Fiona MacNeill, who sings alto in the GSA Choir, writes about her experience of rehearsing Angel of the Battlefield – composed by Cecilia McDowall, with lyrics by Clara Barton and Seán Street.
In my professional role I help individuals and teams make sense of complex working environments, to identify patterns, connect to meaning and think about legacy. As I step outside my comfort zone to write this blog, it occurs to me that each of the compositions in the Composeher project has these components, and yet it is Angel of the Battlefield, by Cecilia McDowall, that really speaks to me.
I’ve been thinking about why that is. I don’t have language or skill to describe the way in which the music is written, after all, I can’t read it! So as is often the case with me it’s about feeling, emotional connection and visual metaphors. The fact that Clara Barton (founder of the American Red Cross), whose diaries were the inspiration for the piece took the time amongst the fires, the death, and the suffering to reflect on what it felt like for her and those like her, attaches personal meaning to her experience.
I’m also attracted to her leadership and vision, engaging with values and behaviours that still show up in many organisational statements of intent today. Her career began as a teacher, as one of the first women to work in federal government she became the director of a woman’s prison and was an advocate for women’s suffrage and other progressive causes. Clearly tenacious, a feminist and a believer in equality.
When the American Civil war broke out, she stepped forward to provide care and supplies to soldiers, earning her the nickname ‘Angel of the Battlefield’. This and the experience of the Swiss Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian war inspired her to bring the Red Cross to America.
Angel of The Battlefield is in three movements; like chapters in a book, they speak to and build on each other. There are patterns of texts and notes held up by meaning made by Clara’s reflections on her purpose and legacy. She kept diaries from 1861 to her death in 1912, which journaled her personal battle with depression as well as her experiences as a humanitarian leader. Direct excerpts from her diaries create pattern in each of the three movements, bringing an eerie closeness to her thinking and feeling. These words are supported by additional narrative from Séan Street. In conversation with Cecilia, he is quoted as saying “recent collaborations have led us to consider the nature of the synergy between text and music in our work together, and it may be, I think, fruitful to explore it at this time.” This feels accurate in the context of this piece as his writing adds to and merges with Clara’s; ‘It’s not so hard to be an angel you just need bread, water, a sense of what it means to be mortal.’ The way that the music is written brings Clara and Séan’s words, and the sounds of the battlefield, to life. You can ‘hear the guns’, feel the ‘bullet pierce the sleeve’, and imagine ‘the fires of Fredericksburg’ still burning.
Underlying the story is the refrain of the African American spiritual: There is a Balm in Gilead. The ‘balm in Gilead’ appears in both the Old and New Testaments. The origins of this hymn like many, are unclear and unattributed, with claims from John Newton and William Cowper, who wrote Amazing Grace, to Richard Allen a black activist who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The balm that ‘healed the sin sick soul’ seems, in the context of this piece, to be healing Clara as much as the wounded. I can’t really explain the feeling that the flow of the notes bring. Somehow, they hold pain and hope in equal measure.
Clara would be as much an inspirational female leader, if she was alive today, as she was in her own time. She brought compassion, pragmatism, and a sheer desire to respond to what she felt was ‘the need’. She had a vision and delivered on it and continued to do so until her death. Maybe in the end, it’s this that attracts me to her and her story, so beautifully delivered through this composition. I hope we can do it justice.