In the grand scheme of things, the 500 years since Europeans and enslaved Africans began settlement of the Western Hemisphere has been very short. The cultures they brought with them— the art, music, technology, religion, social structure, foods, all of that— reflected many centuries, even millennia, of development on the Eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean. All of the new countries that eventually were constituted on our side of the ocean had to deal, to varying degrees, with the clash, the mixing, of these disparate European and African cultures, and with the indigenous cultures already in place.
Christianity, in many of its manifestations, was a dominant front in this invasion, bringing swift and cataclysmic change. Broadly generalizing: British settlement of the Eastern seaboard brought several versions of protestantism; Spanish and Portuguese settlement of Central and South America, as well French Canada and the southwestern portion of the United States, brought Roman Catholicism. Scandinavians and Germans brought Lutheranism to the Midwest. Africans were not allowed to practice their religions openly, but aspects of their native religious practice informed the development of African American culture as surely as the Christianity which was forced upon them.
Each of these groups brought established musical practice and repertoire from its region of origin. Long before the arrival of refined Western European concert music, the new Americans were making both sacred and secular music, mostly based on the European music with which they were familiar. North American Protestant church music, typically sung by members of the congregation in a variety of European languages, gradually came to be sung in English, which brought it into the mainstream. Roman Catholic music, because it was sung in Latin by smaller, trained choirs, was much slower to adapt to the broader culture. Secular music— what we are likely to call folk music today— quickly adapted to cultural change, developing into something new and less European.
Beginning about mid-twentieth century, composers, arrangers, and conductors, reacting to the predominance of formal Western European art music in American concert life, began to pay serious attention to this “roots” American music, and sought to develop a music that was more reflective of the American experience. Two of the most important people in this movement in the United States were Robert Shaw (1916-1999) and Alice Parker (1925-2023). Together, they discovered and researched hundreds of North American songs, from a variety of sources, and arranged many of them for SATB choir. I heard Mr. Shaw say, in a question and answer session during a Carnegie Hall choral workshop, that Ms. Parker, a talented composer herself, did most of the arranging, remaining scrupulously within the harmonic and melodic framework of the original materials while creating high quality choral works for modern ensembles. Mr. Shaw, a conductor, primarily advised her on what would work with audiences, what would make performances “pop.” Their arrangements, some of them from as early as the late 1940s, continue to be in print, and have sold millions of copies throughout the world, effectively defining the genre. Chorale will sing three of them in our upcoming concerts: Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal, Wondrous Love, and My God is a Rock. The first two are from the Sacred Harp hymnal of early American hymns; the third is an African American spiritual.