Amazing Grace, for Mixed Choir, Tenor Soloist, and Offstage TTBB Quartet

Duration: 4:00
Completed: 2006
Instrumentation: SSATTBB, Alto, Tenor, and Baritone Solo, and offstage TTBB

Program Notes : “Rescue Attempt”

In 18th and 19th Century America, it was especially popular to graft some sort of sentimental lies unto a song to sell music. In drawing close to the music of those times, I felt the need to counter those lies with a kind of musing on the story of this song. The tale of this sort that goes with Amazing Grace is that John Newton, the author of the text, was inspired to write it when, in the course of his sailing as a slave trader, he was caught in a storm at sea, and prayed that God would deliver him. Newton survived, and experienced a conversion. The story goes that he immediately renounced slave trading (mending his wicked ways) and became a minister. Some accounts actually relate that NEW BRITAIN was a so-called slave song, to which Newton set words. However, Newton actually continued slave trade until an illness convinced him that he should no longer sail, and it was only after slave trade was no longer viable for him that he chose another profession. NEW BRITAIN, aside from the fact that it was not the original tune that Newton used (now lost), has a melodic structure that is almost certainly of British origin, as Newton was. Amazing Grace was popular in the United States at about the time of the civil war, both in north and south. 

Following descriptions of Amazing Grace through time, one reads the text enlisted into various causes. In the ambiguity of the text, people often read their own story, or read into it what they would like to have it mean. Sometimes this creates a laudable cosmopolitanism, such as when the Cherokee used it as a funeral song, but this flexibility also causes the song to write people with less than laudable intentions a blank check of affirmation. Like the bible, Amazing Grace has been used to affirm the highest and the lowest things people do. With cultural items, such as a song, everyone who uses them adds a layer of meaning; each person writes their life across the song; we try to write over them, but they cannot be erased. Such meanings cheapen the cultural item if they are ignored, and exist on a subterranean level even when ignored. These old misuses of songs must be confronted, especially when these misuses are wrapped up in atrocities such as slavery and the legacy of slavery. This is part of what this Amazing Grace setting is about; trying to sift the meanings of the song, and reveal some of its subterranean life, and in this way, try to rescue it from itself. Newton’s text was called “Faith’s Review and Expectation”. I think of this setting as “Rescue Attempt”, an endeavor that embodies some of the best sentiments in Amazing Grace. Whereas the civil war could not really be called a rescue attempt, the civil rights movement could be, in millions of subterranean gestures and confrontations.