Easter Music Made In USA

Throughout history composers have written music inspired by Christ's suffering on the cross, his death and resurrection. Some of the best Easter music has come to the United States from Europe. But Americans have been creating their own religious music from the earliest days, first imitating classical composers, but very soon finding their own expression. Here is a brief introduction to Easter music made in the U.S.A.

The earliest Easter compositions made in the United States were introduced to me by Robert Saladini, former head of the music department at the Library of Congress. One of the oldest anthems still recorded and performed is The Lord Is Risen Indeed by William Billings, who lived in the Boston area in the second half of the 18th century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRowRuPuvtA

In the early years of American independence, itinerant singing masters flourished in New England. They are also known as New England psalmodists. Some of these singers composed their own songs.

"Their music was characterized by somewhat jagged melodies often times, and what a lot of musicians will call open fifths. So you'll hear this almost primitive sound. At this time in Europe, of course, this sound would have sounded very old fashioned to a lot of the cultured ears," said Saladini.

Few of these New England musicians had formal music education and many had other professions. Billings, for example was a tanner, like his father. His knowledge of music probably came from a choral singing school, and he most likely taught himself composition by studying choral works of English composers. Many of his tunes have remained popular for more than two centuries. The psalm When Jesus Wept stands out for its simple beauty, said Saladini.

"It is a round. It is probably one of the most well-known pieces of early American music, certainly a piece that was done throughout the 18th century and the 19th century, and is still performed by American school children, and sung in churches." 

New England musicians created sacred music intended for singing by their friends and neighbors. So their songs were popular. Billings is considered to be the foremost in the group, but works by many other composers also have survived, said Saladini. An example is Crucifixion, signed by M. Kyes, recorded in a late 18th century Connecticut tunebook. The music is set to a poem by early 18th-century clergyman and poet Samuel Wesley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe-3tLG0tx8

Early American immigrants were primarily concerend with their daily survival in a new land so their celebrations were not as musically elaborate as those in Europe and other continents. Very few pieces were composed especially for Easter, and it is questionable whether all the New England religious sects even observed the holy day, Saladini said. Subsequent immigrants groups, including the Germans, Italians, Spaniards and Slavs, brought with them their rich Easter traditions. But we have African-American slaves to thank for some of the most beautiful religious songs, known as spirituals. Many of them, such as Were You There remain popular not only in this country, but throughout the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2jlvFj0os

"But we do see with the slave society, we see a lot of music that may be associated with the Lenten season or with Good Friday. I think a lot of the slaves could identify with Christ's suffering on the cross. We see pieces like He Never Said a Mumbling Word and they all sort of reflect the sadness of the crucifixion and it is something the slaves certainly could relate to," said Saladini.

By the end of the 19th century, almost every major church in the United States performed an Easter oratorio, or produced a similar music event for the season. But, Saldini said, most of the pieces performed were by European composers or had a distinctly European sound. It was only in the 20th century that American composers began incorporating new elements such as jazz and folk in their music, and creating a uniquely American sound.

Randall Thompson's Alleluia is one of the best known and most frequently performed 20th century sacred pieces in the United States. It has been called the bedrock of contemporary choral literature, said Saladini. The work was commissioned for the 1940 opening of the now famous Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. By that time, Thompson had established himself as a composer whose work is characterized by a harmonically simple, so-called American sound, that incorporates folk and popular themes. Alleluia is regularly performed on important festive occasions, such a Easter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W86a2o3uaLs

In the early 1960s, composer Ron Nelson presented his coral work Behold Man, set to words by contemporary American writer Albert van Nostrand. In this solemn religious piece, the poet and the composer remind Christians to "Behold man! God summoned yet God bound." Nelson has been described as quintessential American composer who moves easily between conservative and new styles. He has written many sacred as well as secular compositions.

Several decades later, composer and organist Gerre Hancock of New York wrote a solemn composition for chorus and organ titled the Introit for the Feast Day. Like Randall Thompson's Alleluia, its text also consists of only one word - Alleluia - and is often performed during Easter season.

Gerre Hancock

By the arrival of the 21st century, American composers have developed quite another idea of music, said Saladini. Some of the new styles embrace older music, such as Gregorian chant, and update it with jazz and other elements. Works of Frank Ferko from Chicago exemplify this trend.

But a growing number of new pieces in traditional style also are commissioned from contemporary composers. One example is The Passion and The Promise, an oratorio by Dan Gawthrop from Virginia. It premiered in 2001 in Idaho and was presented in Washington D.C. at Easter of the same year. I attended that performance. Gawthrop told me afterwards that he was not afraid of being described as old-fashioned. He said he wanted both the performers and the audience to enjoy his music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxnwtJJeyW4

"I deliberately write in a style which a non-specialist can find approachable and enjoyable. I feel we've not yet exhausted all of the possibilities that tonality has to offer. So my music always has a very clearly defined tonal center although that may shift quite frequently," said Gawthrop. "I am a great believer in melodies as a way of accenting a text and I love to explore harmonic things which people describe as fresh rather than off-putting."

What about trying out something entirely different? "I am not a great experimenter," said Gawthrop. "I am content to leave that to my colleagues, for the most part, and I am keenly interested in communicating with an audience," he said. Judging by the number of commissions he is getting for sacred works, Gawthrop said that kind of music seems to be enjoying a revival in America.

