Church music, race and cultural appropriation
Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate, Heaven Host
in Epiphanies
I mentioned in Ecclesiantics the difficulty I'd had with an African-American Spiritual, Standing in the need of prayer which our minister had picked for our service yesterday.
Many of you will know that my local church is in the Hebrides, which is if not the whitest place on earth then pretty darn close. It is a long way removed from the history and context of Black American Christianity, and there is a long and grubby history of white people appropriating music from that culture without honouring where it comes from.
I've done a bit of Googling, and opinions vary from (paraphrasing) "Spirituals belong in their context and shouldn't be removed from it at all" through to "use them but explain the history and place them in context".
Now, using them/ not using them isn't actually often my choice to make, nor can I insist my minister acknowledges their context. So what can I do? Are their approaches to playing and singing this music that are more respectful? It seems to me that there is one extreme that resembles a Minstrel Show, and another that is the musical equivalent of white people tacos, but there might be something in the middle that isn't as bad.
For yesterday's service, I offered this version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NFBXsxN4PVpr9tbiUkVUuw0yLAzBb4hC/view?usp=sharing
I would value any thoughts or insights into how to do this better in the future, particularly from those in or with connections to Black American churches.
Many of you will know that my local church is in the Hebrides, which is if not the whitest place on earth then pretty darn close. It is a long way removed from the history and context of Black American Christianity, and there is a long and grubby history of white people appropriating music from that culture without honouring where it comes from.
I've done a bit of Googling, and opinions vary from (paraphrasing) "Spirituals belong in their context and shouldn't be removed from it at all" through to "use them but explain the history and place them in context".
Now, using them/ not using them isn't actually often my choice to make, nor can I insist my minister acknowledges their context. So what can I do? Are their approaches to playing and singing this music that are more respectful? It seems to me that there is one extreme that resembles a Minstrel Show, and another that is the musical equivalent of white people tacos, but there might be something in the middle that isn't as bad.
For yesterday's service, I offered this version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NFBXsxN4PVpr9tbiUkVUuw0yLAzBb4hC/view?usp=sharing
I would value any thoughts or insights into how to do this better in the future, particularly from those in or with connections to Black American churches.
Comments
Another context would be a congregation in the US singing spirituals where almost everyone in the congregation and in the region far and wide is white or at least not black.
Yet another context would be an overwhelmingly white congregation in the US or elsewhere singing spirituals in a city or region where many people are black.
And one more context would be singing spirituals in a congregation with more than a few black members, but where all or almost all of the musicians and ministers are white (or not black).
You could go over the different contexts when singing songs from Africa, songs in Spanish from Latin America, songs from Native Americans or other indigenous people, etc.
Performing Jewish religious songs composed long after Christians started persecuting Jews that were never intended to be interpreted in a Christian way is another thing, as is performing other songs that sound perfectly fine for Christians but come from non-Christian religions.
I heard a really interesting program on radio 4 about it - I think pre pandemic - when a professional Black female singer went to Scotland and worked with a congregation on this basis. I’ll see if I can find an online link to it.
OTOH, you haven't truly suffered until you've heard suburban North American Catholics trying to get through their first rendition of Were You There, without having listened to a version by people trained in the relevant tradition.
As far as cultural appropriation goes, I think if you're singing the song because you think the creators came up with a good tune that suits your spiritual purposes, that's great. The problem comes about when someone from the dominant culture uses it to telegraph their own dubious claims to affinity with the subjugated culture("Hey, man, look how Widgetarian I am, I'm singing their songs and everything") or to try and buy reconciliation on the cheap("Let's show our remorse for what we did by singing the victims' songs before heading out for our Sunday coffee").
I agree with @Gwai that giving credit to the originating culture is important, as long as you don't fall into the postures I mentioned above.
That is interesting, though if memory serves the style of psalm singing preserved in the outer isles is a remnant of the standard pre-literate way of doing things. Lining out would have been widespread in England too, but it was displaced by hymns and by literacy. It hung on in the Hebrides because of the insistence by the Free Presbyterian church on using only the unaccompanied psalms. How the timings match up with the colonisation of America and the enslaving of Black people I'm unsure.
