Pics in classical music in harlem folder
(Michael Henry Adams photos)
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Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (West 137th Street), designed by George Washington Foster to use local bedrock for the façade.
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Dessoff Choirs perform a sold-out concert of J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
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Carl Napoleon and Fedler Ais greet choir director Dr. Malcolm J. Merriweather.
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Pastor of Mother AME Zion Church Rev, Malcolm Byrd with his mother, Ms. Elsie J. Byrd, during intermission.
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Harlem’s extraordinary mezzosoprano Patrice Pates Eaton.
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The audience filled the neo-Gothic church of New York State’s most venerable congregation.
Maestro Merriweather ensures that classical music continues to flourish in Harlem
By MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS
Special to the AmNews
Despite intermittent springtime showers sprinkling, Saturday afternoon culminated with a superb sacred music concert at Harlem’s historic Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Celebrating the happy convergence of three anniversaries, the century-old Dessoff Choirs, the New York area’s oldest singing aggregation, presented Johann Sebastian Bach’s magnificent “Mass in B minor.”
No more resonant setting could be found than this atmospheric, century-old neo-Gothic style house of worship, filled to its 1,000-seat capacity. Augmented by a full period orchestra, featuring exceptional soloists, this faultlessly performed famous choral work was conducted by Harlem’s marvelous music maestro Malcolm J. Merriweather. The concert was an observance of both Merriweather’s tenth anniversary conducting the Dessoff Choirs and his tenth year as a Brooklyn College faculty member. This was reflected by inclusion of current college Conservatory students, alumni, and former Dessoff Choirs assistant conductors among the highly impressive ensemble.
Several audience members reported they were as charmed by the presentation’s setting as they were by the lovely music. Built between 1923–1925 on 137th Street near Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Mother Zion today occupies the sixth building to house its congregation. It was designed by George W. Foster, the first registered African American architect in New York State. The history of this soaring structure is no less auspicious than its architecture.
First organized in 1774, Mother Zion was formed in 1796 by Black members of the predominantly white John Street Methodist Church. Despite an abolitionist orientation, the church maintained strict segregationist policies in substantive ways that they grew to find intolerable. Relegated to the gallery, Blacks were only permitted to take Holy Communion after whites had communed first, children included.
Led by founding bishop James Varick (entombed in the undercroft), Mother Zion was renowned nationally as the Freedom Church. It played a crucial role advancing abolition while helping conduct the Underground Railroad, enlisting member Sojourner Truth in collaboration with members of other AME Zion congregations like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Each preached in earlier Mother Zion pulpits.
Until his death in 1963, the Rev. Benjamin C. Robeson, Paul Robeson’s elder brother, served as Mother Zion’s pastor. My personal hero associated with this extraordinary shrine of liberty was the Rev. George McMurray. Beyond leading valiant opposition in the 1970s against Harlem’s destructive heroin epidemic, he put in motion plans in the 1990s to gain protection for Mother Zion as a designated city landmark.
“That’s only fitting,” said the current pastor, the Rev. Malcolm J. Byrd. Addressing the audience during the intermission, he noted that Mother Zion Church “is older than the nation” and reminded us of the biblical admonition that the Lord “loves a cheerful giver.”
Ample and enthusiastic, although 75% white, those attending this performance were a reminder of the prominent role that classical music has always played in the Black community. Promoted by brilliant professional musicians like Will Marion Cook, brothers J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson, Caska Bonds, Sarah Jessye, and Hall Johnson, the Amsterdam News has always supported the excellence of African Americans involved in “serious music.” We have engaged among the most extraordinary journalists in the field, including Nora Holt Ray and Raoul Abdul.
“We are so outnumbered and of necessity, must be so exceptional,” said one of the soloists, mezzo soprano Patrice Pates Eaton. “Manifesting the best work possible is what we do!” Daughter of the late revered Harlem soprano and choral director Patricia (Pat) Pates Eaton, who established the Three-on-Three concert music initiative, she extolled the erudition and virtuosity of the prodigious Merriweather, exclaiming, “He’s been a champion of the once nearly forgotten Black artist, like musical giant Margaret Bonds. Before anyone else, Malcolm resurrected and performed ‘Ballad of the Brown King,’ which she wrote with a libretto by Langston Hughes.”
She reminded me that “he’s Dr. Merriweather”: “Malcolm earned degrees from Eastman, the Manhattan School of Music, and Syracuse University, and was a fellow at Tanglewood!”
She asked, “Did you hear him sing?” and I admitted that I’d been taken aback when the striking conductor quietly put down his baton and commenced to sing, in perfect German in a sweet, pure baritone voice. “Well, he is also most accomplished as a pianist and an organist, too.”
The upshot? Among America’s professional choral and orchestral directors, only a little more than 2% are Black. In the face of the advent of a presidential policy to remove African Americans from every sphere, no less dire than the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws in 1938, the Amsterdam News pledges to do our best to make sure you know who they are.