The extent to which Episcopal church music has diversified over the several decades since Liturgical Renewal became a transformative force in the 1970's becomes abundantly evident upon perusal of the indices of our denomination's present Hymnal 1982, along with its several substantial companion publications, including Lift Every Voice and Sing, Wonder, Love, and Praise, Songs for Celebration, and Voices Found. Ignited by the Catholic Church in America's creative, horizon- widening response to music and liturgy directives emanating from the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960's, most liturgical Protestant denominations soon followed suit, producing an ever-growing compendium of new compositions adjoined to a regularly-expanding palette of music from numerous other worship traditions, producing a variety of choice unimaginable at the time the Hymnal 1982's distinguished predecessor, the Hymnal 1940, appeared.
Among the most dramatic aspects of musical diversification in Episcopal music has been the welcoming of African American Gospel music and Spirituals, as represented in Lift Every Voice and Sing, published in the late 1990's under the editorial direction of Dr. Carl Haywood and the late Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer, who was active in our own diocese (in Amherst). Our parish of St. James, Gt. Barrington, has by no means eschewed such progressive developments as they have unfolded over the past several decades. Over nearly two decades at the close of the twentieth century, Paul Hamill, himself a widely-known composer, proved ever a strong advocate of new music, his ministry at SJC establishing our continuing commitment to exploring differing expressions as a prominent characteristic of our musical worship. With the commencement of my own ministry at our parish in 2004, I was encouraged to not only continue Paul's commitment to new worship music, but also to include more Spirituals with our regular fare, and have to-date worked more than two dozen of this genre into our regular congregational and choral repertoire.
This month (beginning June 13th), with the addition to St. James' congregational repertoire of service music taken from Lift Every Voice and Sing -- including Carl Haywood's lively setting of Glory to God, we yet further deepen our relationship with music from the African-American tradition. Haywood's exciting Glory deliberately juxtaposes two styles that in Black worship were initially regarded as disparate if not antagonistic -- the "boogeying" of the refrain "Glory, glory, hallelujah..." with the smoother "eurocentric" style of the verses. G.W. Brown's Holy, from A Mass for a Soulful People, recalls the slow, deliberate, if not weighed-down motion of the Negro work song, while Lena McKin's Christ Our Passover, from Eucharist of the Soul, is based on the call-response pattern found in so many Spirituals.
Acknowledging that many stylistic aspects of Black music are, I submit, inimitable, one principal reason why Spirituals can, as an exception, transcend stylistic particularism to become fitting in even so anglo-eurocentric a tradition as ours, is to be found in their course of development. Similar to the English Christmas Carol as it has been known since Victorian times, Spirituals (compiled around the same time, interestingly) assumed a more classic, if not abstract, personality at around the same point in the nineteenth century. Like English carols, Spirituals experienced a lengthy gestation in aural form prior to being written down, by that juncture having already been through at least several stages of refinement. It was not until the mid- 1800's that the first anthology of "Jubilee Songs", as Spirituals were first known, was published. Through a touring group -- the Jubilee Singers -- based at Fisk University, a fountainhead of Spiritual research, this genre rapidly came to reach a wide international audience. Further impetus for cementing the legitimacy of African American music was imparted during the 1890's, when the great Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, brought to America to establish a national school of composition in New York, proclaimed this genre as America's greatest, most authentic music, providing more than ample material for what he hoped would become a true American School. Unfortunately America's prevailing mix of eurocentrism with racism produced too formidable an obstacle, and it was not until the 1930's that momentum again grew for developing indigenous national art music in the classical realm, albeit again failing to embrace African American music. One remarkable paradox, if not irony, attending this reluctance on the part of practitioners of American "serious" musical art is that as American composers became increasingly eurocentric, European composers, especially the French, were flocking to Harlem on pilgrimage. Highly representative of this intriguing twist is Maurice Ravel's telling George Gershwin, who had journeyed to Paris in the early twentieth century to study with that master, that it should really be the other way around!
Small wonder, then, that the only Spirituals to be included in the estimable Episcopal Hymnal 1940 were "Were you there" and a tune called McKee, to which is sung "In Christ there is no east or west". But what wonderful things it says for our evolving Episcopal Church that a half century later we are blessed with a magnificent increase of African American music, not to mention so many other expressions, often from folk traditions, among our present-day worship resources -- music that at one time was deemed extraneous to Episcopalianism.
In his forward to the important 1940 publication American Negro Songs; 230 Folk Songs and Spirituals, Religious and Secular (exactly contemporaneous with the Episcopal Hymnal 1940), the Black musicologist Dr. John W. Work explains that the Fisk Jubilee Singers cultivated a highly refined, precise way of singing Spirituals, much as an English cathedral choir renders its Christmas carols. Several years ago, visiting a service at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King fame, I encountered this very thing from its highly- disciplined choir.
Dr. Work tells us that as a "classical" expression, Spirituals should not be unnaturally distorted by super-imposed stylistic elements, which would include singers' striving to imitate an African American dialect. To be sure, one of the major debates in Black churches as the Jazz Age waxed in the 1920's was the extent to which blues, boogie-woogie, New Orleans music, and other popular idioms, should be admitted into their church music. The performance tradition of Spirituals established by the Fisk Jubilee Singers advocates a pure, refined, "classical" approach: thus for us, the most appropriate way of rendering the African-American music we sing at St. James would be in a solid, spirited American hymn style, striving for expressive tempos be they faster or slower, well-defined, pulsating rhythm, and above all, heartfelt, soulful singing. Yet, if it is incorrect to try to make a Spiritual overly infused with popular elements. it would be equally incorrect to attempt to take our interpretation in the opposite direction -- for example, toward the English style of singing Victorian hymns.. This great music stands on its own as an immense source of spirituality, and is most effective when sung as naturally as possible.