The paradigmatic abuse is when a white performer sings songs originally written and sung by black artists without giving credit, as often happened in the early days of pop music.
(I think one thing about the Tippett is that the spirituals so obviously stand out from the rest of the work. Also, Tippett is using them explicitly as the songs of an oppressed people.)
First, one can over-agonise about this. If the hymn/song fits generally in the context, edifies and enables the congregation to pray to God better than I'd say go for it and stop fussing about the possible source. People are generally happy to borrow in their worship the contributions of other traditions, whether Amazing Grace, metrical Psalms, Gregorian chant the contakion that was used at the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral or whatever. Just regard this as a contribution to world hymnody from the Black American musical tradition and receive it gratefully.
Second, the possible link to Gaelic psalmody is quite interesting. Gaelic psalmody itself is not something mysterious and Celtic. It derives from how everybody sang their psalms in the period around the time of the Civil War. Psalm singing had become so slow and sung with so much spontaneous ornamentation that there was a campaign in England from around the 1680s to get people to sing at a reasonably normal pace. That included the addition of instruments and broadly worked. It developed in the next century into what has now been called the West Gallery tradition.
It had quite a considerable influence eventually in anglophone Scotland, though that was inhibited by the insistence for long time the people only sang about 12 different tunes.
In Gaelic speaking areas however they carried on singing the old way. Nothing musical stays the same, particularly in the era before gramophones and tape recorders. Over time, and possibly through exposure to local traditions and other influences as well, that has developed into what one would now hear in, say, Stornway on a Sunday morning.
A friend described having heard what sounded from his description very like Gaelic singing except that the people were singing in English in a church somewhere on the mainland near Fort William about 50 years ago.
It is interesting how traditions affect each other. I'm not sure how much it matters who borrowed from who and in which direction the influences moved, or when. Wherever people collect their ideas from what really matter is what they have made of them, what they are producing now and whether it works for them..
Right, and that was the substance of much of the push back at the time, that this was a vestige of a pre-literate tradition, and that actually there are multiple examples of call/response style patterns evolving in parallel (it's also not necessarily representative of most gospel music).
I'm afraid there is a loud voice in my head saying Bah! Humbug. (Good job I'm not typing this wearing my pyjamas sitting in a bungalow, but I did have kedgeree for breakfast ...)
My church sings a few songs like ‘Let us break bread together’ which are ‘spirituals’ but in our context definitely sound like ‘white people tacos’.
Music crosses borders. Which culture ‘owns’ Amazing Grace?
Welsh male voice choirs have sung spirituals beautifully for decades, despite the fact that the last non-white member was probably Paul Robeson!
I think there is a difference between ripping off another culture and trying your best to appreciate its heritage.
Anyway . . . .
I’ve seen this issue approached from a number of angles in church music circles, including resources from the Presbyterian Association of Musicians. I gathered a lot of materials with differing viewpoints for our congregation’s worship committee a few years ago, when we undertook a discussion (over several months) to wrestle with the implications of a predominantly white congregation singing the songs of African Americans or indigenous people. We asked whether that can be done with integrity and respect, and if so, what does that look like.
For context, we are, as indicated above, a predominantly white congregation in a predominantly white denomination (the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We are in the American South. We are a Matthew 25 congregation. (The Matthew 25 movement in the PC(USA) is a program where congregations, presbyteries and other entities commit to embracing one or more of three focuses: Building congregational vitality, dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty. We have committed to all three focuses.)
Context matters here. As some have said, cross-fertilization is a real and often good thing in music, as in other parts of culture. (Southern foodways are certainly the product of cross-ferltilization, as are many other aspects of Southern culture.) When considering issues of appropriation, power imbalances are key. There’s no real history of power imbalances in, say, English-speaking churchgoers singing German chorales. (Tha’s especially so if those English-speaking Christians are Lutheran.) There is a very real history of power imbalances between whites in the US and African Americans or Native Americans..
After reading, conversations with people knowledgeable on the subject and discussion, we came up with three guidelines:
- Music from African American or indigenous communities will be sung in a manner consistent with the traditions of those communities. For choral arrangements, the arrangements should be by members of those communities, if possible.
