September 17, 1892, Antonin Dvořák, his wife, Anna, and their two oldest children boarded the SS Saale in Bremen and, after nine stormy days, debarked onto a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Dvořák’s folk-inspired music was closely identified with the national struggle to free Bohemia and Moravia from the domination, cultural as well as political, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a radical, a progressive thinker and a champion of the proletariat.
He assumed the directorship of National Conservatory of Music of America on 17th Street and Irving Place. It was his nationalist credentials that had attracted Mrs. Jeannette Thurber, founder of the conservatory, to select him as their new director, for at the top of her agenda was the establishment of an American school of composers. For Dvorak ”the future American school will be based upon the music of the Negro,” and here was an opportunity to begin to realise that goal.
The family move into a five-room flat at 327 East 17th Street, less than half a mile from the Free African Church of St. Philip’s, New York City’s first African-American congregation of Protestant Episcopalians, where two of his students would attend. His assistant Harry T. Burleigh, moved his family to the church after a swelling African American congregation at Wall Street Trinity Church had upset the parishioners, who were forced to worship separately.
In May 1983 Burleigh introduces the composer to “Negro spirituals.” Burleigh had learned many of the old plantation songs from the singing of his blind maternal grandfather, Hamilton Waters, who in 1832 bought his freedom from slavery on a Maryland plantation. Waters became the town crier and lamplighter for Erie, Pennsylvania, and as a young boy Burleigh helped guide him along his route. The family was Episcopalian and young Harry sang in the men and boys choir. Burleigh also “remembered his Mother’s singing after chores and how he and his [step] father and grandfather all harmonised while helping her.” At various times in his long life — he died in 1949 at age 81 — Burleigh described his student days with Dvořák. Taken together, Burleigh’s writings provide insight into Dvořák’s ongoing Negro music education while he was composing what would become the Symphony “From the New World”: “Dvořák used to get tired during the day and I would sing to him after supper … I gave him what I knew of Negro songs — no one called them spirituals then — and he wrote some of my tunes (my people’s music) into the New World Symphony.”
For this, at the tail end of the romantic era and at the birth of modernism, continues the belief that in the folk traditions there is a beautiful and sophisticated music to be sought. That the bucolic music of the romantic era could be explored deeper. That there was a life to musicians listening not to nature and the profound beauty of divine creation, but to give a voice to the peoples who tendered to these lands. While Yiddish folk tradition was beginning to appear in the work of Wagner, the pentatonic scale and Stravinsky ‘rite of spring’ would not appear for a further 20 years. And when it did, it would be welcomed with criticism and shock. Dvořák’s “curious” theory that the melodies of Black America could be the source of great work set the European musical world abuzz.
Speaking to the New York News Dvořák would say, “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” But this wasn’t a revelation, it was Dvořák repeating a belief he held before he stepped on the boat in Bremen. Assured in his belief Dvořák had journeyed to carry out an exploration already mapped in his mind. It is his determination that advances music and propels its modernisation. It is almost as if he is the mountaineer, whom once reaching the summit, is so starved of oxygen and elated by his achievement, fails to distinguish between the music in front of him. Foolishly Dvořák conflated both the music of native Americans and that of black slaves.
In January 1893, Dvořák began a continuous sketch for the “New World” Symphony. Wrote Burleigh, “When Dvořák heard me sing ‘Go Down Moses,’ he said, ‘Burleigh, that is as great as a Beethoven theme.’” This, for Dvořák, was the ultimate compliment. He made his students compose dozens of themes before accepting one as appropriate for “development.” He would then have them wrap the theme around the skeleton of an existing Beethoven sonata, imitating, measure by measure, the modulations and key relationships.
Dvořák began working on the full score in mid-February 1893. “Dvořák of course used ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ note for note,” continued Burleigh. “It was not an accident. He did it quite consciously … He tried to combine Negro and Indian themes. The Largo movement he wrote after he had read the famine scene in Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha.’ It had a great effect on him and he wanted to interpret it musically”.
The largo is more than an academic study on the melody of the cotton fields. It is a lament to a Czechoslovakia that Dvorak deeply missed. He and his family joined in Iowa for a summer’s vacation, his longing for both his homeland and the peasant music of America both carried a sense of distance. A break from an employment that came with a rather large annual fee, half paid in advance, guest-conducting appearances, and commissions for new works. Whether it was the generous salary, the access to Black music, the holidays with his compatriot communities, The largo is structured around a longing for the unreachable. The central melody mimics a heartburn sorrow, an aching and a deflation. In April 1895 he and his family would return to Prague.
