The Spiritual Enters the Concert Hall

In 1871 a touring college choir turned oral spirituals into concert repertoire

Related

RomanticStrophic FormChoir scoringVoice

In 1871 a college in Nashville sent a choir north to raise money. Spirituals moved from church and field onto the concert platform and became a genre that could be printed in a programme.

Time and place

Nashville in 1871, then Boston on the first northern tour. The Jubilee Singers of Fisk University toured to raise funds for the school, singing Black spirituals in choral arrangement for northern audiences. Over the following decades spirituals entered printed scores, school books and solo recitals, and similar tours reached Paris and London.

What happened

Spirituals were oral: a lead sang improvised lines, the congregation answered, and melody and harmony changed at each performance. Touring required fixed programmes, steady intonation and a presentation audiences would accept, so notated choral arrangements appeared, softening the strongest rhythm and shout while keeping pentatonic melody and call-and-response. The process involved compromise, since arrangements were smoothed for the listeners of the day. It also let the songs be preserved and circulated as works for the first time.

What changed

Spirituals became concert repertoire and a publishing category. In the 1910s Burleigh arranged them as art songs with an independent piano part, and they entered the solo recital. The path runs from oral practice to choral arrangement to solo song to textbook, and each step changes how the music is heard. It also raises a question that has not gone away: when a community's music is staged, who decides the correct version.

Listen for the turn

Begin with the traditional Nobody Knows, the melody plain and the phrases sinking at the end. Then Burleigh's arrangement, with a piano introduction and harmonic colour and the voice written as a solo. Finally Deep River and Swing Low, comparing the choral version with the melody sheet. Both forms are in the catalogue, which is exactly the distance worth hearing.

Related

This turn belongs to Romantic; the form is at Strophic Form, the choral writing at Choir scoring and the solo voice at Voice.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Jubilee Singers" — the 1871 tours checked, not quoted
• Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (University of Illinois Press, 1977) — oral tradition and early notation checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.