- Historical context should be provided for music from African American or indigenous communities. As @Gwai and @Arethosemyfeet have said, context is important. Our hymnal helps with this some, as there is a two- or three-sentence blurb about each hymn at the bottom of the page. Beyond that, this means for us that a paragraph or two will be included in the bulletin giving background on the song. Given that many of those songs reflect in some way or another the experience of enslavement and often contain layers of meaning, we think it is very important for white Christians to understand and respect that history. (I know it’s not a church context, but I really can’t convey how bizarre and grimace-inducing it is for me to hear “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” sung at English rugby games.)
- We recognize that this music came into use in predominantly white congregations without any payment of royalties or other recognition of authorship, so we resolved to make a financial contribution every year in recognition of our use of this music. We ultimately identified a nearby elementary school music program in a school that primarily serves low income, minority students. Our hope is that we can build a connection with them and support them in other ways, not just give them money.
So that’s where we ended up. It’s a process, and we’re still learning. But we do think it’s important.Adopting pedant mode, most Orthodox do not know much about the Kontakion for the Departed. What is now sung as the Kontakion at funerals and memorial services is, strictly speaking, only a (possibly later) preliminary verse added to the Kontakion proper. Properly speaking a Kontakion is a hymn, usually of 24 verses, sung by a soloist with a congregational refrain after each verse. The English Hymnal gives the first of these verses, the refrain being "Alleluia".
In current Russain use the full set of verses are only found at the funeral of a priest. In Greek use they are not used.
According to reputable scholars it was written in late 6th or early 7th century by a monk named Anastasios, and was the most popular of the three very different Kontakia for the Departed that date from that era.
I agree with Nick's position. Our hymnal is structured much like the Presbyterian hymnal when it includes hymns from other cultures
I think a problem here is what is our understanding of what is "Church." Is it a local faith group made up of a specific ethnic group of people. Or is it a world-wide body made up of all ethnic groups. I know my congregation has moved more from local to world-wide in its perspective. When my family joined the congregation, we were the only family on the roster with an English name--all the others were Scandinavian. Shortly thereafter, our previous pastor left and a Chinese interim pastor filled the pulpit. I can remember an older lady wondering if the interim pastor could really be Lutheran since he was not Norwegian. We have come a long way.
I say if we focus only on a local community, then I can see how we might be uncomfortable singing songs outside our local culture, but if we look at church as a worldwide body bringing in all cultures it easier to include music from cultures around the world. Personally, I think this is the only way for the church to survive into the next century.
What form should that engagement take when a congregation sings a hymn from the world-wide Church?
Does this apply to other areas of our lives? Should I be mindful of the East India Company every time I eat a curry?
As I said above, context matters. The cultural context of my congregation is that we’re a predominantly white (as in 95+% white) congregation in the American South, where the legacies of historic, systemic racism are all around us. My personal context is that a handful of generations ago, my family enslaved people from the community that gave rise to African American spirituals, and I have experienced privileges as a result of how that benefited my family at the expense of other people.
I think this context means that we/I must take care in how we/I sing the songs of people that we, as a community (civic and church) and as a family once exploited and mistreated. That’s especially the case when those songs arose out of the exploitation and mistreatment.
As described above, it can be something as simple as educating the congregation about where the song/spiritual comes from and what it meant to the people who first sang it. That can include fostering an understanding of the meaning of the song in an enslaved context. It’s not a church context, but my example above of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at rugby games is a prime example of people singing a spiritual with absolutely no clue as to what it’s about.
1) This is an issue for privileged (for lack of a better word) communities to manage, largely if not altogether on their own. It's not up to marginalized groups to inform or facilitate it -- asking for these is is most often pouring salt into the wound. It's also not something that needs to be advertised externally. The work of this kind is best done internally. The fruits may be borne externally, but those are wholly different than the raw materials of the process(-es).