Following his death in May 1904 Dvořák would inspire a generation of musicians, “to go after our own folk music.” His student Arthur Farwell launches “progressive movement” for American music. Dvořák will later meet violinist Will Marion Cook, who becomes his student. Marion Cook would become a fascinating figurehead of Afro American music, enjoy a spell as a celebrated Broadway composer , teacher to Eva Jessye, music educator and original choir mistress for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and conductor, future mentor of Duke Ellington.
Although a synthetic imagining of a negro spiritual remembering a native American famine, the largo would be later adapted into a new spiritual by one of Dvorak’s students William Arms Fisher who titled the piece Goin’ Home.
Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home;
Quiet-like, some still day, I’m jes’ goin’ home.
It’s not far, jes’ close by,
Through an open door;
Work all done, care laid by,
Goin’ to fear no more.
Mother’s there ‘spectin’ me,
Father’s waitin’ too;
Lots o’ folks gather’d there,
All the friends I knew,
All the friends I knew.
Home, I’m goin’ home!
One of his students, the acclaimed music theorist, historian and composer in his own right, William Arms Fisher wrote of the piece,
“The Largo, with its haunting English horn solo, is the outpouring of Dvorak’s own home-longing, with something of the loneliness of far-off prairie horizons, the faint memory of the red-man’s bygone days, and a sense of the tragedy of the black-man as it sings in his “spirituals.” Deeper still it is a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feel. That the lyric opening theme of the Largo should spontaneously suggest the words ‘Goin’ home, goin’ home’ is natural enough, and that the lines that follow the melody should take the form of a negro spiritual accords with the genesis of the symphony.”
Boston, July 21, 1922.
Arms-Fisher’s spiritual It especially became known as a spiritual after the death of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s.
And one obituary wrote One obituary read: “If it were possible the Afro-American musicians alone could flood his grave with tears.”
***
Alice Coltrane (nee McLeod, 1937) met her husband John in 1963. Of the four years they spent together Alice would delve into a spiritual journey. Her music is a deep meditation, and she a devout lover of the form.
“I heard music that was just beyond anything I had heard before. I would hear country gospel. I would hear the down home gospel. I would hear the kind of gospel you almost wouldn’t need music with. It was flowing from the heart, from the soul.” Alice Coltrane.
Down home is an emigre expression for a Southern style, here Alice’s reference is where her parents met in Alabama. Her mother Ann Johnston grew up in a rural town called Athens, while her father Solon McLeod from Birmingham.
As a musical child Alice McLeod would play piano and church organ for her neighbourhood baptist church. Mt. Olive Baptist church had a repertoire than included spirituals, Calvinist hymns, evangelical hymns, and new gospel. Her mother sang in the choir.
“For the young people, there were all the written musical pieces that I would play for them to sing. There wasn’t as much rhythmical involvement there. Senior Choir was very nice, sort of strict, leaning toward the European anthems; a number of them were beautiful hymns from the hymn book. There was not a great deal of additional work needed other than being able to read… but when you are playing in the Pastor’s chores, you have to play in a different way. The Pastor’s chorus sounds like gospel. You have the gospel songs, from a book called Gospel Pearls. Beautiful songs.”
Gospel Pearls p.1921 was published in Nashville, Tennassee by XX, a year before William Arms Fisher wrote Goin’ Home. Over XX million copies would come to exist and Gospel Pearls would form part of what Detroit churchgoers understood as down home.
When Alice was born in 1937 the black population of Detroit was less that 5% of what would be a predominently European and multinational city. After the war over 325,000 black servicemen would travel north to the industrial city. The blood red leather of Gospel Pearls were a church staple, and the negro spiritual a pastoral memory. For the congregations of Detroit, Goin’ Home would become a calling song for a bygone era.
In 1948 FDR died months into his fourth presidential term. Born into wealth Franklin would be accused of class betrayal as he fought to stem improve the opportunities presented to the hard-up. His wife Eleanor was a campaigner who held press conferences. The couple were progressives, and champions of workers rights. Chief Petty Officer Graham W. Jackson played “Goin’ Home” on his accordion as FDR’s flag-draped casket passed by. The image of which was featured in Time magazine, and through the years the image has come to symbolise a nation’s grief, alongside Roosevelt contribution to the civil rights movement. Like many negro spirituals before, not least Amazing Grace, Goin’ Home had been adopted as a song of mourning. Alice was 11 years old.
