David Önaç: Spirituals

Versatile composer, pianist, musical director and educator David Önaç is a connoisseur of concert music, and jazz and gospel repertoire. His compositions have received numerous awards including the RPS Composition Prize, have featured in multiple ABRSM syllabuses, been selected for international piano competitions and broadcast on Classic FM, and enjoyed in concerts and performances throughout the UK. His recent publication with EVC Music, Spirituals, showcases his expert knowledge and his passion for the genre. I recently caught up with David, who talks about his new publication, an important upcoming project entitled Atlantic Requiem, working with UK exam board ABRSM, and the importance of expanding your repertoire from the beginning of your musical journey.

What were your influences and inspirations growing up?

I grew up in the Caribbean and spent the first ten years of my life there. My family very much influenced me. In terms of classical music, my dad’s side of the family is very musical. His brother was a concert pianist, and I always looked up to him; I also had classical piano lessons from a very young age. At the same time, in the Caribbean, there was gospel music in local churches, reggae on the radio, and jazz everywhere. Highly stimulating, lively music with great grooves, great harmonies, and amazing improvisations. I think I heard gospel music from the womb!

We came to the UK in 1995, and my lessons in classical piano continued. I started playing piano concertos from the age of fourteen and became increasingly interested in composition in the second half of high school.  This was encouraged when I was awarded the runner up prize in BBC Young Composer of the Year for my solo piano piece The Butterfly - looking back, this piece is a snapshot of everything I was exploring.  At this time, I was becoming more and more interested in improvisation and jazz too. These areas of classical and jazz are really at the core of my musical influences, but for a long time these two worlds were almost always pursued separately. It’s only over the past few years that I’ve come to the point where I’m actively, consciously trying to integrate them and more overtly embrace the influence of jazz and gospel.

You were recently commissioned to write for the ABRSM piano syllabus. What did you learn from that experience, and how much did this impact your understanding of the parameters of graded exam pieces? 

I remember being sent a massive A3 spreadsheet with all sorts of very specific requirements: keys, accidentals, rhythmic values, duration and so on. This definitely aligned with my classical training, but we also discussed the possibility of writing something at Grade 5 level which connected with my jazz and gospel experience.

I wrote a very still, reflective piece, A Distant Star in the Stillness. Harmonically, it’s hugely influenced by jazz and gospel, and I really wanted to include certain chord voicings in the ABRSM syllabus because when I was younger I used to spend hours trying to work out these beautiful, rich sounds at the piano, but almost never had anyone teach me. If pianists can be introduced to these sounds from earlier grades and earlier ages, I would love for that to happen.

From the outside, the requirements can sound a little prescriptive and restrictive, but I didn’t experience it like that at all. It was just a framework in which I needed to operate, just like in any commission or project. In some sense, it is liberating because you have set goals to meet, and it is interesting to be given the challenge to create something beautiful within those limits.

I am passionate about the education of young musicians. Those things which I didn’t have access to as a child… I don’t want that to be the case for other people because there is so much beauty out there. ABRSM were a good fit because they have such a wide reach and so include many learners who want to expand their horizons, and that is fantastic. 

Carnival, was played on Classic FM this month. Has having your work featured in the educational syllabus and on the radio helped bring your music to a wider audience?

Absolutely. It has been hugely beneficial professionally both to work with ABRSM and to have my music broadcast on a station with the reach of Classic FM. Carnival is the third etude of my 'Five Etudes for solo piano' which, as a set, have had performances by Peter Donohoe, Simon Smith and Jonathan Mamora, and they were also selected as the compulsory work for the Scottish International Piano Festival last year. For me, though, it is about more than just the wider audience. The pieces selected have encapsulated my combined passion for both jazz and classical music. Carnival was written about a festival in the Bahamas - the sights and sounds and the excitement late at night and in the early hours of the morning as a child watching all these amazing hand-made costumes go by, and there is live music with every group competing for the top prize. It is groovy, and it is loud; there are cowbells and trumpets and sousaphones, and it is such an amazing experience. Carnival is very much about that.

At the same time, I was discovering Ligeti with much excitement for the first time when I wrote my piano etudes, and looked at his etudes closely. I was also studying Debussy’s piano etudes in depth for the first time and starting to appreciate his amazing compositional technique and trying to work through how that could lead to pieces of such beauty. Carnival is all about threes. It’s the third etude in the set, and all the rhythmic groupings are threes and there are three parts to the structure and the intervals are all in thirds. It’s very mathematical in one sense! But a third is also a building block of both classical and jazz harmony, and I love stacking 3rds on top of each other to create 9th and 11th and 13th chords - those rich sonorities! So Carnival is very much about fusion of cultures and styles and approaches and sounds and so really represents me.

You have been working on a project titled Atlantic Requiem. Can you tell us more about the project and the work itself?

I had recently completed a violin duo Out of the Blue, commissioned by the Danel Quartet, resident at the University of Manchester. It initially sounds like bebop but is still very much in the classical idiom, and I was starting to grapple with questions that arise from fusing styles.  Like how to notate the rhythm, especially as the rhythm is swung and straight at both the quaver and semiquaver level: do I notate everything in triplets or is it best to write ‘swing’ over the top, and how would that land with performers? That was a sign for me that I was really engaging with bringing these two worlds together. As I was working on that, I received an email from a charity called Culture& about a requiem. One of the directors met me at the premiere of Out of the Blue, leading to some very interesting conversations about what I was trying to do musically and from that conversation I became more interested in the requiem project and put a proposal together.

