Exploring David Önaç's Atlantic Requiem

In June 2020, Lloyd’s of London made an astonishing admission. In a historic statement, the company apologised unreservedly ‘for the role played by the Lloyd’s market in the 18th and 19th-century slave trade … an appalling and shameful period of British history, as well as our own.’ Recognising that these words could never right the wrongs of the past, Lloyd’s went on to commit £40m to a programme of research, education and investment that might help to shape a future informed by past mistakes – including the commissioning of creative responses to these unspeakable historic atrocities.

So it is, that through a co-commission by Lloyd’s, Culture& and John Hopkins University, David Önaç’s Atlantic Requiem came to be. As Errol Francis, Artistic Director of Culture& explains: ‘It was felt that a large-scale musical response to the research would acknowledge the ineffable horror of this shameful period in human history that almost exceeds the potential of language to describe.’ Atlantic Requiem is both an acknowledgement of some of the darkest days in Western history, and a deeply uplifting meditation upon our potential, as humans, to do better, and to coexist in a ‘joyful and fearless fusion’. As Önaç explains: ‘The first three movements of this Requiem just go down and down and down, but the fourth and fifth movements are much more positive. I wanted to balance darkness with hope.’

The texts that form the scaffold of the Requiem trace this U-curve too, interspersing elements of the original Latin Mass with historical documents that shed light on the dark reality of the slave trade. The first movement uses a rare and significant Lloyd’s document as its text: the Guipúzcoa insurance agreement for a ship and its ‘cargo’ – enslaved people, who are ascribed a monetary value for the purpose of insurance. The second movement delves deeper, directly quoting a distressing 1791 court testimony describing how an enslaved woman was deliberately thrown overboard for having smallpox, tied to a chair with a mask round her eyes and mouth. The captain, however, only laments the loss of ‘a good chair’.

Atlantic Requiem is both an acknowledgement of some of the darkest days in Western history, and a deeply uplifting meditation upon our potential …

The third movement is a turning point, a day of reckoning between this gruesome past and a better future. Here, the text of the ‘Dies Irae’ (Day of Wrath) is juxtaposed with Biblical excerpts that force us to question the calculated use of Christian texts to legitimise injustice. As Önaç explains, this is far from clear-cut: ‘Biblical texts have been used as justification by those profiting from the slave trade – but also by those who argued for its dismantling.’ And so we begin to move towards a place of hope, with the fourth movement offering a prayer for peace and a move towards reconciliation, and the fifth eventually leaning into text from the Book of Revelation, with a vision for a bright and harmonious new future.

If the texts force us to face some uncomfortable truths and ask ourselves difficult questions, then the music helps to frame our perspective and lead us to a place of understanding. The very first sound we hear is that of the ‘Lutine bell’, an echo of one that belonged to HMS Lutine before it sank in 1799, taking with it a vast sum of gold and silver intended to underwrite a stock market crash. The bullion (along with 240 lives) was lost, but the Lutine bell now hangs in the Underwriting Room of Lloyd’s HQ, where it is traditionally struck to mark a significant loss or death. As the bell tolls at the start of the Requiem, we are at once cast back to those treacherous voyages that fuelled the slave trade, and reminded of the many lives destroyed and lost in the pursuit of capitalism.

Önaç himself identifies as ‘transatlantic … culturally, ethnically, musically’, so the Atlantic Requiem was an opportunity to connect both Western classical and African American musical traditions with the historical narrative in an authentic and meaningful way. It is in many ways a work of contradictions and oppositions, between cultures and people, between right and wrong. But over the course of its five movements, these collisions and contradictions begin to resolve themselves, and not in a way which glosses over past atrocities, rather in a way that looks optimistically, in Önaç’s words, to ‘a future where cultural disunity is superseded by mutual coexistence’.

‘Everything is so polemical and polarized – my hope is that we’ll rediscover the art form which makes us listen.’

David Önaç

The collision is there in the juxtaposition of classical forms with jazz, gospel and blues influences, in the harmonies and rhythms, and even in the pitch structure of the score itself. Although the traditional Western chromatic scale uses 12 notes, in the Requiem Önaç restricts himself to just ten: five white and five black, ‘representing both colouristic segregation and equality’. When separated, the five white notes (C, D, E, G, A) create a pentatonic scale that alludes to the tuning notes of the Western orchestra: it is heard in the very opening bars of the piece in an expressive violin solo. Meanwhile, the five black notes (F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp, C-sharp, D-sharp) create a purely black-note pentatonic scale, first used in a clarinet solo which overtly references jazz and blues: the clarinet solo appears immediately after the solo violin, before the two intertwine. The two scales are separated by the interval of a tritone — which in tonal terms is as far apart as they can be — and yet they are structurally identical. As Önaç explains, these two sets of five notes are ‘profoundly equal in sound, structure and conception, while simultaneously being profoundly different in sound, colour and association.’

Önaç takes a similar approach to the rhythmic construction of the Requiem, which combines ‘straight’ classical rhythmic subdivisions of 2, 4, 8 and 16 with the ‘swung’ triplets and rhythms associated with jazz, gospel and blues. And yet, over the course of the Requiem Önaç repeatedly demonstrates how much more vivid and compelling these musical tropes are when they combine, that when these seemingly opposing cultures coexist they create a rich musical whole much greater than the sum of their disparate parts. By the fifth movement, the integration of these different musical styles results in something that is ‘polyrhythmic, polymetric, polystylistic’, and which is all the richer and more interesting as a result. This in itself brings home the Requiem’s greatest lesson, one which Önaç hopes will help to shape a more positive future. ‘I feel like people are really not listening to each other, that any opposing view is taken as a threat’, Önaç explains. ‘Everything is so polemical and polarised – my hope is that we’ll rediscover the art form which makes us listen.’