Words and Prayers of My Fathers

Carlos Simon wrote Words and Prayers of My Fathers in 2025 for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, through the generous support of the New Works Fund established by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. First performance: James Burton conducting the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, August 24, 2025, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

My patriarchal heritage includes ministers. There are over one hundred years of service to the community through ministry in my family. I chose to set words from either sermons, prayers, or silent reflections from these great men in my family. These sage, sacred words show the wisdom and knowledge that still remain relevant today. —Carlos Simon

In his new work for the BSO’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Carlos Simon pays tribute to a long legacy of ministry within his family through the choral and gospel musical traditions that were his entryway into music. Words and Prayers of My Fathers is the third of Simon’s works to have been commissioned by the BSO. A fourth, the co-commissioned Good News Mass, will be performed by the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus under Andris Nelsons’ direction in January 2026 at Symphony Hall, and two new chamber music works will also be premiered in January.

While a much smaller work than the eclectic Good News Mass, Words and Prayers is from the same musical world. Simon sees his music as being a type of service, carrying forward the service that three generations of his forebears brought to the church and to their communities. This a cappella choral work follows another explicit homage to his ancestors, his electronic piece Generations, which uses modified actual recordings of songs, sermons, and prayers within a texture of computer-generated music.

The four movements of Words and Prayers similarly pay tribute to four men in Simon’s lineage: his great-grandfather Bishop Henry C. Brooks, who started his own church in Washington, DC, in 1927; his maternal grandfather, Bishop C.W. Hairston; his paternal grandfather, Deacon Richard J. Simon, Jr., and his father, Bishop Carlos O. Simon. Bishop Brooks’s “Sow Good Seeds” is a gloss on Galatians 6:7-9; Bishop Hairston’s “Help Us Lord” is a fervent, solemn prayer. The third movement, “Reflections,” is a wordless (in a sense “silent”) contemplation, and the elder Carlos Simon’s “Lord, We Thank You” is a high-energy hymn of praise. The first two movements are hymn-like, essentially chorale settings; in the third, the individual vocal lines suggest personal, inward meditation. In the finale, tenors and basses provide a rhythmically punchy foundation (on the phrase “thank you”) for the higher voices’ detailed prayer.

In addition to holding the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Composer Chair, Carlos Simon is composer-in-residence at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center until 2027. As a composer, he has concentrated in recent years on more than a dozen works for orchestra, including short concert openers and orchestral studies, a suite of dances, a big work for voice, chorus, and orchestra, a trombone concerto, a four-movement symphony, and a concerto for orchestra. Several of his orchestral works were recorded by Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gianandrea Noseda for an album released in 2024. In 2020 he joined the faculty of Georgetown University, where he is now an associate professor of music. Simon wrote Requiem for the Enslaved for Georgetown University, which commissioned it as part of its reckoning with its history of engaging in slaveholding and the slave trade.

An interconnectedness of subject matter and musical genre is key to Simon’s approach, which is illustrated on a more personal and intimate level in his albums My Ancestor’s Gift and Together, which feature stylistically fluid collaborations with close musical colleagues. “The way I think about things, I’m a composer first,” Simon has related, but he has enhanced instinct via hands-on and pragmatic musical activities in several spheres, as he has demonstrated in his work with the BSO. Along with his own pieces, he has curated concerts for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, performed as pianist, and acted as a musical ambassador for the BSO in Boston and elsewhere. 

Simon’s music has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center, American Ballet Theatre, BBC for the 2024 Proms, Minnesota Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Carnegie Hall, and many others. His Los Angeles Philharmonic commission Good News Mass was premiered earlier this season under Gustavo Dudamel’s direction and will be performed by the BSO in the 2025-26 season. Simon has also been commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera for a new work, The Highlands, slated to be produced by the company in 2027. He is the first Black composer commissioned for an original opera in the history of the company. The BSO first played his music in 2021, his Fate Now Conquers, and has also performed Motherboxx Connection, Warmth from Other Suns, the concerto for orchestra Wake Up!, and the commissioned works Four Black American Dances and Festive Overture and Fanfare. 

ROBERT KIRZINGER

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.