Appreciation and Appropriation of Black Gospel Music
Music is frequently considered one of the great unifiers of people from all over the world. It has the power to bring people together and communicate across language barriers, but these statements overestimate this unity by neglecting music’s many purposes. Music is not only entertainment for consumption; it can be ritual, expression, and a mode of therapeutic healing. Gospel music functions in these ways and more. While gospel music can function as a unifier, we must question for whom this music is intended. Some argue that gospel music was born in black churches and religious practices and stems from African American experience, and therefore is not meant for popular consumption. Others argue that it conveys strong religious messages, and practically cannot be restricted. Now, gospel music requires more attention to how we can respect and appreciate it as an art form and cultural practice without appropriating it and erasing the black voices that worked to shape it.
Lisa Huisman Koops approaches musical appreciation through stressing the value of authenticity in music education in her article “‘Can’t We Just Change the Words?’ The Role of Authenticity in Culturally Informed Music Education.” Koops explains that “while it might seem easier to study and perform musical works without attention to their cultural context and performance practice, this denies students a full understanding of the power and use of music and stylistic accuracy” (27). A practice of cultural reference creates stronger moments of learning and understanding, but also shows respect for a people and their work.
In E. Patrick Johnson’s book, Appropriating Blackness, he researches a gospel a cappella choir in Australia called The Café of the Gate of Salvation. This group is comprised of mostly white non-Christian singers, and was started when Tony Backhouse, the director of the group, became fascinated with gospel music and decided to get a group of singers together to perform a cappella arrangements of gospel music. In addition to a cappella arrangements of classic gospel music, the choir also sings a cappella compositions in gospel style that are written by members of the group. Since so many members of the choir are atheist, agnostic, or non-Christian, their compositions do not follow the same religious practices or have the same connotations as typical gospel music. Johnson investigates how members negotiate singing sacred music that references Jesus with their secularism. He explains that many members of the choir do mental translation to associate “Jesus” with “freedom” (173). In reassociating words or writing music in gospel style that are less textually accurate, the singers in The Café of the Gate of Salvation appropriate black gospel music and erase parts of the cultural context.
Another erasure of cultural context is the value the choir members put on the a cappella style of their gospel arrangements. While part of the exclusion of instrumental accompaniment is the issue of lack of access to organists that are versed in gospel style in Australia, Johnson explains that members like Judy Backhouse feel that a cappella style is more intimate and that instruments correlate with theatricality more than reality. While it is a worthy goal to perform music with personal integrity, which in this case takes the form of a cappella style, personal integrity should find a balance with musical integrity. Judy Backhouse’s understanding of gospel music disregards part of the historical context, and how “instrumental as well as rhythmic accompaniment in gospel is an integral part of the performance just as in African music” (Williams-Jones 378). Later in his chapter, however, Johnson shows that Judy Backhouse had the opportunity to sing in a black gospel church on a trip to the United States, and how the opportunity transforms her. Johnson writes, “…the fact that the subjects sanctioned her performance of their culture is what transformed her relationship to and with the Other, what made her ‘feel like she was in Heaven’” (212). Here he indicates the strength of being invited into a space and into a cultural and religious practice, rather than appropriating a style of music.
Using a variation of Susan Scafidi’s permissive appropriation framework, I suggest we approach a politics of asking permission to immerse in black gospel music as a starting point to reach a practical balance between rejection and appropriation.
Bibliography
Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.
Koops, Lisa Huisman. “”Can’t We Just Change the Words?”: The Role of Authenticity in Culturally Informed Music Education.” Music Educators Journal 97.1 (2010): 23–28. JSTOR. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
Williams-Jones, Pearl. “Afro-American Gospel Music: A Crystallization of the Black Aesthetic.” Ethnomusicology 19.3 (1975): 373–85. JSTOR. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
