The idea is bracingly simple and genuinely uncomfortable: take the paperwork of the transatlantic slave trade — the insurance policies that treated human beings as perishable cargo — and repurpose them as the libretto for a Catholic Requiem Mass. The opening line of the original documents, "In the name of God, Amen," becomes the hinge. A phrase designed to sanctify commerce in human flesh now introduces a liturgy of mourning for the people that commerce destroyed. Errol Francis, the artistic director of Culture&, saw the contradiction and ran straight at it. David Önaç, Manchester-based and of mixed heritage with roots on both sides of the Atlantic, built a 40-minute, five-movement work around that contradiction. Atlantic Requiem fuses contemporary classical composition with jazz and gospel — traditions that themselves emerged from the cultural aftermath of enslavement. Önaç describes the piano's geography as a compositional tool: five black keys plus two white keys yield the seven-note blues scale, a product of enslaved Africans' musical experience. The musical language doesn't just reference these traditions; it tries to hold them in the same room simultaneously. The most harrowing passage draws on a 1791 grand jury testimony preserved by the Newport Historical Society. John Cranston, a crew member aboard the brig Polly commanded by James DeWolf, described an enslaved woman suspected of smallpox being bound to a chair, gagged, and thrown overboard on the captain's orders. The captain's recorded regret was for the loss of the chair. Önaç sets these words to music directly, forcing the audience to sit with the human cost that the original documents were designed to obscure. The commission came through Culture&, the arts and heritage charity, and grew from research into Lloyd's of London's historical involvement in insuring ships and enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. Lloyd's sponsors the work and has acknowledged its historical links to enslavement, launching the Underwriting Souls interactive archive and the Inclusive Futures programme aimed at supporting Black and ethnically diverse communities. The performances at LSO St Luke's during Black History Month are conducted by Grammy-winning conductor Malcolm J Merriweather, with the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers. Francis is careful to draw a line: the requiem is not about reparations. It is an artwork that acknowledges suffering and survival. For some, that distinction will feel like a dodge — Lloyd's funding an artistic commemoration while financial redress remains contested territory. But Francis and Önaç are both clear-eyed about what the piece can and cannot do. It repurposes documents of extraction into acts of memory. Whether that is enough depends on what you think art is for. Önaç frames the work as a commentary on the present as much as the past. "Everything's so polarised and segregated and polemical right now," he says, pointing to the black and white notes of the piano as a visual metaphor for contemporary division. The requiem ultimately moves toward reconciliation and joy, but it earns that movement by refusing to look away from the violence first. The structure of a Mass — from grief through supplication to release — gives the piece a spine that pure documentary could not provide. What makes the project worth attention is its formal ambition, not just its subject matter. Plenty of memorial works exist. The specific bet here — that the legal and commercial language of enslavement can serve as liturgical text, that the requiem form's tension between earthly suffering and divine order maps onto the slave trade's own grotesque invocation of God — is a structural argument about what documents are and what music can do to them. Whether Önaç and the performers land that argument is something only the room at LSO St Luke's can answer.
