AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

Sacred traditions: Religious

- What you do in church is separate to what you do outside of it

Secular traditions: Anything not done in church

Secular traditions (Jazz):

- Connection to military music
- Jim Crow segregation in New Orleans

American Civil War

- Began in 1861, 4-year conflict
- Decades of tensions between N and S states over slavery, states’ rights and westward
expansion
- N: increasingly urban; S: increasingly rural
- Election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 made 7 southern states
- Costliest and deadliest war ever on American soil
- 620,000+ soliders killed, millions more injured
- Slaves had to rebuild the economy of the south, sometimes were hired

End of ACW: emancipation signed

Convict lease system
- Forced penal labour in the Southern states that targeted African American men

Structural characteristics of music

- Form, rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic organization of music

Musical processes

- The way music is created, performed, and experienced

3 Areas of Aesthetic Significance

1. Sound quality (timbre)
2. Mechanics of delivery
3. Style of delivery

Sound quality
- Character or quality of a musical sound as distinct from its pitch and intensity
Mechanics
- Manipulation of time, text, and pitch in musical performance
o Anything that you can notate on a score
Style of delivery
 - Physical mode of presentation. How performers engage the body in gesture, movement
and adornment during musical performance
Rhythmic characteristics

Syncopation
- Shifting of accent from standard West. European stressed beats ato aytpical stress
points in the measure (i.e. off beats)
- Used to be use as a derogatory term
- But is now so common in popular music today

Polyrhythm
- More than one contrasting rhythm played or sung simultaneously

The Ring Shout (folk spiritual)

- Antiphonal singing (call and response), hand clapping and other percussion
- Highly stylized religious dance
- Example: talking bout a good time

Ring shout rhythm  Charleston

Characteristics
- High degree of repetition
- Spontaneous, continuation of the songs for indefinite, often lengthy periods
- Variation of tempo
- Robust, full-bodied vocal timbre
- Highly embellished melodic lines with many slides from note to note, and turns and
cadences not on articulated notes. Melisma: singing same syllable but different pitches

Secular folk music

- Used in children game songs
Juneteenth: celebrates final extension of policies of emancipation proclamation in all
communities in the US

Play-party
- Playground songs, children game songs, ring songs (holding hands in a circle)
Work songs
- Songs sung by African Americans to coordinate their movements, lift their spirits and
enable to slower workers to keep up, and ward off fatigue

Field holler or cry

- Short, improvised melody sung by someone working in the fields
- Time for lunch, better look busy because the master is coming around, it’s time to make
a break for it
- Coded communication: metaphor, slang
Protest Songs

- Songs that directly/indirectly protest

o Recast the circumstances of Af-Am life
o Counter-narrative
- Derisive singing: critical
- Improvising satire
o Make fun of master without provoking offense

Spirituals – (sorrow songs)

- Religious folk song about enslavement of Af-Am people in American South
- Intense, slow and melancholic
Jubilee/camp meeting songs
- Joyful, celebratory and consequently fast, rhythmic and polyrhythmic

Lined hymn
- Hymn singing where each line of text is sung or chanted first by the song leader and
then echoed by the congregation
- Stretched out
- Melody relatively sparse

Call and response

- Singer/instrumentalist makes a musical statement that is then responded by someone

else

Great Awakening
- Religious revival that swept the American colonies in the mid-18 th century
- Significant numbers of slaves converted to Christianity

Invisible Church

- Slaves worshipped in secret, against the law that prohibited their assembly w/out White
supervision
- South: gatherings in spaces designated for purposes other than worship
- North: independent Black church

Folk spirituals vs. Arranged Spirituals

Folk: a cappella religious music created by Af-Am during slavery

- Hand claps and foot stomps

Arranged spirituals: post-Civil war form of spirituals in a fixed, non-improvised form which
evolved in schools created to educate emnacipated slaves
Af-Am in front of slave quarters