Getting Ready, O Zion is a musical setting of the words to a little-known African-American spiritual of the same title.  It is the finale of a cantata of the same name. 

Most of the great pieces we now call “spirituals” were assembled during the 18th and 19th centuries out of snippets of black and white liturgical and devotional music, colloquial versions of Biblical stories, and white and black popular music of the day.  Originally referred to as slave songs or jubilee songs (after the name for black religious festivals), these pieces were brought to the world’s attention by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers during a fund-raising tour in 1871.  Since then the spirituals have occupied the center of every choir’s repertoire, and new arrangements of the most popular – like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”, and “Ain’t-a That Good News” – continue to be published year after year.

My love for the spirituals comes in part from my own Christian faith, which allows me to appreciate them on a level beyond that of the simply musical.  In particular, I have found the texts to the spirituals to be a wonderful devotional tool.   They are often powerfully compressed statements of faith, made all the more moving by the dire circumstances that many times prompted their creation – circumstances that often made their way into the texts themselves.    The words to the spiritual “Getting Ready to Die” provide a good example:

The most compelling characteristics of the text for me was the way that the mood of the verses changes from weary defeat to joyful hope.  When sung in the traditional call-and-response manner, each of the verses (sung by a soloist) would be followed by a repetition of the chorus (sung by the choir or congregation).   However, when sung in this way, each brightening verse would be immediately followed by a return to the rather maudlin chorus.   The challenge when writing new music for this text was to figure out how to create an overall brightening of mood despite the constant return of the chorus.  One of the ways I try to do this is by keeping the original tune for the chorus, but writing entirely new music for the words of the verses.  Another solution is to combine the words of both verse and chorus as the piece moves closer and closer to the joyous finale.  By doing so, I also seek to make clear my own faith in the main message of this text: that Christ’s willingness to die for our sins on the cross transformed death from the ultimate failure to the ultimate triumph.   At the transcendent climax of the piece, the choir combines the last verse with the chorus, singing the glorious truth “The Lord is ready to die”.

Getting Ready, O Zion was composed for the Lexington Christian Academy Chorale in 2002, and was premiered by
                                 that remarkable group  of high school students and the Triton Brass Quintet at Grace Chapel,
                                 Lexington, MA, in 2002.