Meditations in Passage [CF:116-40775L]

In the early eighteen-hundreds, captives on the slave ship Amistad mutinied while in passage to America. When upon arrival the slaves were prosecuted under criminal law, John Quincy Adams successfully pleaded their case before the United States Supreme Court. As composer Hale Smith notes, the saga of this mutiny touches ?a universality of human experience ... It relates equally to the boat people who fled Southeast Asia or to the Jews who were uprooted and victimized by the Holocaust.? In 1981, Hale Smith finished writing Meditations In Passage, a work for Soprano and Baritone soloists and Orchestra based on what was then a little-known historical fact, the mutiny on the slave ship Amistad. With the recent release of the Stephen Spielberg feature film ?Amistad,? this amazing and thought-provoking event is now finally no longer obscure, and is taking its rightful place in the annals of US history.Hale Smith wrote this work not only as a tribute to a significant part of Black History, but the text (by the composer), dealing with the feelings of those aboard ship, sought to reach further: ?not...a description of the actual event because I was more interested in its universal human implications than in its historical reality.?