Presto Music Classical Podcast, Episode 42: A Great Musical Dett - Choral Music by Black Composers with Dr Marques Garrett

Published earlier in the year, the Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers is a wide-ranging, meticulously-researched collection of thirty-five works by Black composers, ranging from the Renaissance to the present day, and drawn from around the world. With sacred texts sitting alongside secular settings, it's a resource equally suited to teaching and to performance, and has already been leaping off the shelves and into the repertoire of choirs all around the world. 

A few months back I was lucky enough to have a chat with its editor, Dr Marques Garrett, about the process of putting the collection together, as well as diving into some of the individual composers included - the Renaissance polyphonist Vicente Lusitano, the enormously influential mid-twentieth-century American composer Undine Smith Moore, and of course R Nathaniel Dett, a Canadian-American especially devoted to writing choral music, who has formed a particularly large part of Dr Garrett's own research. He gave me fair warning that getting him started on discussing Dett would open the floodgates, as indeed it did...!

Dr Garrett's ever-expanding spreadsheet of Non-Idiomatic Choral Music of Black Composers (listed by composer, title, voicing, instrumentation and genre) can be found on his website, at https://www.mlagmusic.com/research/beyond-elijah-rock.

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