Lloyd’s of London had discovered documents in their archives pertaining to their role in the transatlantic trading and enslaving of Africans. Transatlantic for me is important because of my own heritage and lived experience from both sides of the Atlantic, plus the musical influences from both sides. My cultural and racial heritage is very mixed, and it has taken me most of my life so far to process that.  For decades I asked myself: where is home? Who is my culture? Who are my people? I’ve finally realised this is not problematic, my people and culture are on both sides, and this could be really rich! One attraction to writing the requiem was that it was a perfect opportunity to bring this richness together.

My Atlantic Requiem is for orchestra and chorus, with three vocal soloists. I’ve used instrumentation, rhythmic approaches and pitch collections to symbolise both violence and reconciliation between cultures, right from the violin and clarinet solos at the very start of the first movement. The entire piece is built on only ten notes, five black notes and five white notes on the piano, and there is literally, audibly segregation of sound and colour moving to reconciliation and unity throughout the work. The orchestration of larger moments aligns with the Western classical tradition at times, but simultaneously there are times when the sound is very much like a jazzy big band chord (or both!), and there is the parallel triadic movement in upper strata which sounds like gospel. 

The subject matter is of course horrible, and I wrote the libretto myself using one of the principal documents discovered in the Lloyd’s archives for the first movement. For the second movement, I researched and found a companion document, the court testimony of John Cranston, a crewman aboard a slave ship.  He testifies how a slave contracted smallpox, was quarantined for two days, and when she didn’t get better, since the captain didn’t want the other slaves to get infected, he ordered the slave to be tied to a chair and thrown overboard alive. I also included biblical texts which condemn slavery, talk about the consequences of enslaving people, and also positively about the beauty of dark skin. These things are often missed out. It is deeply emotive subject matter and at times I was in tears writing this piece, but the fourth and fifth movements take a more positive trajectory towards understanding, unity, reconciliation, and redemption.

It really pains me that our culture is so divided at the moment, so much lack of dialogue. We are all human beings to the core. Just imagine what we could do if all the energy spent on being divisive could be channelled towards unity. That is what the Atlantic Requiem is about. It looks forward to a vision of the future where all races and cultures co-exist harmoniously without losing their distinctiveness.

Your recent publication with EVC, Spirituals, is aimed at initial to grade five piano students. How did this project come about?

Again, the guiding principle for me was that there were certain sounds and techniques that I wanted to introduce to younger pianists, or adult learners starting out or at an intermediate level. I’ve tried to make the arrangements really fun. For example, one of the pieces is very much in a static hand position with the exception of the lowest C on the piano. Even though that is  one of the earliest pieces in the book, you still get to really whack that low note! There are easy ways for learners to experience the power and resonance of notes in the lower register of the piano and I want people to have fun moving out of that initial confined position to start encountering the geography of the piano!

Another example is certain patterns of movement on keyboard instruments which are characteristic of gospel music, like the triadic alternation of major and minor triads, which simulates a very vocal sound and comes from three-part vocal gospel music. That can be quite manageable to play on the keyboard and perhaps combined with a bass line. 

Elena Cobb (of EVC Music) and I also had a detailed conversation about swung rhythms: which grade should we begin introducing them, and how do they contribute to the overall difficulty? You have to think about what the fingers are doing, what’s involved in coordinating the hands, what the rest of the rhythmic content is, if repetition can be used to make things more manageable. If you can learn from a younger age that rhythmic division or multiplication by equal twos, fours, and eights is not the only possibility, but that asymmetrical proportions are possible - and fun! - knowing that from the outset is very valuable.

Can you tell me about some of the specific spirituals featured in the book?

For me, I definitely wanted to include spirituals that are well-known already, as well as introduce tunes that are just fun and memorable to play. For example, Deep River is a beautiful tune. It features the words ‘Deep river, my home is over Jordan, Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground’. The Jordan River can be a signal. In one sense it’s a biblical signal, ‘crossing over the Jordan’ or ‘getting to the promised land’. It was also a signal for possible shelter and refuge or escape from slavery. So, as well as the beautiful tune, it has this really long, rich, diverse history - I felt that had to be included.

Another example is Dem Bones, another biblical story about a prophet called Ezekiel, who speaks to an entire valley of bones, and this entire skeleton army comes to life. The traditional spiritual is such an imaginative setting of this story where you literally hear a skeleton being built up!  Everything transposes up a semitone each time a bone is added, and from a didactic perspective, having the same sort of phrase and a reasonably light texture gave an opportunity to introduce learners at quite an early stage to transposition and the different shapes you encounter in different keys on the piano.  And going up several keys is just really fun!

For those who buy and enjoy the music in the book, what would you recommend they look to afterwards to expand their knowledge of this style? 

Great question. There is so much out there these days, so just try and find it! Even just for keyboard, you can look at technical walkthroughs of scales, chord progressions, rhythmic approaches, hand positions of course.  But from my experience of jazz and gospel music, I’ve found that the real joy comes when you are playing or listening live. Find some live events or live performances of the music you like - there is nothing like it. For example I recently discovered that Nord has some really great keyboard sessions on their YouTube channel where you can watch musicians from all over the world. They are just phenomenal, such extraordinarily inspiring musicianship.

Art Tatum is another person I’ve recently been checking out. I love his super-fast right hand runs down the piano, his playing is almost machine-like in its speed and precision. It is so inspiring and brings such joy!