2) There's an Artistic element to this that is by definition subjective on its own and therefore doubly sticky. Re: music, and in particular A.A. Spirituals, there are physiological realities and awarenesses -- vocal techniques, patterns, intuitions, codifications, etc., to be mindful of and handle with extreme care. In spite of fundamental musical components being faithfully executed -- rhythm, pitch, dynamics, tempo, etc., there are going to be specific vocal production, expressive, and interpretive qualities that are going to be extremely difficult if not impossible for "white" choirs, however well intended, to reproduce faithfully. Understood as a celebration, we are not the same, and attempts to communicate those kinds of unique qualities fail badly, and do so in more than one way. Better to invite in a choir and sing with them, or let them facilitate musical worship on their own than to present selections stylized in any way. Solutions for choirs can also be found in a variety of arrangements where the composer/arranger has taken pains to explain how their version relates to the "original," however that may be ascertained. Often the better examples of these arrangements can give access into another genre without offending it.
At one time just a couple/few decades ago, insofar as rhythm and linguistics were concerned, A.A. Spirituals were being published with extremely precise, seemingly overwrought notation that was supposed to represent something better described as "felt" than "read." It made looking at the score very discouraging from an accurate execution standpoint. There was also a publishing fad of presenting the texts "vernacularly" with words that resembled some kind of phoeneticized Gullah, the most ubiquitous of which was surely "Soon ah (I) will be don' (done) a-wid (with) de (the) troubles ob (of) de (the) worl' (world)." Thankfully, publishers have moved on from both of those.
3) Lastly, as a cautionary tale, but an argument I've heard on more than one occasion, and again re: A.A. Spirituals and/or Gospel, some will say that the A.A. tradition itself 'appropriated' the OT story of the Israelites held captive in Egypt and their Exodus narrative. Hopefully you can recognize right away how problematic this is as any kind of blanket justification for the unthoughtful use of another community's or culture's Art.
And - inter alia - what do we say about the Iona/Wild Goose approach, which intentionally seeks and uses songs from the World Church?
I read a great post elsewhere on the internet this week talking about Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas as an example of cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation.
In that film, Jack the Pumpkin King is head of Halloweentown. He happens across Christmastown and, enthralled by the sights and sounds of Christmas, he attempts to replicate them in Halloweentown, without any real understanding of their origin and meaning. (For the purposes of this film, that's Santa, presents, warm fuzzies etc, not the birth of Jesus, but hey...)
He later comes to appreciate more about Christmastown and the 'real meaning' (ahem) of Christmas, which is when it becomes appreciation rather than appropriation.
This next Sunday will be All Saints Sunday for us. We will be using a Sami (Laplander) tradition to remember those who have gone on before us. The Sami believed their dearly departed occupied the birch groves in their area. Whenever a child was born, the Sami would take the baby to the local birch grove to introduce it to the family members that dwelled there. We do not have any baptism planned, that I know of, but our task next Sunday is to build the birch grove of our congregation with our loved ones who have gone beyond. We will stick leaves on the branches of a bare tree trunk. I think it will be very meaningful for my grandchildren who will be visiting since two years ago we interned the ashes of my mother, father and brother in a mountain meadow near a grove of quacking aspens.
Okay, some may say this sounds like cultural appropriation, and would be uncomfortable doing it, but we Lutherans have an old saying, "If you sin, sin greatly and expect the grace of God just as greatly."
FWIW the arrangement of Standing in the need of prayer in our hymnary is by John Bell (not Wild Goose in this case, however).
The arrangement we used on Sunday was whatever hymnary.org had available as a midi file, so I can't speak to the origin.
Of course I do!
I notice in the movie Jack also wants to do it the way Christmastown does, but everyone is so enthusiastic about making it spooky that Jack mutters to himself, "Well, I might as well give them what they want..." and then goes all in on making Santa out to be terrifying,
I'd also add "throughout all time and space, the living and the dead, and even those yet to be born," because of course I would.
Amen
But the reality is that the way some people in some of those ethnic groups have treated people in other ethnic groups has been anything but Christian. And that has had lasting effects.
Nobody is saying white congregations should be prohibited from singing African American spirituals. What we are saying is that to do so without understanding of the past and respect for those whose experiences produced those songs can be problematic.