5 - Musical languages

Summary

The spirituals

The story of how Tippett became aware of the potential of spirituals has already been told, as has their relationship to the overall design of the work. Tippett's source for the spirituals was a commercially available publication, The Book of American Negro Spirituals. Published in 1926, this text reflects how the spiritual was popularly received at that period. The introduction to the volume gives the following commentary on the arrangements, with specific reference to the harmonic vocabulary:

The songs collected in this book have been arranged for solo voice, but in the piano accompaniments the arrangers have sincerely striven to give the characteristic harmonies that would be used in spontaneous group singing. Of course, these harmonies are not fixed. A group or congregation singing spontaneously might never use precisely the same harmonies twice; however, Mr. Rosamond Johnson and Mr. Brown [the arrangers] have shown great fidelity to what is characteristic. The ordinary four-part harmonies can, without difficulty, be picked out from the accompaniments to most of the songs, but what the arrangers had principally in mind was to have the instrumentation approach the effect of the singing group in action.

In the arrangements, Mr. Rosamond Johnson and Mr. Brown have been true not only to the best traditions of the melodies but also to form. No changes have been made in the form of songs. The only development has been in harmonizations, and these harmonizations have been kept true in character.