LAMC Presents: The Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers
Oct 24, 1981 - 8:30 PM
PROGRAM NOTES By Richard H. Trame, S.J., Ph.D. Loyola Marymount University
Where a program such as this evening's comprises numerous selections from Afro-American musical traditions, it will be well to investigate something of the background to and elaboration of this attractive music, particularly the black spiritual. These considerations, it is hoped, will enhance our enjoyment of so many of the songs which in large measure are arrangements created for and designed to convey through choral presentation the essential qualities of the originals.
Early in the Nineteenth Century during the period of the "Great Revival" in areas of pioneer settlement, the camp-meeting became the organ through which religious revivalism attempted to reinvigorate the Christian faith of the populace. Such camp-meetings fostered open-air religious services lasting several days and attracting thousands of settlers from every denomination. In the southern states blacks attended these meetings, mingling with the whites, although they provided for their own religious services.
From these revivalist camp-meetings arose the white and black spiritual song, abbreviated simply to "spiritual." These spirituals utilized folk tunes and folk hymns characterized by textual simplicity and the frequent repetition of phrases and refrains. Since the camp-meetings engendered a high degree of religious fervor, the spiritual in turn reflected this emotionalism. Moreover, concurrent white and black cultural traditions continually interacted with one another.
The element of direct African influence on the black spiritual remains the subject of much debate among those scholars who have researched the origins of this music. Some see the spiritual as the innovation of the black slaves, whereas others see the slaves who often attended the white churches interacting with and transforming the hymn tunes they encountered there. Paul Oliver, who authored the article on the Black Spiritual in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980) summarizes the impact of the spiritual on black life as follows: "The black spiritual created at this time (mid-nineteenth century) provided a source of strength and expressed many aspects of the blacks' condition during slavery and just after its abolition."
Dr. Wendall Whalum, Professor of Music at Atlanta's Morehouse College and Minister of Music at the city's famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, has recently observed that the spiritual is rooted in the Biblical aspects of the Hebrew emancipation from Egypt. The slaves found a parallel between the escape to the land of Canaan and their longing to reach freedom in the North.
The spiritual encapsulated a very simple, straightforward idea upon which the "lead singer" ingeniously elaborated through related ideas, together with the repetition of key phrases by the "basers" who provided the vocal groundwork and interpolations.
Afro-American music in the West Indies, particularly in those areas where English and Protestant influences predominated, developed from the Christian Revivalist cults. This Revival cult music was characterized by the constant presence of harmonized choruses exhibiting less African rhythmic influence than in the music of the Cuban, Haitian, or Brazilian cults. Jamaican revivalist music retained in its call-and-response approach more direct African influence. Here the "lead singer," either a man or woman, would initiate and elaborate a musical phrase to which a chorus would then respond monophonically, though occasionally individual singers would deviate from the principal melodic line. The similarity in development of the West Indian music to the American spiritual appears evident.
George Gershwin (1898-1937) summarized all the various influences which had been brought to bear on his musical development in the composition of Porgy and Bess. He called the work a "folk-opera" spun from his natural musical language made up of ragtime, the blues, jazz, and influenced by the melodic contours of the spiritual.
Porgy and Bess emerged from a novel Porgy by the black folklorist DuBose Hayward, who subsequently with the help of his wife, Dorothy, converted the novel into a play and then into a libretto for Gershwin. Gershwin commenced the composition of this "folk opera," a story about a Charleston beggar, in 1934, while residing on an island near that city. Its ever-popular songs such as "It Ain't Necessarily So," were directly influenced by the life-style, vocal music, and speech of the local blacks he encountered there.
Gershwin's music clearly demonstrated his natural dramatic instincts. The enduring success of Porgy and Bess, both in America and Europe, attest to its authentic American character and to Gershwin's assimilation in it of the feeling for the simple but inherent inspiration of the black folksong and spiritual.
Duke Ellington (1899-1974) achieved fame and recognition as the most important composer in the history of jazz music. Although the exact count of his enormous compositional output is not known with certainty, he did create some 6000 works and arrangements.
With Mood Indigo in 1930, his reputation was firmly established. As the extraordinarily gifted band leader he was, his most distinctive contribution was his unrivaled ability to devise orchestral accompaniments permitting spontaneous solo improvisation, whether vocal or instrumental.
