Michael Udow

2 Sopranos, 3 Tenors, 5 Baritones, 1 Bass, 1 Boy Singer, 2 Girl Singers, SATB Choir, and Piano

Composer's Note:

Twelve Years a Slave, first published in 1853, is the autobiographical account of Solomon Northup, a free black man of New York. The original nineteenth-century title begins to unveil the bizarre and horrific circumstances of what Solomon Northup experienced: “Twelve Years a Slave, Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River in Louisiana”. Through exhaustive document research, Professor Sue Eakin, has authenticated this autobiography, and it is considered among historians to be the most profound record, from a slave’s perspective, of slavery in the United States.