Alvin Singleton’s Sweet Chariot


This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.

https://youtu.be/z8h34p9tsy4


Alvin Singleton (born 1940) grew up listening to jazz but planned to be an accountant. He did get a job as an accountant but, having decided that he wanted to be a composer, decided to fill some gaps in his musical education before going to graduate school. He said in an interview, “Carman Moore was studying with Hall Overton, so I followed Carman’s advice and began studying with Hall as well. I also wanted to take Vincent Persichetti’s analysis course at Juilliard, however; he was on sabbatical and Roger Sessions was teaching instead. And then at Columbia I took a composition seminar with Charles Wuorinen, he was only a little older than me.” He was accepted to Juilliard, University of Michigan, and Yale, and decided to attend Yale to study with Mel Powell.


Carman Moore says of Singleton’s chamber ensemble piece Sweet Chariot that it is “scored for 2 flutes (each doubling both piccolo and alto flute), bassoon, soprano saxophone (doubling tenor saxophone) and cello.  Of special interest about this instrumentation is the doubling of the saxophone and the tripling of the flutes, which in effect turns this quintet into a ‘tentet,’ and required almost choreographic skills of the composer to make sure the player had time to drop one instrument and assume another in time to play the next note. Taken overall, the music in this piece seems to be about rising, perhaps suggestive of the journey from swinging low to being carried home.” And in the composer’s own words about this piece: “Human experience shows that there are images familiar to us that they do not have to be completely defined. How much of a face does one need to sketch out (absent nose, eyes, mouth) before it is recognizable as a face? When choosing a ‘Negro Spiritual’ upon which to base my composition, I chose one that is universally recognizable, Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Therefore I needed not to use it in its entirety. In fact, it is sketchily quoted a few times here and there throughout the composition.”


My classical music post for today is Alvin Singleton’s Sweet Chariot.

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