Three Octaves: An Immersive Oratorio for Sissieretta Jones
An oratorio honoring the legacy and voice of Sissieretta Jones, the first African American to perform at Carnegie Hall (1892). The libretto is shaped around Jones’s counter-archive: a fragile scrapbook of news clippings and memorabilia she personally curated. Recognizing her forethought in constructing a time capsule against historical erasure, it relies exclusively on Jones’s own documented words and historical press articles. Staged exactly 130 years after Jones's final performance at Carnegie Hall on October 12, 1896.
Composer: Tyné Angela Freeman | Doctoral Candidate | University of Oxford
This oratorio listens for the voice of Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones. Widely hailed as the foremost Black vocalist of her time, she performed for four U.S. presidents and royalty around the globe. Her three-octave range was raved about in press articles featuring effusive writeups (“incomparable brilliancy”; “wonder of wonders”; “she came in the light of a revelation”). Jones sustained a career over 28 years, touring internationally, heading her own performance troupe, and straddling the divide between two centuries. Her three-octave range, so widely documented, exists now as a phantom limb of music history, a presence defined by its systematic absence from the era's nascent recording technology.
Jones anticipated her own disappearance: in a scrapbook she assembled across decades, she tucked away the fragments of a life she knew history might try to forget. Over 300 news clippings were curated and arranged in her scrapbook, tracing the journey of a life filled with era-defying accomplishments, and discovered 35 years after her passing. In the cut-and-paste proto-liner note/improvised technology of her personal archive, Jones composed the first draft of her own history.
Three Octaves uses Jones’s counter-archive as a foundation. The composition attempts the impossible: composing "toward" her lost voice by setting the reviews and programs she preserved in her scrapbook, alongside her own words from rare interviews and repertoire from her documented performances, including spirituals and operatic arias. It recognizes her scrapbook not as a collection of ephemera, but as a theoretical text.
I endeavor to listen through Jones to the sounds that surrounded and shaped her: the Black Church tradition she was raised in; her white contemporaries whose voices were preserved on record. And I listen closely to what she did leave behind: her spoken words that were recorded textually, the detailed show programs and letters she composed, and the carefully curated scrapbook. Jones is conduit and conductor, guiding the ear to listen otherwise.
Musical Architecture
The oratorio adopts a compositional constraint, only integrating:
Jones's own words from rare interviews and correspondence: "I have a voice and I am striving," "They say my color is against me," "I give out melody because God filled my soul with it"
Critical descriptions of her voice set to music, making the archival mediation audible: "clear and bell-like," "rich and sensuous with a tropical contralto quality," "the soul of a nightingale seems to have lodged in that throat"
Original arias and reconstructed performances from Jones's documented repertoire, including "Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster" (her signature piece), "Home, Sweet Home," and "The Last Rose of Summer"
Spirituals including "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and "Wade in the Water"—honoring both her operatic aspirations and the sacred tradition that sustained her
Outputs
Live premiere: Premiering at Carnegie Hall on October 12, 2026 would bring Jones's voice full circle to the venue where she made history.
Album: An immersive album will be released in conjunction with the premiere. The work will employ spatial audio technology as a form of sonic justice to enact Jones’s lost voice, a deliberate intervention that transforms archival silence into immersive presence. The voice that was systematically excluded from technological preservation is now recreated using the most expansive immersive audio formats available.
Proposed Premiere: Monday, October 12, 2026 (Weill Recital Hall)
Significance: Staged exactly 130 years after Jones's final performance at Carnegie Hall on October 12, 1896.
PERSONNEL:
Tyné Angela Freeman (Composer, Lead Vocals)
Tyné Angela is a vocalist, composer, and doctoral researcher. She has performed at diverse venues, including the Kennedy Center and the Grammy Museum, and opened for artists such as Lalah Hathaway and Vanessa Williams. She studied music at Dartmouth College, where she was named a Senior Fellow with honors. Her in-progress dissertation at the University of Oxford explores the ear as biocultural: shaped dually by biological mechanisms and sociocultural context.
Nicholas Kershaw (Piano); Joshua Albert (Auxiliary Keyboard); Max Lorick (Bass); Perrin Anderson (Percussion); Krystal Halverson (Soprano); Cherelle Turner (Alto); Brandon Waller (Baritone)
LOGISTICS:
Instrumentation: Piano, Keyboard, Upright Bass, Drum Set
Ensemble: 4 singers, 4 instrumentalists
Proposed Venue: Weill Recital Hall
-“Three Octaves” - original oratorio
-Setup, performance
COMPOSITIONS:
Click here to view the full libretto.
