns away impurity and sin? Poet Carrie Williams Clifford warns us in collaboration with the chords of “Walking in the Snow” by Run the Jewels that every wrong will be reckoned. “He will you all repay: be thou assured!”

There is a chance to repent even now, says the preacher. We have given account and our hearts must be changed. “Liberty” reasserts itself, but it has been exposed as an idol. In 1739 a group of enslaved Africans rebelled, setting fire to the plantations that were centers and engines of their enslavement and shouting “Lukango,” freedom, in their native Kikongo language: that cry takes over the whole chorus, and the heptameters of the first movement return with their structure reversed and the tables flipped, building to an ecstatic resolution. Freedom means that we all get to climb Jacob’s ladder after passing through the fire that judges us and scours us clean: liberation of the Kindom leads us to the Kingdom. What follows is wordless hymnody to the grace that comes from beyond us and holds the world in being. The work of repair needs all of us and more: it needs the grace that is more than we can be, that takes us up in its song and transfigures us until all that remains is the Love that, as St. Paul writes, will be all in all.

Lukango: a Kikongo word shouted during the 1739 Stono Rebellion. Scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote this about the uprising, “They paraded down King’s Highway, according to sources, carrying banners and shouting, “Liberty!” — lukango in their native Kikongo, a word that would have expressed the English ideals embodied in liberty and, perhaps, salvation.

Text

Here are the lyrics for To Repair:

I. Truth

Excerpted from “America,” by James Monroe Whitfield

America, it is to thee,
Thou boasted land of liberty,—
It is to thee I raise my song,
Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.
From whence has issued many a band
To tear the black man from his soil,
And force him here to delve and toil;
Chained on your blood-bemoistened sod,
Cringing beneath a tyrant's rod,
Stripped of those rights which Nature's God
Bequeathed to all the human race,
Bound to a petty tyrant's nod,
Because he wears a paler face.

II. Investment

Excerpted from “Black Baby,” by Anita Scott Coleman 

Lo … the rich loam is black like his hands.
The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby.
Today the coal-man brought me coal.
sixteen dollars a ton is the price I pay for coal.—
Costly fuel … though they say:
— If it is buried deep enough and lies hidden long enough
'Twill no longer be coal but diamonds. …
My black baby looks at me.
His eyes are like coals,
They shine like diamonds.

III. Resilience

“Calling Dream,” by Georgia Douglas Johnson

The right to make my dreams come true,
I ask, nay, I demand of life,
Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband
Impede my steps, nor countermand;
Too long my heart against the ground
Has beat the dusty years around,
And now at length I rise! I wake!
And stride into the morning break!

IV. Renewal

“God’s Gonna Set This World on Fire” (Negro spiritual)

God's gonna set this world on fire
One of these days
God's gonna set this world on fire
One of these days, Hallelujah
One of these days
God don't want no part-time soldiers
God don't want no part-time soldiers
God don't want no part-time soldiers
God don't want no part-time soldiers
God don't want no part-time soldiers
We’re gonna climb, climb Jacob's Ladder
We’re gonna climb, climb Jacob's Ladder
One of these days, Hallelujah
We’re gonna climb, climb Jacob's Ladder
We’re gonna climb, climb Jacob's Ladder
We’re climbing Jacob’s Ladder,
Soldiers of the Cross.

Excerpted from “America,” from Race Rhymes, by Carrie Williams Clifford

For every act of cruelty you've done,
For every groan which you have from him wrung.
For every infamy by him endured,
He will you all repay, be thou assured!