Every day at 2pm, I’ll be featuring some of the stellar Black artists of our time and of eras past on Voices Carry. We’ll share in some powerful singing from titans of the operatic world, world-premiere songs by Florence Price, centuries-old Black spirituals, and art songs written by current Black composers exploring the Black experience in our world today.
While some of these recordings are quite historic (Marian Anderson singing spirituals, Paul Robeson singing Ol' Man River,) I want to introduce you to some new recordings you’ll be hearing this month:
One of the things you have probably heard us talk about on WUOL is the late discovery of many of Florence Price’s works. A substantial number of compositions were buried away in Price’s one-time summer home, and were unearthed beginning in 2009. The intense and ongoing musicological work of reproducing her manuscripts has meant we are still, slowly but surely, hearing some of Price’s works for the first time since her death, and in some cases, for the first time ever. It was this concept that brought the soprano Karen Slack and the pianist Michelle Cann together. On their recent album Beyond The Years: Unpublished Songs of Florence Price, Slack and Cann debut art songs of Price which are meditations on life’s great themes- love, loss, power and even nature. The fact that this album was just awarded a 2025 Grammy feels like a win not only for these two Black women who are absolutely at the top of their fields, but for Price herself.
A powerful and heartbreaking new project by Kentucky-native Shawn E. Okpebholo almost didn’t happen- he received a call to write a song cycle based off of a newly formed database of runaway slave ads called Freedom On the Move. The superstar set of musicians were already tapped, the material was powerful, and yet Okpebholo wasn’t sure if he was up for the emotional toll. In the end, bravery got the better of him, and the result is stunning. The texts are based off of the database as well as poems curated by Zimbabwean poet Tsitsi Ella Jaji. Ads searching for three different slaves by the name of Martin weaves together with the story of Trayvon Martin; a search for a slave in Georgia named Edom is paralleled with Ahmaud Arbery’s murder in the same state a century later: How can a gunshot end a race? A race you had hardly started… Soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman and Rhiannon Giddeons voice the songs with tenderness and intensity; Paul Sanchéz is a sensitive collaborator at the piano. This is truly one of the great song cycles of our time.
It might seem strange to pair African American spirituals with the sounds of early music viols, but Philip Spray, the director of Alchymy Viols, disagrees. The historical purpose of a viol consort was to play the folk music of the day, and so for Spray, the pairing was a natural fit- a viol consort playing America’s earliest folk music. Alchymy Viols’ album Deep River makes for a thought-provoking listen. There is a certain warmth and roundness to a viol’s sound that can make for an almost sigh-like gesture, which adds an additional dimension to these deeply human songs. The countertenor Michael Walker II joins the early music consort for several spiritual arrangements by Moses Hogan and H.T. Burleigh.
