Digital Commons Network^™

Sacred Music Of African American Catholics: Understanding Usage In High Liturgy, William S. Harrison

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Despite steady progress toward honoring cultural identity in liturgy, the Roman Catholic Church has historically ignored the vast musical contributions of African Americans in the celebration of the Holy Mass. This study explores the historical, theological, and cultural application of music from the African and African American diaspora in urban Catholic churches that employ high liturgy as a practice in corporate worship. While many post-Vatican II documents govern culturally inclusive liturgical practices, little is known about the challenges in implementing and maintaining authentic Catholic African American corporate worship traditions in these spaces. The universality of the Roman Catholic faith is …

Guide To The Godwin Sadoh Collection, Columbia College Chicago

CBMR Collection Guides / Finding Aids

Dr. Godwin Sadoh is a Nigerian composer, educator, church musician, organist, pianist, choral conductor, and ethnomusicologist. He holds music degrees from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria; the University of Pittsburgh; the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, where he became the first African to receive a doctoral degree in organ performance from any institution in the world. The collection holds scores, publications, books, and recorded music

Guide To The Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson Collection, Columbia College Chicago

CBMR Collection Guides / Finding Aids

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was a composer, conductor, and pianist who composed classical, jazz, and popular music containing elements of spirituals, folk music, and blues. He was founding member and associate conductor of the Symphony for the New World, and had a long career as a composer includes activities in classical music, jazz, and film and television. The collection consists of scores, a scrapbook, programs, and publicity about his career from 1949 to 2004.

The Jubilee Singers: Free Or Enslaved?, Micaiah H. Jones

Musical Offerings

This paper intends to inform the reader about the great impact that the Fisk Jubilee Singers had on developing and understanding American music, specifically African American slave songs and culture, during their years of performance and travel. It also seeks to highlight the contradiction of the Fisk singers’ situation during that period of their lives; many of them were recently released from slavery, yet they were obligated to tour as a group for years after their education had ended. This resulted in most of the members altogether forfeiting their diplomas. This paper focuses on the difficulty which the Jubilee singers …

From Perpetual Struggle To Liberation And Freedom: An Analysis Of Two Predominately African American Churches, Stanley Bernard Baldwin Ii

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

African American Church Music has a unique and robust history dating back to the era of the African Slave Trade. This project will focus on African American Church Music and its effect on the African American worship experience in the 21st century. The creation of spirituals and gospel music helped shape the doctrine and identity in the African American Church. However, its message of suffering and “longing to go home” has limited the worship experience of the African American demographic. Musical style, historical significance, and racial issues have played a significant role in shaping the African American worship experience. These …

Disparities In Programming African American Solo Vocal Music On College Campuses Across The United States, Ramelle Brooks

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the representation of African American composers within the solo vocal literature genre of classical music. Literature suggests the music of African American composers is seldom taught in classical musical studies. The study explored one publicly available college recital database from each U.S. geographical region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West), which included listings of songs performed at each recital. The researcher recorded the number of recitals including African American composers and provided a numerical breakdown of song genres associated with African American Americans that included African American arts songs, Spirituals, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, and operatic arias. The number of …

A Musical Analysis Of William Grant Still's Songs Of Separation: The Chamber Arrangement, Michael Preacely

Theses and Dissertations--Music

William Grant Still was given the title “The Dean of African American Music” because of the many firsts he accomplished as an African American musician in the early twentieth century. He is known for fusing his African American musical tradition of Jazz and blues with the classical European musical tradition. This study explores one of Still’s most famous song cycles, “Songs of Separation,” in the arrangement for string quartet, voice, and piano. This document considers the instrumentation of the string quartet arrangement and how Still uses the instrumentation to enhance the character OF the poetry. This document also provides a …

African American Sacred Music And The Romantic Aesthetic, Brooksie Harrington

English Faculty Working Papers

Gospel music affects every aspect of African American culture, and the similarities between the African American sacred music aesthetic and the Romantic aesthetic share a theme of religiosity that is contained in the correlative of the mythopoetic “seam.” This seam meshes together analysis that explores the natural sublime, as suggested in the writings of such scholars as William Wordsworth, Pierre Proudhon, Samuel Coleridge, James Weldon Johnson, Henry L. Gates, and Anthony Heilbut.

