M. Lamar’s Spirituals for Our Time

Late yesterday afternoon I decided to take my own advice and view the PROTOTYPE streaming of M. Lamar’s “Funeral Doom Spiritual.” PROTOTYPE calls this series of free streams Opera | Theatre | X. “Funeral Doom Spiritual” was more of a song cycle than an opera with male soprano Lamar providing his own piano accompaniment. “Doom Spiritual” is a phrase that Lamar himself coined. It amounts to a more contemporary genre of Negro Spirituals with apocalyptic connotations.

The assimilation of musical performance and video projection in “Funeral Doom Spiritual” (screen shot courtesy of PROTOTYPE)

Those connotations were realized through a rich context of accompanying video. On the basis of the overall camera work, these videos appear to have been projected on either side (in front or behind) the performers; but, in the streamed version, they were assimilated into an overall viewing experience alternating between the world of the projected images and the world of the concert hall. In addition to Lamar, the performers consisted of a violinist, a cellist, two bassists, and electronics provided by composer Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. All of these musicians were hooded with black robes, suggesting connotations of both the Spanish Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan.

It would be fair to say that Lamar’s sense of apocalypse is tightly coupled to the many events of recent years that have made it clear that, for all of the progress made in civil rights movements, race-based segregation is back on the rise. The prevailing images are those of a Negro in his coffin and another Negro carrying the coffin on his own back without any assistance from others. (Possibly both of these roles were taken by Lamar himself. Also, it is worth noting that, in the advance material I received, Lamar seems to prefer “Negro” to “African American.”) Presumably, this is a journey to a graveyard; but, within the scope of “Funeral Doom Spiritual,” that journey is never completed. This may have been a contemporary reflection of early Civil Rights songs, which also talked about the “journey to freedom” with little, if any, indication of that journey arriving at a conclusion.

However, “Funeral Doom Spiritual” is structured around a narrative that is more enigmatic than the narratives of any of those Civil Rights songs. Indeed, given that this is an entirely different genre of music (not to mention theater), the overall sense seems to be one of an enigma far too challenging to be resolved. Even the fact than much of Lamar’s vocal work comes across as idiomatic phrases repeated too many times seems to suggest that resolving that enigma is going to require more than merely groping at possible solutions. Thus, if the listener/viewer begins to feel some strain from an excess of repetition in both what is heard and what is seen, this may simply be a matter of reflecting the sense of helplessness arising from the current retrogression of attitudes towards civil rights.