To convey the true impact required depths only artistic responses could provide: David Önaç on how his Atlantic Requiem aims to memorialise the lost lives of enslaved Africans

David Önaç

How Lloyd’s insurance contracts from the transatlantic slave trade became the unlikely inspiration for a new choral work for the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and BBC Singers. Composer David Önaç explains his Atlantic Requiem.

Legal insurance documents might not be an obvious inspiration for a choral work. But when Lloyd’s opened up its archive of contracts from the transatlantic slave trade, the dramatic potential leapt off the page. Keen to respond on an artistic level to these insurance contracts, Dr Errol Francis, director of arts and heritage charity Culture& commissioned a ground-breaking new musico-dramatic work, soon to be premiered by the LSO and the BBC Singers conducted by Grammy award-winning Anthony Parnther.

Prof Alexandre White of Johns Hopkins University had meticulously digitised Lloyd’s archives, creating an entire website Underwriting Souls (via “Black, Beyond Data” funded by the Mellon Foundation) testifying to the insurer’s complicity in the transatlantic trade, insuring slave ships and their ‘cargo’.

Errol’s deep concern was that such comprehensive, systemic undervaluing of human life was about more than facts and figures: indeed, numerical abstraction was part of the problem. To convey the true impact required depths only artistic responses could provide.

In a strange coincidence, when Culture& approached me to write a musical response, I was then arranging 20 Spirituals for Piano for EVC Music, and awaiting the premiere of a milestone: my violin duo “Out of the Blue” which at last integrated jazz, gospel and classical styles with a newfound confidence I had been seeking since childhood.

I grew up on both sides of the Atlantic, inspired by music from both sides of the ocean at the centre of the slave trade. Gospel, jazz and Junkanoo were styles I’d relished as a child in the Caribbean and tried to emulate on the piano as early as age four. Western Classical music was the air I breathed in the UK as a young solo pianist devoted to Rachmaninov (playing Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini was a teenage highlight), and then as a postgraduate composer studying at Cambridge tutored by Robin Holloway, and at Manchester tutored by Adam Gorb and Camden Reeves.

So the requiem proposal offered a vast 45-minute choral and orchestral canvas to paint the sounds of spirituals and more deeply explore sound palettes from my dual heritage.

Atlantic Requiem is a stylistic fusion of diverse musical ingredients which audibly reference the cultures the work needs to portray and is a personal expression of my transatlantic ethnic mix – a mix my skin makes visibly obvious.

All well and good in theory, but how (exactly) did legal documents lead to a libretto? Everyone who read the insurance documents in the Lloyd’s archive had balked at the uncomfortable juxtaposition of grandiose religious language and legalese dehumanisation of enslaved human beings – the now infamous Lloyd’s Insurance Agreement for the ship Guipúzcoa (literally) begins “In the name of God, Amen…”

Religious language and grand tone presented an obvious similarity to well-known Catholic Requiem Mass texts (eg “Requiem Aeternam”, “Kyrie Eleison”, “Dies Irae”). But on a deeper level, bringing the insurance text into conflict with traditional requiem texts could transmute uncomfortable juxtaposition into artistic organising principle and this became my essential approach to writing the entire libretto: multiple voices speak through multiple texts, creating suitably complex combinations and opportunities for any single text to act as commentary, corroboration or critique of any other across a 5-movement span.

The first movement Requiem in Records uses the actual Guipúzcoa insurance agreement text, sung verbatim (abridged) combined with Requiem Aeternam, dona eis Domine (Eternal rest give to them O Lord), gradually revealing that the prayer is for all unnamed slaves such agreements ‘accounted’ for. The second movement Kyrie from the depths travels across the Atlantic via Cranston’s 1791 Grand Jury testimony, a court document courtesy of Newport Historical Society, Connecticut. It recounts how a female slave with smallpox was thrown overboard alive, blindfolded, bound and gagged to avoid further loss of slaves (profit), a sadly common maritime corollary to insuring slave ships. In court, Cranston still recalled her screams – Kyrie Eleison indeed.

The third movement Exodus Eschatologised is the requiem’s nadir, a ferociously violent Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). A megaphone for culpability is provided by Biblical texts pronouncing judgement rather than justification for kidnap slavery (eg Exodus 21:16 “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death”) vs a repeated Biblical assertion of the beauty of blackness (Song of Songs 1:5 “Dark am I, yet lovely…”).

