W.E.B. Du Bois: Credo & The Divine Liturgy

 A great thanks to Anne for posting a link to last night's live performance of Benedict Sheehan's Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom by Conspirari in Saint Martin's Lutheran Church in Austin Texas. Betty and I greatly enjoyed it. 

You are able to enjoy it, too, if you missed it last night:

The program is available here:

CSP_0122_2533_Credo_Program_1.9_MMT_SPREADS.pdf (conspirare.org)

One of the usual features of last night performance is that it used a Credo written by W.E.B. Du Bois which has a status close to that of MLK's I have a Dream speech. The Credo had already been set to music by famed Black Woman composer, Margaret Bonds. Conspirari has also performed her work recently. You can enjoy it here in a Black culture context:

While it would take a lot of time and effort to discuss the two performances. I think we can discuss both the W.E.B. Du Bois Credo and Benedict Sheehan rational for setting and using it in a concert performance of his work on the Divine Liturgy especially Sheehan's thinking about liturgy. 

Church musicians like Betty may also want to hear Sheehan and his wife's guided tour of his entire work in this video: 

The St. Tikhon Choir - Benedict Sheehan Liturgy Guided Listening - YouTube

CREDO by W.E.B. Bois

1. I BELIEVE in God who made of one blood all races that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.

2. Especially do I believe in the Negro Race; in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul, and its strength in that meekness which shall yet inherit this turbulent earth.

3. I believe in Pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves; in pride of lineage so great as to despise no man’s father; in pride of race so chivalrous as neither to offer bastardy to the weak nor beg wedlock of the strong, knowing that men may be brothers in Christ, even though they be not brothers-in-law. I believe in Service – humble, reverent service, from the blackening of boots to the whitening of souls; for Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell, and Wage is the “Well done!” of the Master, who summoned all them that labor and are heavy laden, making no distinction between the black, sweating cotton[1]hands of Georgia and the First Families of Virginia, since all distinction not based on deed is devilish and not divine.

4. I believe in the Devil and his angels, who wantonly work to narrow the opportunity of struggling human beings, especially if they be black; who spit in the faces of the fallen, strike them that cannot strike again, believe the worst and work to prove it, hating the image which their Maker stamped on a brother’s soul.

5. I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

6. I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in the kingdom of beauty and love. I believe in the Training of Children, black even as white; the leading out of little souls into the green pastures and beside the still waters, not for pelf or peace, but for life lit by some large vision of beauty and goodness and truth; lest we forget, and the sons of the fathers, like Esau, for mere meat barter their birthright in a mighty nation.

7. Finally, I believe in Patience – patience with the weakness of the Weak and the strength of the Strong, the prejudice of the Ignorant and the ignorance of the Blind; patience with the tardy triumph of Joy and the mad chastening of Sorrow; – patience with God!

PROGRAM NOTES BY COMPOSER 

Benedict Sheehan

In the opening scene of Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye sums up how a lot of us tend to think about tradition: “How did this tradition get started?” he says, “I’ll tell you: I don’t know. But it’s a tradition.” Tradition can often feel like this: arbitrary, circular, something we blindly follow without really thinking about. At worst, a tradition can even feel repressive, a force opposed to individual freedom and creativity. In my experience, though, a tradition only becomes truly arbitrary and repressive when people stop engaging with it creatively. A tradition that is continually being renewed is, in a sense, a real tradition, and as such it can actually become a source of creativity rather than an enemy of it. As Stravinsky put it in 1939, “a real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present” (Poetics of Music).

From the outset, then, my goal as a composer has been to engage creatively with tradition, to allow myself to be animated by it, and to work in whatever small ways I can to renew it. It is in this spirit of engagement with tradition that I wish to introduce my Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. It is a work of music at once firmly situated within the Orthodox Christian musical tradition and yet subtly pushing beyond it.

But first, a few words about what a “liturgy” is. The liturgy—or “Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” to use its official title—is the main eucharistic (communion) service of the Eastern Orthodox churches. In Orthodox understanding, the central event of the liturgy is the consecration of bread and wine—symbols of the material creation and of human interaction with it—to become the Eucharist, the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In the anaphora, or “lifting up”—Movement 11 of my piece—the priest lifts up the bread and wine and says “offering unto thee thine own of thine own, on behalf of all and for all…” and the choir finishes the sentence, singing: “…we praise thee, we bless thee, we give thanks unto thee, O Lord, and we pray unto thee, O our God.” This is, as Orthodox believe, a moment of mysterious contact between heaven and earth, a moment in which the uncreated and eternal are united with the created and temporal and all people become partakers in that mysterious union. It is also the most intense and focused moment in my own composition, the dramatic center point, a moment in which everything converges in a space of deep stillness and awe.

