Advertise on ChoralNet
Moses Hogan paper on the history of the spiritual?Date: January 26, 2010
Does anyone have anything relating to a interest session or lecture delivered by Moses Hogan on the history of the spiritual? It was also about the techniques used by different generations of choral arrangers throughout the 20th century. I cannot find this in his spiritual anthologies or online, but I used to have a typed copy that I have lost. I am writing a dissertation on American folk music arrangements for choir and this would help me a great deal! Replies (19): Threaded | Chronological
Sharyn Baker on January 26, 2010 4:53pm
http://www.moseshogan.com/music_scores.htm
http://www.dogonvillage.com/negrospirituals/index.htm
http://www.npr.org/programs/pt/features/hogan.html
Maybe here are some links that might be of use.
Sharyn Baker
Colorado
on January 26, 2010 5:53pm
Dear Charles,
While I do not have such a document...I would love to gain hold of it myself...If you would be so kind as to let me know once you find it...I am currently in the process of researching Spirituals and writing a Performance Practice Dissertation for my DMA in Choral Conducting.
Thanks so much,
Lynn G. Atkins
---
Lynn G. Atkins
Doctoral Graduate Assistant to the Director of Choral Activities
Conductor, JMU Treble Chamber Choir
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA
on January 26, 2010 6:52pm
Hi Charles, I have a three page handout, a interest session overview, that Moses Hogan gave to the Missouri Music Educators probably ten years ago. I also have a one page handout from an interest session that Rollo Dilworth gave titled "Gospel Music: Pedagogy and Practices". There is also some historical information, thought brief, in the introduction to Hogan's Oxford Book of Spirituals. I could scan and send any of these to you if you are willing to wait until next week. I am headed out of town Wednesday for a music conference.
Ron Sayer
ACDA National Chair for Community Choruses
Director, Marshall Community Choir
on January 27, 2010 8:40am
Ron,
I would love to see the scanned handout from Moses . . . can you send it to me as well?
on January 27, 2010 5:07am
I do not have this handout, but it would be worth your time
to consult André Thomas’ excellent book, Way Over in Beulah’ Lan´:
Understanding and Performing the Negro Spiritual (Heritage Music
Press).
Patricia Abbott Montreal
on January 27, 2010 7:54am
Dear Charles,
Have you asked Andre Thomas at Florida State University? He may very well have a copy of this, or can lead you to it. Good luck, Fred Spano, UNC Charlotte
on January 27, 2010 9:42am
When and if the Moses Hogan paper becomes available, I would be very interested in seeing it as well. Thanks to all.
on March 31, 2010 8:34am
NEGRO SPIRITUALS – A Cappella – Ezekiel Saw the Wheel; Mixed Choir – I Hear a Voice a Prayin’.
Afro-American religious music constitutes a specific genre among black musicians of the United States. It has developed its own history since the 20th Century and has always interacted with profane musical forms, both vocal and instrumental.
The distinction between Negro Spirituals and gospel songs corresponds to a historical division which is partly artificial. Negro Spirituals issued from the religious traditions which appeared and developed during slavery. They were collected and arranged at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 20th century. They belong to the anonymous and collective oral musical culture of black American people. They are, however, present in the repertory of many interpreters of gospel. Gospel songs represent the modern popular hymnody, though it is difficult to date their birth with precision. They developed around 1930, under the impulse of Thomas Dorsey.
THE DEEP SONG OF AN ENSLAVED PEOPLE
The first blacks who come from Africa landed in Virginia in 1619. Their status as indentured servants seemed rather mild compared to that of millions of slaves who were later to undergo the same trip. The liberal ideas of the Enlightenment prevailed in the North of the United States where the slave trade was outlawed soon after Independence, while the Southern states, in need of a labor force, built their cotton-centered economic system upon slavery.
Many observers, especially in the 19th century, noted vocal practices which accompanied the work of the slaves. The slaves were scattered in the fields, and often communicated by hollering to one another (in a manner halfway between speech and song). The equivalent of this practice is still to be found today in southern rural areas or markets. These field hollers made a deep impression on all the observers of the period, due to their marked scansion, their melodic shifts, the rapid shifts from chest voice to head voice, and the particular texture of African voices. Rhythm, which holds an important place in African cultures, had a practical use in work songs. Cotton cultivation required unified effort, and the work songs provided a means of coordinating the slave’ activities, enabling them to work more efficiently. They were sometimes encouraged by plantation owners, even after slavery was abolished in 1863.
