Coretta Small Ensemble - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1720879

Coretta is a collage of fictional musical recollections given to Coretta, wife of Martin Luther King, following the assassination of her husband on 4 April 1968. It is not so well known that Coretta King (née Scott) was a fine classical singer and pianist, referred to as ‘a talented young soprano’ in a January 1964 Time Magazine article. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in music and education from Antioch College, Ohio and supported by a scholarship, she undertook a second degree in voice and violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in the early 1950s, meeting Martin Luther King during this time in Boston. Although Coretta has envisioned a life for herself as a musician, she realised that such a career was not fitting for a Baptist minister’s wife. However, following her marriage on 18 June 1953, Coretta continued to perform in concerts and religious services as a form of non-violent protest, giving audiences ‘an emotional connection to the messages of social, economic, and spiritual transformation’.

Martin Luther King also valued music as a force for political change and spoke publicly about its importance for the Civil Rights Movement. On 13 September 1964, he met with the organisers of West Berlin’s first jazz festival, contributing the foreword for the programme. He wrote ‘When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument….Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.This is triumphant music.’

Coretta begins and ends with Martin Luther King’s favourite song Precious Lord, take my hand. King’s last words prior to his assassination were a request that it be sung at a mass he was to attend that night. The hymn is initially heard transformed by Coretta’s grief into a dark lament, followed by hazy memories of music that she may have shared with her husband - a blues waltz, quirky bebop ‘improvisation’, a dance from a 1950s musical, a quote from There is a Balm in Gilead (the only recording we have of Coretta’s singing voice) and fleeting harmonies taken from Verdi and Rossini soprano arias. These memories gradually transform into a joyful version of the opening hymn, dissolving into its 1932 setting by Thomas Andrew Dorsey. The very first notes of the piece - CorEttA - are heard throughout as a leitmotiv, eventually transformed from the minor into the major, mirroring the journey from personal grief to a public celebration of the First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement, Coretta Scott King (27 April 1927 – 30 January 2006).

Coretta was commissioned by New Music in the South West with generous support from Arts Council England.

It received its premiere on 4 February 2018 at the Victoria Rooms, Bristol, performed by Andy Keenan, Alison Holford, Michelle Ezigbo and Tomáš Klement.

The work is dedicated to NMSW’s founder and director Julian Leeks.