Morehouse and Spelman in the Tabernacle
This week the Morehouse and Spelman Glee Clubs were in Salt Lake City to perform with the Tabernacle Choir on Temple Square. You can still watch the recording of the Sunday morning broadcast of “Music and The Spoken Word” when they all sang together. I live too far away to have been able to attend in person, but I watched the broadcast and encouraged my daughter to attend, which she did. Years ago when I lived in Atlanta, I used to regularly attend the Morehouse-Spelman Christmas Concerts and always considered it the highlight of the holiday season. It is one of the events I miss most not living in Atlanta.
Why is a collaboration between the Tabernacle Choir and the Morehouse and Spelman Glee Clubs such a big deal? It demonstrates an openness to diversity and in the “Word” part of Music and the Spoken Word, Lloyd Newell noted the “balance of variety and harmony may be one reason we are inspired by the music we have heard today.” The musical style of singing for the Tabernacle Choir is not the same as the style of singing by Morehouse and Spelman and the voices of the singers in each choir are different.
To understand the difficulties of singing in a different style, I will use the example of Betelehemu, a Nigerian Christmas carol. I was first introduced to this song by the BYU Men’s Choir sometime late in the last century and it was received with enthusiasm and as a white person use to white people choral singing, I was impressed. Then the Tabernacle Choir sang it. You can see a video of them in 2012 here. But then I moved to Atlanta and attended a Morehouse-Spelman Christmas concert and heard the Morehouse men’s glee club sing it (see a performance of them here) and it blew me out of the water. It’s hard to describe the difference in energy in the room each time, but with Morehouse, the room simply came alive.
The singers from Morehouse and Spelman demonstrated clearly that they can sing with the Tabernacle Choir in their traditional style, but after the broadcast was over, they let loose a bit more with their personal style of singing.
Music in southern black churches has much more energy and involves a lot more audience participation. The Morehouse and Spelman choirs demonstrated this in the Tabernacle after the filming of “Music and The Spoken Word” was finished. After the broadcast, they stayed and sang additional songs, getting the audience involved clapping during each one. This music was well-received – they received a standing ovation for each piece, with some that seemed to go on forever. It was clear that those in attendance appreciated the quality of the music provided and the more alive the music was, the more it was appreciated. I hope that the organizers of the new church hymnal are taking all this into account. Music is one of the big reasons that many black converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have difficulty feeling at home in our worship services. I have heard many converts in my own ward lament that the music we sing makes it difficult for them to feel the spirit. Personally, I’m not much of a holy roller, but I can feel the Spirit listening to black gospel music.
There are a lot of cultural things that separate people in this country and in our church. I hope that we can take the inviting of these HBCU choirs to sing with the Tabernacle Choir as a signal to embrace difference in our music and then to expand that embrace beyond music. In the south we have a saying that the most segregated time of the week is Sunday morning. I was glad to see that was not the case this past Sunday morning in Salt Lake City.