So if the sacred music composition had a slow beginning in the new world, it clearly is making up for it now.

From the Spirit: African-American Sacred Music

I live near a historically black Brown Memorial AME Church in Washington D.C.  The M in AME stands for Methodist.  Every Sunday I am woken up by clapping and stomping which accompany the congregation's joyous singing in praise of Jesus. I can picture bodies swaying to the rhythm of the sacred music. I once attended the service as a friendly neighbor and so I know how it goes.
 
Pastor Henry White leads choir members as they march to the altar singing "Holy, holy, holy" to begin the service. "It's a part of our tradition," he says.

"That's what we as African-Americans do. It's just a part of our worship experience to sing the songs of the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with singing and thanks. We are 'singing people.' In fact, Methodist people were the first people to start singing in church," Reverend White told me in an interview.

The Methodist Church indeed had an important role in the development of African-American sacred music. English evangelists Charles and John Wesley, who came to America during the early 18th century, encouraged Methodists to be a 'singing people' and provided them with a multitude of hymns.

Bernice Johnson Reagon 

Bernice Johnson Reagon, music scholar and founder of the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock told me in an interview that blacks in the United States started to sing these Protestant hymns and adapt them to their own style. Amazing Grace is one of the best known.

Reagon said that African-Americans living in slavery before the 1860s U.S. Civil War, also created their own brand of songs to help them get through the hard times.

"We call them spirituals because they come from the spirit," she said. "And so this body of material comes up from the inside of the people especially when they are joined together. So you are getting individuals coming together and creating a music. We don't know the composers."

I've Been 'Buked And I've Been Scorned is one of the oldest and best-known African-American spirituals. The early spirituals were often performed without rehearsal and both the text and music were improvised. The same phrases appeared in different songs and the same words were sung to different tunes. Another genre that developed among African-Americans is shape note music, said Reagon.

"This is a method of writing music down on a score for an audience that is not musically literate. It began in Scotland among illiterate Presbyterians.  They were doing psalms, but because they were not musically literate there was a great difficulty in controlling what would happen to the song after you lined out the text," said Reagon.  

"So the leaders of the church thought - we've got to teach these people to read music and they developed a method of assigning a particular shape to a particular note - circle, square, triangle - and they taught people to learn pitch by those shapes and it's called shape-note singing. That was imported into the U.S. and taken South with missionaries. And they actually had song-singing schools where they trained black and white converts to learn to sing music by shape notes and you will still find a few people who participate in that tradition."

Jubilee Singers,  a late 19th-century a cappella group at Fisk University, Tenessee, brought African-American spirituals to a broader audience

In the 20th century, a new music form emerged that reflected African-American spirituality.  "When black people moved from rural to urban areas, they created gospel
music," said Reagon.

"When we get to the city in the early part of the 20th century, we actually create churches that often have elements of the churches we have left," she said. "But our lives have changed. We have to work by the clock. We are working in factories, there is a pace that is different from working on a farm and you get a new music that is a blend of both the hymn and the spirituals in structure and in energy - in terms of performance, in terms of intensity."

Reagon said the new sacred music composers brought back the use of traditional African-American instruments such as the guitar, the banjo and drums. She said the Protestants had taught the blacks that these instruments had no place in sacred music. But the 20th century gospel composers disagreed. They referred to a psalm that says: "Praise the lord all that have breath. Praise the lord with the harp, the cymbal, with the dance, with the trumpet." And so the African-American religious leaders encouraged the use of traditional instruments, shouts, clapping and body movements during worship services.

"And there were people who felt the reason they came together to worship was to invite in the fire - the spirit," she explained. "So the function of the service was to hope that you would be moved and that you would shout, that you would express yourself emotionally. And as one group of black people began to be educated, and said: you can actually feel the spirit and you don't need to be jumping up and dancing all over the place, you don't need to be carrying on so, another group claimed that as the central function."

While the composers of early African-American sacred music are not known, 20th century musicians such as Charles Albert Tenley, Thomas Dorsey, Lucy Campbell and many others became famous. Their sacred music also became popular outside the church. In the 1950s, Mahalia Jackson's recording of the song Move On a Little Higher, sold millions of copies.

During the 1960s, African-American sacred music played a major role in the civil rights movement in the South. Reagon said protest meetings always started with a song.

The best known protest song from the US 1960s rights movement

"The music was more than an identifying sound. It really was a way to form a group. In the black traditional churches I grew up in, in southwest Georgia, whenever people came together, the first thing they did was sing. It forms a community out of the people who walked in the door. You came in and you joined this community, but what is this community during the civil rights movement? This is the community that has decided it is going to take Albany, Georgia apart and make it over."

After the civil rights movement, spirituals and gospel music gained worldwide popularity. Today, there is hardly a music organization anywhere in the world that does not recognize African-American sacred music as a significant form of music.

Reagon taught that while black sacred music can serve as part of a religious service, it is also an analytical commentary on African-American life.

"It is a body of the historical data created by African Americans and should always be considered as documentary evidence for anybody studying, especially 19th century American history." Reagon is the author of books on African-American music "If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me" and "We'll Understand It Better By and By."

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You can hear this radio report with music at:
http://english.ccut.edu.cn/article.php?/1799