Shall We Gather –Lucas Meachem, baritone; Irina Meachem, piano (Rubicon 1071)
Shall we gather? A seemingly simple question. From the vantage point of early 2021, during the latest crest of the pandemic that’s forced us apart, though, the prospect of an actual gathering feels moderately terrifying. The cruel realities of social distancing and its necessary atomization mean that our gatherings have often been replaced by simulacra; our gatherings are mediated by technology or space in order to keep everyone safe. The absence that results casts into relief those larger gatherings that define our collective existences: our relationships to our families, our communities, our workplaces, our country, each of which has been put under stress this past year.
Shall We Gather responds to that darkness and atomization with the simple question of its title. Through art songs by and about a broad swath of people from the United States, Lucas and Irina Meachem offer a vision of Americanness centered around the things that call on us to gather and that we gather to call upon. Those things, they say, are rooted in an act of hope in the promise of resilience that underlies our national character. By channeling the feelings of those gatherings we are missing, we can, perhaps, conjure a greater sense of togetherness, of commonality. Let’s now ponder some of the album’s gatherings.
We gather to help one another. Written in the early days of the Great Depression, Langston Hughes’s poem Prayer at first reads like a paraphrase of those oft-quoted lines about huddled masses at the base of the Statue of Liberty. But for Hughes, those ‘sick,’ ‘desperate,’ and ‘tired’ are people who live in our own ‘weary city,’ people whose own society has failed them. He calls on us to come together to lift them up with the soothing refrain of ‘gather up.’ In Litany, John Musto’s 1987 setting of the poem, Musto uses a two-note motif, alternately rising and falling, to underscore Hughes’s call to embrace our shared humanity.
We gather to celebrate. Aaron Copland’s 1950 arrangement of The Boatman’s Dance doesn’t start as a celebration. It begins with a pealing call to the grandeur of the Ohio River. But once the boatman shakes off his weariness, he can start celebrating in earnest, tumbling forward until he runs out of steam. He dances until dawn, spends all his money on the party, and gets in trouble, only to arise the next day to float to the next city and do it all again.
We gather to mourn. The imagery of William Grant Still’s Grief is almost too much to bear: an angel so lost in grief that it can barely raise its wings, let alone its head. Poet LeRoy V. Brant was describing a statue in a local cemetery, but his sentiment couldn’t be more relevant now. Still captures the sense of suspension in the scene, with ringing piano chords contrasting with the baritone’s nearly motionless, recitation-like melody. And in the song’s final moments, the singer moves up to a questioning dissonance, which seems to embody our current world of solitary grief. (Interestingly, Still didn’t write that note; it was an error unwittingly introduced by his publisher. But it’s an error so evocative that it has nevertheless become a vital part of the song itself.)
We gather to fight for what’s important. 'Rise up,’ Walt Whitman cries, it is time for everyone to march loudly enough to wake the dead, to ‘stop for no expostulation’ that might cause you to tarry or lose faith. The moral force undergirding the poem was, of course, the cause of preserving the union and eradicating slavery. In early 1942, Kurt Weill unsheathed Whitman’s trenchant words in preparation for another massive conflict, this time to punch some Nazis. Weill’s music clearly depicts the marching sounds of drums and bugles, and his particular sense of melodic time easily accommodates Whitman’s free verse. While the song’s martial connotations may be impossible to fully set aside, one can still hear echoes of today’s moral gatherings – for Black lives, for equal rights, for improving our democracy – in its blaring drums.
We gather to assert what unites us. In most of the songs presented here, observations about Americanness are implicit. Each lifts a particular moment, a facet of our collective character, highlighting our aspirations to resilience, care, humor, strength, justice, and so forth, the many qualities and beliefs that tie us together. That sentiment is made explicit by the first song on the album, Gene Scheer’s American Anthem. It asserts that what connects us as Americans is not some innate, unquestionable exceptionalism. Instead, we are gathered by a constant striving toward a more just and equal society, pursued through actions large and small. It is a gathering whose power is derived from its hopefulness and the commitment we make to ourselves to give our all to improve ourselves. And the warm embrace of that hopefulness is perhaps enough of a balm to tie us together until we can all gather safely and uncomplicatedly again.
-Dan Ruccia, Durham, North Carolina, February 2021