Conference Agenda

Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ opera Omar (2022) is based on the life of Omar ibn Said, a Muslim man from present-day Senegal who was enslaved and sent across the Atlantic. This paper focuses on the musical construction of Omar’s African identity, which is retained by the character throughout and never subsumed into the American identity forcibly imposed upon him.

The musical signifiers of African identity in Omar include the quotation of “Koromanti,” a melody sung by enslaved Africans in Jamaica, rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and cinquillo patterns characteristic of Afro-Caribbean music, and winding, ornamented, and melismatic melodies. Most notably, these rhythmic and melodic signifiers accompany Omar’s statement to his mother Fatima in Act I that “here [in Africa] we have our place, . . . our time, our faith.” The melismatic melody accompanying this statement is reprised at the opera’s end, revealing that even after all the events of the opera and numerous years spent as a slave on plantations in the Carolinas, Omar has not lost touch with his African identity.

The musical emphasis on Omar’s African identity results in a reversal of traditional operatic tropes. The musical signifiers noted above often characterize exotic tropes in European operas such as Samson et Dalila. In Omar, however, this music signifies not the exotic Other but rather the core identity of the central character. Instead, it is the American characters who sound “exotic” to Omar, as in a passage where the audience experiences the English text through Omar’s point of view, with the slaveowner’s threats emerging as nonsense syllables.

The New York Times critic Brian Seibert wrote before Omar’s premiere that “Omar’s journey, translated into opera, becomes about finding a language to hold together all that he experiences.” By treating the musical construction of Omar’s African identity as a through line in their opera, Giddens and Abels suggest that it is that musical language that holds together all that Omar experiences in the opera.

This paper examines American folk elements of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s opera Omar, arguing that tracing these folk references and Omar’s participation in them is vital to gaining an understanding of Omar’s character development throughout the opera. I draw on historical folk music sources as well as Eileen Southern’s and Samuel Floyd’s work on the history of Black American music, Horace Maxile’s work on African American musical topics, and Mark M. Smith’s work in sound studies to examine two ways in which Omar’s life in America is represented in the music of the opera. First, I observe that Giddens’s adaptations of Black American folk music create a soundscape broadly representing Black life in the antebellum South. Second, I argue that—by attending to Omar’s participation in these musical styles—we gain insight into Omar’s character and relationships as he attempts to understand his Muslim faith in relation to the plantation owner’s Christian teachings.

I first identify various Black American musical styles and folk references heard throughout Omar’s time in America—for example, we hear the chorus of enslaved people singing Giddens and Abels’s adaptations of traditional tunes as work songs and hoedowns. Giddens’s use of these styles creates a realistic soundscape that tells a broad story representing the lives of enslaved people in the South, as work songs and dance music were a common part of the antebellum southern soundscape (Southern 1997; Smith 2001). However, Omar does not participate in these songs, suggesting that he is not yet integrated into the community of enslaved people in America. We do not hear Omar sing with the chorus until the opera’s final scenes, where he struggles to reconcile his Muslim faith with the Christian community around him. However, his singing is musically distinct from the chorus’s. I argue, therefore, that Omar does not assimilate to the chorus—instead, the music reflects his community in America changing to accept him. This musical storytelling offers a nuanced representation of Omar’s individual spiritual journey in America.

Reviews of the L.A. Opera’s performance of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s Omar highlight the opera’s historical context, its striking sets, and the soloists’ impressive performances. Few reviews, however, devote much attention to the large, involved opera chorus. Musicological scholarship on the opera chorus highlights its involvement in the drama, its relationships to the lead characters, or its political, religious, or national symbolism (Parakilas 1992; Buch 2006; Rutherford 2006; Huebner 2013; Lajosi 2018). In this paper, I combine analysis of the dramatic functions of the Omar chorus with analysis of the music and staging. Together, these elements illuminate two overarching narrative roles of the chorus: 1) broadening the focus from the individual to the collective—past and present—of which Omar is a part; and 2) facilitating a transformation from a historically situated narrative to a transcendent religious meditation.

The Omar chorus appears in four distinct roles—Greek chorus, characters in the narrative, singing absence, and non-singing presence. The Act 1 trajectory from singing absence to non-singing presence points towards Omar’s real and imagined communities across history. At the beginning of Scene 2, the offstage chorus confronts viewers with the fact that unlike Omar, countless enslaved individuals’ stories are lost to the violent history of the slave trade. In Scene 5, the chorus remains on stage after issuing an intensifying warning to Omar, powerfully concluding the act through their sheer physical presence.

In Act 2, the chorus transforms the historical narrative into a broader religious meditation. In Scene 2, they physically and musically enfold Omar into their community on the Johnson plantation. A subsequent veiled warning and an enigmatic, hymn-like passage enact a dramatic shift from chorus as Omar’s actual community to a more enigmatic spiritual support. The chorus makes its final appearance near the end of Omar’s contemplative Scene 4 aria, magnifying his religious introspection into a transcendent profession of faith with a polyphonic “Amen”, a triumphant 8-part praise song, and a final offstage D-minor vamp. Together, the chorus’s dramatic, musical, and staged elements elucidate Giddens’s characterization of the opera as “at once a story of one man and many” (Subito 2024).