She would begin to perform outside of Mt. Olive, and into parishes across the city. Ernie Farrow her brother-in-law found her employment working alongside vibraphonist Terry Gibbs with whom she toured. By 1963 she had left the parish for life on the road:
“We were coming in from California on our way to New York. While we were driving there I asked Terry [Gibbs, vibraphonist and drummer whose band she played in] who else was on the show with us. He said, ‘I don’t know, maybe John Coltrane I’m not sure’. So I said, Oh good, I hope it is John Coltrane. When we reached New York and spent one or two nights seeing him back stage I found him to be a very quiet man and so much into his own deep thought that I felt very reluctant to even say anything to him. Maybe we were close to ending a week, we just sort of gradually spoke a few words here and there. But when you look at someone like that and you can see like a profound inner, kind of ground that he always appeared to be in, you don’t wish to disturb that. After a while we found that we shared a lot of things in common with each other.”
Gibbs would say that John, “saw something in her that was beautiful.” Her connection with her husband was simultaneously musical and spiritual.
She says of John that, “He always felt that sound was the first manifestation in creation before music. I would like to play music according to ideals set forth by John and continue to let a cosmic principle, or the aspect of spirituality, be the underlying reality behind the music as he did”. Their connection was instant and the couple quickly moved in together, By the summer of 1964 they had relocated from New York City to a house in Dix Hills, on Long Island. They married in 1965 in Juárez, Mexico, coinciding with Coltrane’s divorce from his first wife, Naima Grubbs.
In 1967 John died from liver complication at the age of 4o. Drink and heroin from a decade previous had wasted the great saxophonist. Alice took a vow of celebacy and entered into a deep meditation. John would never leave her side, his music and ideas would stay with her, and frequently act as the central point to her recordings.
The service was held at st. Peter’s Lutheran Church, NYC, n Lexington and 54th. July 24 1967. Albert Ayler Quarter opened the service with ‘truth is marching in’ and ‘love cry’, John close friend and trumpeter Calvin Massey played ‘a love supreme’, the Ornette Coleman Quartet (backed by two bassists, Charlie Haden and David Izenzon, and the drummer Charles Moffett)closed out the service with a blasting version of Coltrane’s ‘holiday for a graveyard’. Moffett can be heard colliding into his kit.
In her memories she would write of John, “Not only could the thoughts of people be heard, they could also be seen. This recalled to my mind a time when the beloved John Coltrane Ohnedaruth, shortly before his final departure from the earthly plane, told me of Akasha. Akasha is the universal memory file cabinet of the universe.”
John exists in her Akasha, and is a major factor in both her continual spiritual journey and, indeed, her music. “He was at times, away from [his body] for hours,” she writes of John near his death. “Occasionally, he would speak of his interspheric travels.”
Alice was a specialist in capturing transitional music. That John’s should had travelled was central to her belief before his death. Upon it, she would invest not just a continuation of the repertoire she accrued alongside her late husband, but an extension of the belief they had explored together.
“Look at what trance means, it means to transcend… it means to become transcendental! So if we get a singular transcendental path of light, that could lead to such great dimensions of consciousness, of revelation, of spirituality, of spiritual power.”
In the funeral Not asleep, no Awake and more alive than ever before In the consciousness and at one-ment with the One and only all pervading all-embracing Ultimate Truth and only Reality, God; our own true self.
Alice realised her love for John in her music, in a prolonged period of reflection and mourning. the ascent of his soul, the movement of his spirit is for Alice at one with her meditation.
Speaking in 1971, at a time where Alice had dedicated the previous 4 years to him, and the previous 4 years with him, ‘All of my music is John. It’s John’s influence coming out on piano…’ John is there with her, their mutual inspiration on each other guiding Alice on the earthly plane and John on whatever one he is on.
Alice decides to not only remember John in her music, but to channel his spirit and continue the work they had been exploring together. Had Alice been attending church she could have invoked a ghost of Miss Haversham, in her wedding dress, acting out the ceremony that never was. The liner notes of the records that followed included quotes attributed to John, but it is widely understood that they were the hand of Alice. There is a heartbreaking tragedy to the records that follow, a grieving widow and the ghost of her husband, fervent in the studio, making their music. While, in a coffin lay the alcohol poisoned body of he lover.
However a contrasting picture is formed in both the music and the euphoric spiritualism. If Alice had been affected by the death, it had revealed itself in generosity and grace. Ravi Coltrane, describes the mood in their Dix Hills home. At home his mother would play a lot of records, especially Igor Stravinsky, whom her and John had admired. The family owned a copy of the Columbia Symphony orchestra performing the firebird suite, conducted by the composer himself. “The very end of the piece begins in this very tranquil way and builds into this overture, this very simple theme,” he says. “We used to dance around to it like we were on the stage.”
