is profiled at AfriClassical.com, which
features a comprehensive Works List
and a Bibliography by Dr. Dominique-René de Lerma,
Christopher Hyde has been a good friend of AfriClassical. He is transitioning from his former newspaper in Maine to an online publication. The first issue has been posted:
www.maineclassicalbeat.com
Negro Spirituals
Christopher Hyde
July 14, 2015
In the wake of last month’s Charleston, SC, tragedy, there has been a
renewed interest in what used to be called Negro Spirituals. The a
cappella choir, Vox Nova, sang two of them as encores after its recent
concert in Yarmouth, in elaborate arrangements that nevertheless seemed
to capture some of the flavor of the originals.
After deciding to write a column on the subject, I was surprised to
discover that there is just as much controversy over the songs as there
is about other aspects of race relations. There seems to be no consensus
about their origin or definition, although most people think that they
know one when they hear one. Unfortunately, what most white Americans
have heard are adaptations written for public performance, which is not
what spirituals are about.
I was fortunate enough as a boy to have heard what I consider to be the
real thing, in some small churches of rural Maryland while visiting a
friend there. Our parents not being church goers, we would take our
bicycles on Sunday morning, ride to one or another of the local
African-denomination churches and listen to the singing through the
windows, open wide in the Maryland summer heat.
We found the music strange but exciting. We were often invited inside
but were too frightened or embarrassed to accept. Perhaps that was a
good thing, since the presence of strangers might have altered the songs
(I didn’t think of them as hymns).
The primary controversy has to do with the origin of the Spiritual form,
one major aspect of which is the call-and-response heard in “Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot.”
One school maintains that it is entirely African in nature, another that
it is an amalgam of African and protestant hymn forms, and a third that
it is modeled entirely on Scotch-Irish hymns sung at popular religious
revival events (camp meetings) in the 19th-century rural South.
The latter view was backed by some purportedly anthropological studies
of the 1930s, which analyzed rhythm, meter, harmony and use of the
pentatonic (all black keys on the piano) scale in spirituals versus
those of camp meeting songs, and found them virtually identical. The
same view was advocated by earlier musicologists after Dvorak’s
favorable comments on the songs led to international recognition in the
early 1900s. It is almost as if the academic community, or at least some
parts of it, could not accept the idea of an original Black art form.
Maintaining the exact opposite was musicologist Henry Edward Krehbiel,
who, after analyzing 529 songs, wrote in “Afro-American Folksongs: A
Study in Racial and National Music” (1913) “… while their combination
into songs took place in this country, the essential elements came from
Africa; in other words… while some of the material is foreign, the
product is native; and, if native, then American.” (Krehbiel wrote this
study while living in Blue Hill.)
The problem with the African origin theory is that Africa is not a
single entity. The enslaved were from many different tribes or nations,
each with its own musical traditions and forms. The Bantu may sing in
parallel fifths, while some nomadic herders have a polyphonic tradition
that would put Bach to shame. Still, there may be some universal
characteristics in communal singing, and in widely played instruments,
such as the banjo and the wooden xylophone, that could have contributed
significantly to the form. African drumming is universal, but was
forbidden by fearful slave owners because it was a form of communication
that they could not understand.
A description of the Spiritual, which comes closest to what my friend
and I heard long ago, is that of African-American novelist Zora Neale
Hurston (1891-1960) in “The Sanctified Church:” “The jagged harmony is
what makes it, and it ceases to be what it was when this is absent.
Neither can any group be trained to produce it. Its truth dies under
training like flowers under hot water. The harmony of the true spiritual
is not regular. The dissonances are important and not to be ironed out
by the trained musician. The various parts break in at any old time.
Falsetto often takes the place of regular voices for short periods. Keys
change. Moreover, each singing of the piece is a new creation. The
congregation is bound by no rules. No two times singing is alike, so
that we must consider the rendition of a song not a final thing, but as a
mood. It will not be the same thing next Sunday. Negro songs to be
heard truly must be sung by a group, and a group bent on expression of
feelings and not on sound effects.”
Maybe Dvorak was prescient when he said: “I am convinced that the future
music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro
melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school
of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful
and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs
of America and your composers must turn to them.” We’re still waiting.
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