Black And White Notes: Segregation, Integration, And Urban Renewal Through Pittsburgh's Locals 60 And 471, Nathan Seeley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores Pittsburgh’s Locals 60, 471, and 60-471 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1960s. Local 60 was founded in 1896 for white musicians and Local 471 in 1908 for black musicians. While other studies of the AFM take a “top-down” approach, this study examines these Locals from the “bottom-up.” In doing so, it re-examines the causal relationship between music/musicians and the social, political, and economic conditions intersecting with them. This dissertation is built upon seventy-two interviews conducted between former Local 471 members in the 1990s, photographs from Teenie Harris Collection …

Illuminating Unsung Americans Sung As A Musical Staple Within American Culture, Richard Leon Hodges

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The book Unsung Americans Sung was first published in 1944 by the Handy Brothers Publishing Company. With over 30 contributors and edited by William C. Handy, this book explores the great abolitionists of the eighteenth century and the climate of Negro culture during that moment in time. The book includes poetry, illustrations, children’s songs, choral works, scenes from major works, and art songs. Handy was not only offering his opinion of the Negro of the time, but he was creating a book that would add these freedom fighters and generational torchbearers into the archives of every American. Sadly, this glimpse …

The Soul Of Black Opera: W.E.B. Du Bois’S Veil And Double Consciousness In William Grant Still’S Blue Steel, Toiya Lister

Graduate Thesis Collection

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois theorized that black peoples were viewed behind a metaphorical “veil” that consisted of three interrelated aspects: the skin as an indication of African Americans’ difference from their white counterparts, white people’s lack of capacity to see African Americans as Americans, and African Americans’ lack of capacity to see themselves outside of the labels white America has given them. This, according to Du Bois, resulted in the gift and curse of “double consciousness,” the feeling that one’s identity is divided. As African Americans fought for socio-political equality, the reconciliation of these …

From The Margins: The Underrepresentation Of Black And Latino Students/Teachers In Music Education, Lisa C. Delorenzo, Marissa Silverman

John J. Cali School of Music Scholarship and Creative Works

There is an alarming gap between rising numbers of minority students and a shrinking minority teaching force. The purpose of this research was to explore the question: Why are so few students of color preparing to teach music in the public schools? Black and Latino music students and teachers who graduated from urban high schools in northern New Jersey were interviewed about their race/ethnic related experiences in college along with their ideas about the scarcity of music students of color in music teacher education. Data, presented in narrative form, indicated a complex web of factors that discourage high school students …

Who Can Afford To Improvise? James Baldwin And Black Music, The Lyric And The Listeners [Table Of Contents], Ed Pavlic

Literature

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life.

The route …

Contemporary Conversations On Cross-Cultural Exchange, Jenni L. Shelton

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

From Segregation To Integration: A Historical Study Of Music Education In The Colored School In Louisville, Mississippi Through 1970, Jeremy S. Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What was music like, if it existed, in black schools before integration, and what happened to black music educators after integration? To properly address this, the history of segregation, major court rulings and other noteworthy attempts at integration, must be mentioned. This study reveals the untold history of the music department of Louisville Colored School in Louisville, Mississippi. This study will open the door for further, in-depth dialogue on the subject of music education in black schools before integration. Five years before the 1970 integration of public schools in Louisville, MS, Louisville Colored School, sometimes referred to as Camile Street …

"Music Down In My Soul:" Achieving A Sound Ideal For Moses Hogan Spirituals, Loneka Wilkinson Battiste

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT In 1995, Moses Hogan ushered in a resurgence of interest in the arranged spiritual at the national conference of the American Choral Directors Association in Washington, D. C. The impact of his arrangements was so profound that today he is widely recognized as being responsible for the mid-1990’s revitalization of interest in the arranged spiritual. In a day when various opinions abound on how Moses Hogan’s spirituals should be performed, the purpose of this study was to describe and define the sound ideal for Moses Hogan spirituals. Qualitative methods were used for the collection and analysis of data relevant …

The Dirty Third: Contributions Of Southern Hip Hop To The Study Of Regional Variation Within African American English, Jennifer Bloomquist, Isaac Hancock

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

While there is well documented evidence of certain supra-regional features in African American English (AAE) phonology and morphosyntax (for example, see Labov 1972; Rickford 1999; Baugh 2000; Green 2002), recent trends in the study of linguistic variation suggest that the homogeneity of the variety has been largely overstated (Mallinson & Wolfram 2002; Friedland 2003; Wolfram 2003). For the most part, contemporary AAE influences on mainstream language have originated from varieties spoken in the northeast and on the west coast which have evolved independently of one another over the past forty years, and which vary in significant ways from southern AAE; …

An Improvised World: Jazz And Community In Milwaukee, 1950-1970, Benjamin Barbera

Theses and Dissertations

This study looks at the history of jazz in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1970. During this period Milwaukee experienced a series of shifts that included a large migration of African Americans, urban renewal and expressway projects, and the early stages of deindustrialization. These changes had an impact on the jazz musicians, audience, and venues in Milwaukee such that the history of jazz during this period reflects the social, economic, and physical landscape of the city in transition.

This thesis fills two gaps in the scholarship on Milwaukee. First, it describes the history of jazz in Milwaukee in a more comprehensive …

Negro Art, Vera H. Richards

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

In recent years, especially in America, the Negro has been the subject of wide and varied discussions. These discussions concerns the intellectual and religious phases of his life. The Negro is inter-nationally known for his expression of music and poetry, especially for his of rhythmical phasing which is so essential to the above named arts in viewing the origin of the race. it is found that valuable material was contributed to humanity by the ancient Ethiopian tribes which the Negro has come