In the 17th century, black people used to meet in large numbers to celebrate Pentecost. Those huge meetings were call “Pinksters” (from a distortion of the word “Pentecost”), and were limited to the Northern states, which had been the first to emancipate black slaves. The participants would dance until they reached a trance state through the effect of a rhythm produced by percussion instruments largely derived from the ancient African drums. In the South, only New Orleans permitted such festivals. In spite of evolutionary changes, one may note certain features which have been present in African music throughout the ages up to our time: improvisation, variations of pitch and rage, and the influence of African scales.
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEGRO SPIRITUALS
Landowners were for some time reluctant to evangelize their slaves, since a Christian could not be held in bondage. This embarrassing principle was definitively abolished by the Bishop of London in 1727.
Thus, two factors enabled black slaves at the end of the 18th century to recreate a spiritual world within their new environment: on the one hand their progressive assimilation of the English language, and on the other hand the Great Awakening (religious revival) preached by separatists – either Baptist or Methodist – in an atmosphere of ecstatic singing. The black slaves thus found a sort of theology of hope, which was an answer to their miser, and a very informal worship pattern which was compatible with their African heritage.
During the Civil War, the beauty of their songs was revealed to whites, when Yankee soldiers heard them around campfires. They were being sung by soldiers of the black regiments, which were largely composed of former slaves.
This sung prayer, the spiritual, was often accompanied by a ritual dance whose most common form was called the ring shout. It was a shuffling, circular dance accompanied by chanting and hand-clapping, during which the “shouters” started to sing the spiritual, which was then sung in chorus by the whole assembly, But those particular features gradually lost their original form: the response was Africanized by opening up to improvisation, and the song had a new beat stressed in counterpoint and it was adapted to the African sense of melody.
EVOLUTION AND MUTATIONS OF NEGRO SPIRITUALS
After the emancipation of slaves at the end of the 19th century, a certain number of vocal groups composed of black singers found their inspiration in this religious repertoire and adapted spirituals for the concert stage. Thus, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, from Fisk University (one of the first black universities created after the abolition of slavery) went on tours beginning 1871, in which they performed concert arrangements of spirituals both in the United Sates and Europe, awakening an abiding interest in this form. Their originality won the enthusiastic adherence of their audiences. They drew their inspiration from A. Simpson’s book, Slave Songs of the United States, containing 136 slave songs, among which a majority were Negro Spirituals. At the end of the 19th century, everyone in America wanted to hear them, and they performed on the most prestigious American and European stages. But parallel to that expansion, the infamous segregation statutes (the so-called Jim Crow laws in the latter part of the 1880s) enforced a de facto segregation in the Southern states. Thus more black people were drawn to the church (where blacks and whites worshipped separately). With the conditions for its development thus in place, the spiritual then acquired a momentum of is own, becoming a strongly individualized vehicle for expression, alongside the blues. The blues, which was emerging at the same time through the voices of itinerant troubadours, expressed the daily misery of blacks exploited and oppressed by the white man, while the spirituals embodied collective hope. Spirituals and the blues were the two major roots of jazz, which developed just after World War I.
Some time later, a second form of religious songs typical of the American black people found its main source of inspiration in the spiritual. The gospel song brought on stage the most famous preachers and singers in the 1920s. The 20th century witnessed a constant shifting between the spiritual, now reserved to the church, and the gospel song for the concert stage, which influenced the whole of black American popular music and gave birth in the 1950’ to a profane genre, “soul music”.
THE WORLD OF THE SPIRITUALS
The texts of the spirituals reveal a familiar appropriation of the Bible and express a naïve and ecstatic mysticism. In the Bible, the “Good Book,” blacks discovered analogies of situation (Exodus), intercessors (the prophets), a leader (Moses) and heroes (David). But the spirituals did not simply originate from a distortion of Protestant chorals by black slaves. One has good reason to think that many spirituals developed from work songs into which biblical imagery was placed. Thus, at the time when the Anti-Slaver Society was organizing evasions (to allow black slaves to escape via the “Underground Railroad”), some Negro Spirituals had a subversive intent, either preparing or announcing those evasions. The words of the songs were apparently harmless, but the religious imagery took on a covert significance, revealing the intentions of the interpreters. In “come and go with me to my Father’s House,” the literal meaning of my Father’s House is heaven, but the coded meaning, if the text is read on another level, is the North or Canada, where freedom and peace awaited the runaway slaves.
