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Three Songs for Baritone, Op. 41: To the White Fiends

from Wide as Heaven: A Century of Song by Black American Composers by James Martin, Lynn Raley

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about

Of all the composers represented in this album, Robert Owens
(1925–2017) is arguably the most prolific. After World War II, Owens moved to Europe. He lived mostly in Germany and France between 1946 and 1957, studying piano with the great Alfred Cortot, and making a solo concert debut in Copenhagen in 1952. In 1957, he returned to the United States to teach at Albany State College in Georgia, where he experienced firsthand a kind of racism he had not so overtly encountered in Europe. On a trip to New York, he met Langston Hughes. The meeting proved life-changing, for he began immersing himself in Hughes’ poetry. Over time, he was to set forty-six of Hughes’ poems to music. In the spring of 1959,
he showed Hughes two completed song cycles of his poems. After hearing them, Hughes commented, “My God, they just sound so much more beautiful with music.” That year Owens returned to Europe, where he also became an actor. The multi-talented ex-pat has a body of work spanning multiple opuses, including more than eighty art songs. Most of Owens’ settings are of Langton Hughes poems, but here arehis inspired, dramatic readings of Claude McKay’s “The Lynching,” “If We Must Die,” and “To the White Fiends.” Appropriate to the texts, Owens’ music is cinematic and angry. But it is also elegant, and full of the beauty and hope of the Black American artist.

lyrics

Think you I am not fiend and savage too?
Think you I could not arm me with a gun
And shoot down ten of you for every one
Of my black brothers murdered, burnt by
you?
Be not deceived, for every deed you do
I could match—out-match: am I not Africa’s
son,
Black of that black land where black deeds
are done?

But the Almighty from the darkness drew
My soul and said: Even thou shall be a light
Awhile to burn on the benighted earth,
Thy dusky face I set among the white
For thee to prove thyself of highest worth;
Before the world is swallowed up in night,
To show thy little lamp: go forth, go forth!

credits

from Wide as Heaven: A Century of Song by Black American Composers, released March 1, 2024

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Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975.

We are dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies.

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