Following John’s death it is difficult to imagine a sombre or macabre home life. The records she made in dedication to John are upbeat — loaded with moments of elation and ecstasy. On the covers she is draped in shawls, white polo necks, and jewelery. There is no mourning dress, black lace nor spidered wedding gown. Kaleidoscopic colours and fractal light make for bright psychedelic imagery.
The first recording of her eulogy is ‘a monastic trio’ a record that was recorded as a dedication for John. On the record he is reimagined as Ohnedaruth, XX to play at Alice’s celestial remembering. A picture on the LPs inner-sleeve shows a lineup that never existed, electric ghosts playing phantom jazz in tape space-time. The sleevenotes are signed by John, but read as Alice. To look at the front sleeve is to fall through fractalized stained glass into nested formations of spirals within spirals, kaleidoscopic iterations as blue as mother sky.
While at the 5 Spot with Monk in 1957, Coltrane got a hint for a new sound, the instrument was harp suggested by Naima. (J.C. Thomas p. 87) Coltrane respected Carlos Salzedo, harp maestro, and bought a new harp for Alice. That harp, which we see on the cover of ‘a monastic trio’ would be Alice’s signature instrument.
In ‘72’S Lord of Lords, penultimate in her Galactic jazz Tetralogy, Alice renames him Sri Rama Ohnedaruth, the god whose name means Universe World Compassion.
John becomes a studio deity: “Before Ohnedaruth’s initiation where he received the name of Sri Rama, his astral globule manifested in my being for my use expressly in music . It is the same container of gross, elementals and cosmic materials he used while living on earth , which he no longer has a use for now that he presently moves and works in a finer, lighter ethereal body.”
I would propose that Alice Turiya Aparna, with which she identifies during this recording, is seeking to invoke an earlier meditation on John’s soul. To capture the moment he transitions into his eternal, ethereal self. In order to accomplish this meditation she calls upon earlier roots melodies that she and John shared together.
The album is recognised for its inclusion of excerpts from Stravinsky’s the firebird suite. Their son Ravi Coltrane, “I remember my mother playing lots of symphonic music,” he tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “Specifically, my mom was a great admirer of Stravinsky. Her favorite pieces were The Rite of Spring and, more so, the Firebird Suite.”
“there was something about the Firebird the really spoke to us” They would play the record repeatedly at eerie house in Dix Hills, Long Island.
The album closes out with a remixed version of the largo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony. A string section is synthesised and re-recorded, the trio of chords repeat on loop upon which Alice on Wurlitzer organ improvises a translinear version of the melody. But rather than the extension and contraction phrasing of the original, Alice pushes the melody as it is were on a continual path of ascent.
While Dvorak depicts distance, and a longing, Coltrane flips this and invokes a coming together.
Although Alice would allude to the John’s spirit being ever present in her music, there is a ghost on this particular song that is born on the largo. For this was never a Negro Spiritual, although it is often compared to Swing Low Sweet Chariot. This was a composition for a new modern America.
“That record was so special to me because practically every aspect of it is like a meditation, and the [cover] photograph was so unlike any one ever taken. It was the expression, it was what appeared to be the underlying substance of some higher energy vibration. When I looked at it I could see it was more like identifying with the soul than it was with the external person’s features or anything like that. And then the music became a meditation where each selection told its own story. Although it’s one that you can write down, I sometimes think things are better left in that realm of mystery or the unknown.”
On the cover, her head sinks back into a halo of her hair, her face wracked by the raptures of creation. She ‘s cloaked in a kaftan that drapes the studio. The Creator dissolves the ego because his ‘embrace is so loving and the bliss from it so extreme, the human body can in no way withstand this .. .
Lord Of Lords, to me, is the graceful accomplishment of several musical and spiritual ideas. It is the recording of bright ideology from Afro-American culture, musicology, experimentation, electronic sampling, remixing, and love. It is a feat of musical achievement that for many is masked by its breeziness.
Alice renames him Sri Rama Ohnedaruth, the god whose name means Universe World Compassion.
Alice’s great-nephew Steven Ellisson who today records as electronic musician, Flying Lotus said in 2014, “For me, Lord of Lords is the story of John Coltrane’s ascension, It’s her understanding and coping with his death. I feel that. This one song in particular, ‘Going Home’ that’s a family song. When someone passes, that’s the song we play at the funeral. When my Auntie Alice passed, we played that one. When my mom died, we played it for her.”
Alice died of respiratory failure January 12 2007 in West Hills Hospital Los Angeles
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