The final movements, Angus Dei (“Lamb of God”) & Caeruleus Lux Perpetua (Perpetual Blue Light) change direction to combine Latin texts and the book of Revelation with a hint of sci-fi, using texts like Revelation’s well-known “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth…”. I want my requiem to transcend confession. In this piece, the past’s nauseating misdeeds aren’t the end of our story. Looking forward Atlantic Requiem asks us all a critical question: how glorious might humanity be if we truly appreciated our racial diversity instead of seeing colour as a cause for cruelty?

So how could the very notes and rhythms, instruments and voices convey segregation? Or equality? Or horrific past – and perhaps hopeful future? The epiphany came via the piano, my instrument since childhood: everything could be built on two 5-note (pentatonic) groups, one group black (the piano’s 5 black notes) and the other white. Using 10 of the piano’s 12 notes is religiously obeyed, and the remaining 2 notes F and B are literally absent from the entire 45-minute requiem.

These 5-note subgroups analogise segregation and hostility based on visible colour, but simultaneously convey sameness, equality and unity. The groups also audibly connect to multiple styles: sounds belonging to blues, jazz and gospel (like pentatonic scales) and sounds familiar from Western Classical music (eg the open strings heard as the orchestra tunes up). Such a sonically diverse requiem was not only topically appropriate but also linked with my personal compositional influences.

Similar approaches are taken to rhythm – ‘swung’ and ‘straight’ rhythms are initially opposed and later combined – and to orchestration – instruments more associated with ‘classical’ or with ‘jazz’ follow the same trajectory from initial opposition to reconciliation. This is then all connected and integrated with the libretto’s context, conflicts and cultures.

The resulting soundworld is one where evocations of formal Catholic chant are married with rap and natural speech patterns; where intensely violent and dissonant 10-note orchestral chords occupy the same ground as lush, gorgeous 4-part choral harmonies; where the listener is immersed in references to sounds aboard ship like the boatswain’s whistle and the Lloyd’s Lutine Bell; and where driving asymmetrical patterns drawn from Stravinsky, Bartok and Ligeti meet the contemporary jazz fusion grooves of Snarky Puppy, the neo soul of Robert Glasper & Gretchen Parlato, and the earth-shaking heavy downbeat of Zulu warrior dances.

I hope the segregated harmonic language of black notes and white notes might reflect the displacement of a 17th-C enslaved African, uprooted halfway through life on their home continent and now living half a life on another, experiencing in addition to their daily mistreatment the double dislocation of belonging equally to both places and neither place.

As a person of mixed race, this piece had to connect to my own conundrum of identity, the questions of racial belonging which I have wrestled with all my conscious life, and the language of exclusion I have experienced from both sides. I’m not black enough (or as someone once concisely put it: “You white maaan!”) and at the same time not white enough (as was made plain to me as the only non-white child in Year 7: “Go back where you came from!”). Do I float in the vacuum of everywhere and nowhere at once?

Racial devaluing in particular, because colour is such a visible characteristic of us all, is an especially pernicious perversion of precisely what ought to be celebrated: that the unifying racial glory of humanity consists so profoundly in the diversity of race present on this planet that to segregate is what reduces us to the subhuman not the other way round!

This is why the 5th and final movement had to be a celebration, a joyful fusion of more musical styles, sounds, systems. I initially struggled with whether it could even be done, and then how on earth I would notate it. A fantastic problem to have!

My hope is that this combination of text and music will provide a vehicle for others to express sorrow at the terrible loss of life and the shocking blindness to true value and to yearn for a future where all human beings appreciate the high dignity of all others – and to believe that such a future would be filled with joy.

LSO Live will record the live performances of Atlantic Requiem at LSO St Luke’s to memorialise the lost lives of enslaved Africans and acknowledge the contribution of their descendants to transatlantic culture both then and now. 

David Önaç’s Atlantic Requiem is premiered at LSO St Luke’s on Sunday 11 October 2026, with London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Singers, Anthony Parnther conductor, Brittany Renee soprano, J’Nai Bridges mezzo soprano, Orson Van Gay II tenor – full details from the LSO St Luke’s website.