Beyond the anaphora, however, Orthodox tend to see the liturgy as a whole as an act of consecration. More than merely a ritual performed by a priest, it is understood to be an expression of love between persons who, in their act of gathering in thanksgiving, become the “body of Christ.” In composing my piece, therefore, I have tried to incorporate this double character of the liturgy: the transcendent and the immanent; the sublime and the familiar; the divine and the human.

My own experience of the Orthodox liturgy has largely taken place in English-language parishes of the Russian[1]origin Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which my parents joined as converts when I was five. Given this, my liturgy draws extensively on the idioms of Russian sacred music—this is the sound of “church” for me.

As I worked on the piece, though, I found myself casting a wider net across the Orthodox tradition as a whole, drawing in sounds from Greek Byzantine chant, Georgian polyphony, and other more localized styles of Orthodox music. All of these musics have come into proximity with one another in America, and I didn’t see any reason to keep them isolated.

As the piece continued to grow, however, so did its sound-world, expanding well beyond the historical boundaries of the Orthodox tradition to include echoes of, among other things, sacred harp singing, American folk music and spirituals, contemporary minimalism, film scores, and the high tradition of western choral music, all of which I love deeply. To put it simply, my liturgy is the Orthodox musical tradition filtered through my own experience, background, and musical sensibilities.

It is at once both deeply personal and broadly expansive, a sort of musical LITURGY OF ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM (2018) COMPOSER NOTES universe that kept expanding outwards to include more and more of what—and who—I know and love. As I said earlier, though, a tradition is not a real tradition unless it is continually being renewed. As I reflect on the underlying purpose of the liturgy and my own musical contributions to it, I want to underscore that the liturgy is fundamentally a place of welcome, a place of hospitality. Since the early centuries of Christianity, sacramental participation in the Orthodox Church has been restricted to observant believers, but this does not mean that the experience of the beauty of the liturgy must be a closed door for everyone else. One of my goals in writing this piece, therefore, is to offer anyone who wants it a taste of that beauty—a beauty that has no boundaries—and to instill the liturgy with a greater sense of openness.

It is thus in this twofold spirit of openness and of creatively engaging with tradition that I wish to introduce Credo, a new work for chorus and narrator that will be performed for the first time on this program. When Craig Hella Johnson first introduced me to this remarkable text by W. E. B. Du Bois, I was immediately struck by it. I’ve long felt a desire to grapple with issues of racial injustice and inequality through the medium of, or at least in the context of, Orthodox liturgical music, and setting Du Bois’s text seemed to me the perfect way to do that.

At the very heart of the Orthodox Christian theological tradition is the notion of the absolute value of the human person. And “person” not simply as “individual” per se, but a person in profound interconnection with every other person, with all of creation, and with God. In the words of 20th-century Orthodox luminary St. Silouan the Athonite, “our brother is our life.” This is “personhood” in the Orthodox understanding, and the perfect revelation of that personhood is understood to be Christ on the Cross who recapitulates the whole of creation in himself in an act of self-emptying love.

While we say this, though, we must also confront the fact that humanity is rife with “traditions” of the devaluation the human person, “traditions” of injustice, “traditions” of hatred and cruelty. These false traditions must be engaged with and transformed so that we might hand down something better to the next generation.

To this end, therefore, I offer Credo as a symbol of faith—and of hope and love as well—set in the midst of my liturgy. My goal here is not to replace the church’s own statement of faith, but to assert that, for my own part, I also believe in the human person, and especially those who are downtrodden, suffering, and oppressed. I believe, with Du Bois, in “Life lit by some large vision of beauty and goodness and truth,” not just a small vision limited only to those with whom we share a natural affinity or an ideological unity or a set of religious or political convictions or a common color of skin. However, I also accept that renewing and transforming a flawed and corrupted tradition—and all traditions are flawed and corrupted in some way—is an incredibly difficult task. If we want real change, if we want a real tradition of beauty and goodness and truth, a tradition built upon the absolute value of the human person, it will take time. So, with Du Bois, let me say finally that I also believe in patience—“patience with the weakness of the weak and strength of the strong, the prejudice of the ignorant and the ignorance of the blind; patience with the tardy triumph of joy and the mad chastening of sorrow—patience with God.” I would only add, for my own part, that I hope that this renewed and transformed tradition isn’t too long in coming