Stitching together lost histories in ‘The Wanderer’s Tethering’ – The Boston Globe

Since the beginning of 2023, Boston has hosted a bounty of performances of concert pieces and operas written to honor forgotten — some would say erased — episodes in American history. The stories of civil rights activist Octavius Catto, abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, and enslaved Islamic scholar Omar ibn Said have all been retold in music.

The latest in this string of forgotten histories is the legend of a group of African people who, in 1803, seized control of the slave ship transporting them from the auction block in Savannah to plantations in the Georgia Sea Islands, and walked into water rather than live enslaved. Their spirits haunt “The Wanderer’s Tethering,” a new piece by Boston-based composer Mason Bynes and librettist Porsha Olayiwola, the city’s poet laureate.

The precise details of the Igbo Landing revolt have been lost to time, and primary sources are patchy, but the generally accepted outline goes as such: Around 75 West Africans of the Igbo ethnic group were taken captive and transported across the Atlantic Ocean, where they were sold as slaves in Savannah. They were then packed onto a smaller ship to be transported to plantations. During the voyage, they took control of the ship and drowned their captors.

What happened next depends on who’s telling the story. Some say they walked into the swamp together and drowned; others said they tried to walk on the water; still others tell that they flew home to Africa. The legend of the “flying Africans” has been intermittently reimagined and reinterpreted by Black artists from Toni Morrison to Beyoncé and now Bynes and Olayiwola, who with “Wanderer’s Tethering” straddle the line between past and present, realism and magical realism.

“Tethering,” commissioned by Boston Lyric Opera, is not a staged opera. However, on Sunday at Roxbury’s Hibernian Hall, it felt more like an operatic monodrama than a song cycle in the vein of “Winterreise.” In her pre-performance remarks, Bynes described it as a “quilt,” stitching together aspects of African and African American experiences. The central character — sung with incandescent grace by soprano Brianna J. Robinson — is called Tobi, after an apocryphal name of a wise leader of the Igbo Landing rebels. “I was named after a man who could fly,” she sang in the fifth and longest movement.

Bynes, who was mentored by “Omar” composer Rhiannon Giddens, clearly knows how to compose for voices. Robinson’s melodic lines had an elegant, unforced rhythm to them, almost as if being thought out loud in the moment. Olayiwola’s libretto easily flowed between the concrete and the abstract, and her experience as a spoken-word poet likely helped the libretto avoid the almost unsingable turns of phrase that pepper so many other contemporary pieces.

Some movements described specific events, while others meditated on the landscape of Dunbar Creek, where the Igbo Landing rebels vanished into the water. Some layered Robinson’s singing with Olayiwola’s spoken poetry, delivered in a deep contralto that melded naturally into the texture of the score, as performed by the soprano and a string quartet from Castle of Our Skins.

The quartet also performed a few short pieces as a prelude to “Tethering,” effectively setting the scene with three contrapuntal arrangements of Black American folk songs by Florence Price, Trevor Weston’s percussive and spiky “Juba,” and Jesse Montgomery’s dense, hypnotic “Source Code.”

But “Tethering” was the lodestone of the program, and the final movement to be performed (listed as movement 9 of 10 on the program) was the most intense, with Olayiwola narrating alone as the string quartet sawed through a long, visceral crescendo. Like the legend, the piece ended without resolution.

THE WANDERER’S TETHERING

Presented by Boston Lyric Opera. At Hibernian Hall, Roxbury. June 18. www.blo.org

A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @knitandlisten.