I Have a Voice
Ocean!
A Revelation
Carry Me Home
The Matter of Color
Nightingale
I Shall Continue
The Last Rose
A Long Way Ahead
Total runtime: ~45 mins
RESEARCH:
Grounded in doctoral study on the ear as a biocultural organ, Three Octaves extends research on Black feminist listening practices. The oratorio embodies the framework developed in the accompanying research, positioning Jones as practicing the Historian's ear: she was actively engaged in counter-archival listening, preserving her own legacy through the scrapbook while simultaneously listening backward for the unrecorded Black women singers who came before her. The work makes audible that historical listening is fundamentally relational and collective, requiring multiple listening positions across time, as Jones listened to her own voice, her world, and those who preceded her.
STATUS:
Libretto completed
Score in progress
Ensemble secured
Rehearsals begin Dec 2025
PRODUCTION REQUIREMENTS
Audio:
Dolby Atmos installation (Carnegie has this capability)
Specific speaker configuration needs
Monitor requirements for performers
Personnel:
Solo soprano
Choir (size TBD)
Fisk Jubilee Singers (8-12 members)
Orchestra/ensemble (specify instrumentation)
Audio engineer (Dolby Atmos specialist)
Staging:
Scrapbook podium (stage right)
Suspended fragments (your staging notes mention this)
Lighting design that supports the "archival fragments" concept
Projection? (if you want to incorporate scrapbook images)
Technical:
Rehearsal time needed
Load-in requirements
Sound check needs
SECTION 4: AUDIENCE & IMPACT (1 page)
Target Audiences:
Classical/contemporary music audiences
Black history/culture communities
Academic/scholarly communities (musicology, Black feminist studies, sound studies)
Spatial audio enthusiasts/audiophiles
Supporters of women's history
Educational Component:
Pre-concert lecture/panel?
Post-concert discussion?
Student matinee?
Companion exhibition (her scrapbook materials)?
Documentation:
Professional recording for album release
Video documentation
Scholarly publication tie-in
SECTION 5: BUDGET & FUNDING (1 page)
(Carnegie will want to know you're thinking about this realistically)
Revenue Streams:
Ticket sales (Carnegie's standard split)
Grants (specify any you're pursuing: NEA, arts councils, university funding)
Institutional partners (Oxford? Other universities?)
Foundation support (specifically for Black women's history/arts)
Individual donors/crowdfunding
Major Costs:
Venue rental (Carnegie may offer reduced rate for significant artistic projects)
Performer fees (soloists, Fisk Jubilee Singers, orchestra)
Technical (Dolby Atmos specialists, recording)
Marketing
Production (sets, costumes, lighting)
Note: You don't need exact numbers yet, but show you understand the scale.
SECTION 6: TIMELINE (1 page)
Now → June 2025:
Complete composition
Secure funding
Finalize Fisk Jubilee Singers partnership
Cast soloist
June 2025 → December 2025:
Rehearsals begin (remote/regional)
Marketing campaign launch
Press outreach
Educational programming development
January 2026 → October 2026:
Intensive rehearsal period
Tech rehearsals at Carnegie (week before)
Press week
October 12, 2026: PREMIERE
Post-Premiere:
Album release (physical + streaming)
Potential tour to other venues
Scholarly publication
Documentary?
FRAMING:
"I have a voice, and I am striving," proclaimed Sissieretta Jones in an 1893 Detroit Tribune interview. It reads like a declaration of artistic self-possession—until you read what came before it. She was explaining her discomfort with being called "the Black Patti":
"I am afraid people will think I consider myself the equal of Patti herself, and I assure you I do not think so, but I have a voice, and I am striving to win the favor of the public by honest merit and hard work. Perhaps some day, I may be as great in my way, but that is a long way ahead.”
The burden of that "but"—the necessity of disclaiming before asserting—is the racial predicament Jones navigated throughout her career. This oratorio listens for the voice beneath the apology. It uses spatial audio to imagine her voice into the sonic archive on her own terms, closing the "long way ahead" she prophesied, 130 years later.
Born just six years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Jones was the child of former slaves and a member of the first generation of African Americans born free. She navigated racial discrimination and constraints, touring internationally and using her voice to inspire a powerful legacy.
This oratorio explodes the anchor quote above into a full libretto (and reflective essay) / anchored by the quote above and Sissieretta’s counter-archival scrapbook.