In “Stand Still, Jordan” (“I can’t stand still, my mother is in Heaven”), Jordan was also the border between the North and the South (the Ohio River, which the fugitive slaves, hoping for calm waters, had to cross). As for the “mother” of the singer, she was probably already in Heaven, that is to say, the North. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” describes all the hardships the slaves had to go through before they reached the North. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” gave to Mississippi slaves a sort of “recipe” for escape: the “drinking gourd” was in fact the constellation (the Big Dipper) they had to follow to reach the North. Here the fusion of escape/redemption, freedom/heaven is obvious. In “Good News”, the good news is of course revelation and liberation.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said about the spirituals: “We sung the ‘Heaven’ which awaited us and the slave owners listened without being aware that our hope was not only of reaching Heaven. The word ‘Heaven’ meant the North or Canada, and the black man expressed his hope that by running away with the help of the Underground Railroad, he would eventually get there.”
PROFESSIONAL CHOIRS IN THE EARLY 20th CENTURY
Established in the 1920’s and 30’s
Golden Gate Quartet
The Southernaires
Wings Over Jordan
Eva Jessye Singers (Dixie Jubilee Singers)
Hall Johnson Choir (Hall Johnson Negro Choir)
PROFESSIONAL ENSEMBLES ACTIVE TODAY
The Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers (Los Angeles, California)
The Brazeal Dennard Chorale (Detroit, Michigan)
The Harlem Spiritual Ensemble (New York) (Francois Clemmons)
Spiritual Renaissance Singers (Tampa, Florida) (Patricia Trice, Arretta Morrae)
The Moses Hogan Chorale (New Orleans, Louisiana)
The Robert Leigh Morris Chorale (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
The Legend Singers (St. Louis, Missouri) (Doris Wilson)
on January 31, 2010 8:02am
Perhaps this would be a fine entry on ChoralPedia. Looks like there is a lot of interest on the topic.
on February 2, 2010 4:54am
Charles,
I'm not familiar with this lecture by Moses Hogan, but like others would be eager to see it if found. For other sourcdes, if you go to http://acda.org/publications/choral_journal/Aug2004 you'll find the article
“Shout all over God’s heaven – The survival of the Spiritual through dramatically changing social and musical contexts,” Choral Journal, August 2004
which discusses the development of the Spiritual through the lense of historical recordings and includes references to a number of other earlier articles in the Choral Journal and elsewhere. Also of possible interest would be a review of Andre Thomas' Way over in Beulah Lan'" in the current (Feb 2010) issue of the CJ.
Thomas Lloyd, Haverford College
on February 3, 2010 10:16pm
To get back to you on the subject....as I stated on an earlier post, I have the presentation notes that Moses Hogan provided us from an interest session he gave to a packed house (500+) at the Missouri Music Eduators Association convention a number of years before his death. There are 4 pages to the handout which cover: Negro Spirituals, the song of an enslaved people, Religious movements and the emergence of Negro Spirituals, Evolution and mutations of Negro Spirituals, the World of Spirituals and 20th century professional ensembles performing spirituals. There is also a suggested reading list. I also have a one page handout from an interest session Rollo Dilworth gave titles Gospel Music: Pedagogy & Performance Practices. I would be happy to mail copies of these to anyone who contacts me at my email address below. I also recommend reading the Introduction and Note on Dialect int he Oxford Book of Spirituals edited by Moses Hogan. Very good info there.
Ron Sayer
ACDA National Chair for Community Choirs
ronsay(a)aol.com
on February 4, 2010 5:08pm
Hey, Ron.
I had the pleasure of seeing the Moses Hogan Chorale perform on a couple of occasions, and our community chorus has sung a few of his arrangements through the years.
I'd love to have a copy of the printed handout you have, and if you mail it to me, I'd be happy to scan it and post it on ChoralNet so others can have access to it, too.
Have a great time in Denver...
Let music live!
Sam.
Sam P. Vladovich Executive Director Spiritful Voices Community Choir, Inc. PO Box 720468 Oklahoma City, OK 73172-0468 Telephone: 405-414-SING (7464) E-Mail: svladovich(AT)spiritfulvoices(DOT)org
on March 23, 2010 8:42am
Dear Charles,
My doctoral disseration (from the University of Mississippi - Ole Miss) is on Moses George Hogan. Any assistance that I might offer, feel free to contact me. There will be a Forum/Panel and Festival pertinent to the Music of Moses George Hogan, October 28-30, 2010 in New Orleans, LA on the campus of Loyola University.
Dr. Herbert V.R.P. Jones
Pittsburgh, PA
|
Help support ChoralNet by buying via these links
|
