From Spirituals to Hip Hop:
American Music of the African Diaspora
(MUS 113)
SUNY Broome Department of Music
and Theater Arts
Dr. Julia Grella O’Connell

  • Go Down, Moses

    The first published version of the spiritual “Go Down, Moses,” in 1862, attributed its authorship to “The Contrabands” — escaped slaves who joined the Union Army — who probably sang it as a rallying cry, rather than as a hymn. The song had been known for at least 15 to 20 years prior to its…

  • Sun Ra, Intergalactic Afrofuturist

    Sun Ra (born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914) was not only a jazz pioneer. He was also a pioneer of all kinds of avant-garde sounds. In the 1950s, when record companies released 45-rpm discs in the hopes of selling them as hit singles, Ra used the 45-rpm technology to record his musical experiments.…

  • Blackface/Yellowface

    We’ve talked a little about the longstanding practice in opera of white singers “blacking up” to play characters of color. This practice has only begun to be thought of as controversial in our own century. For now, the least offensive choices for opera producers are to 1) cast singers whose race/ethnicity matches the race/ethnicity of…

  • Do the Words Matter?

    Baritone Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer, onstage with “The Gadget” in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic. In a previous blog post, I discussed Oppenheimer’s Act I aria in John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic. The entirety of the aria’s text is John Donne’s Holy Sonnet no. 14, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” As you know, an opera aria is…

  • Variations on a Theme

    (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann.) Robert Schumann, no. 4 of Bunte Blätter (Colored Leaves), op. 99. In 1853, his wife, Clara (Wieck) Schumann, wrote a set of variations on this piece. The following year, Schumann was confined to the insane asylum at Endenich. Clara, who gave birth to their seventh child that May, was forbidden to…

  • Batter My Heart

    (J. Robert Oppenheimer) How does contemporary art music respond to the moral problems of the age? John Adams wrote the opera Doctor Atomic, about the Manhattan Project — the top-secret World War II initiative to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis could — in 2005. The libretto is by Peter Sellars, whom you will remember…

  • Is it Composed? Is it Improvised?

    George Crumb (1929 – ) wrote Apparition, a song cycle for soprano and amplified piano, in 1979. The text is taken from Walt Whitman’s elegy on the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” considered one of the greatest of all American poems. Crumb used the following excerpts from the poem: The night in…

  • From the Village to the Concert Hall

    Bartók recording folk music. His subject sings into the horn of an Edison phonograph, which incised a cylinder disk with a needle. Bela Bartók was one of the earliest ethnomusicologists. Here is a field recording he made of Romanian folk dances. Here is his piano composition entitle Romanian Folk Dances. Here is a folk song he…

  • Clair de lune

    Nuit du carnaval (Henri Rousseau, 1886). In an art song, there are many layers of meaning. There is the meaning of the sounds of the music. There is the meaning of the words of the text. There is also the meaning of the sounds of the words themselves. Listen to the sounds of the text read in French.…

  • Pierrot

    Pierrot and Harlequin (Pablo Picasso, 1920). Pierrot is one of the stock characters of commedia dell’arte, an improvised form of theater that was performed by traveling players throughout Italy and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a sad clown, in love with the stock heroine of commedia, Colombina (Columbine), who in turn is…

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