Uccelli [née Pazzini], Carolina Uccellini, Marco

(iv) Secular-scared musical interactions in the 20th century.

The artificial boundaries that historically separated secular and sacred traditions in black American communities became virtually non-existent in the 20th century. The hybrid musical styles that developed from cross-fertilization of the sacred and secular traditions in the Holiness Pentecostal church invaded the secular realm through recordings and radio broadcasts beginning in the 1920s. The ragtime, jazz and blues influences on the gospel compositions of Thomas Dorsey eventually found a home in African American demoninational churches after an initial rejection because of their ‘secular’ sound. In the 1940s and the decades that followed, the unique rhythms, melodies, harmonies, form and styles intermingled and were recycled. This process, which continues to the present, brought life to new black American popular forms beginning in the 1940s and gospel beginning in the late 1960s.

In the 1940s and 50s, gospel music influenced the popular styles created by youths who patterned their styles after those of gospel performers rather than the blues and jazz musicians who influenced earlier generations. In 1954, the rhythm and blues performer Ray Charles defied the secular-sacred boundaries when he repackaged the well-known gospel version of the spiritual This Little Light of Mine as This Little Girl of Mine. Ten years later, rhythm and blues singer Mitty Collier recorded a secular version of the gospel song I had a Talk with God as I had a Talk with my Man. In the 1960s, Ray Charles, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Gene Chandler and Aretha Franklin successfully transformed gospel music into a new popular style, ‘Soul’, by employing elements of gospel in their vocal and instrumental stylings.

Paralleling this development was the use of gospel music to revitalize and reshape folk spirituals, hymns, gospel-hymns, folk ballads and earlier popular styles such as rhythm and blues into freedom or civil rights songs. The melodies, harmonies, rhythms and sensibilities of gospel combined with the message of equal rights and black pride captured the ethos and philosophy of the 1950s Civil Rights and 1960s Black Power movements.

In the 1970s, the message of gospel music became more universal. While retaining the established theme of salvation, some performers began omitting direct references to God or Jesus. They introduced themes of peace, compassion and universal love inspired by the Civil Rights movement and the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Gospel performers also began recording popular songs in the gospel tradition, substituting ‘Jesus’ for ‘me’, ‘baby’, and ‘my man’. Popular songs inspired by religious beliefs, such as People Get Ready by Curtis Mayfield, were recorded by gospel singer Shirley Caesar and the Thompson Community Singers without changes to the text.

Since the 1970s, gospel music has been a part of popular music radio programming. Popular music artists freely move between both traditions on a single album, and gospel artists include songs on their albums with popular music arrangements. Both groups use songwriters, producers and artists from ‘opposite’ traditions on their albums. Such trends further illustrate the fluidity of black American musical traditions and suggest a common core of features, approaches to music making and shared life experiences that bind all African American musical genres into a conceptual whole.

USA, §II: Traditional music

3. Hispanic American.

The official classification of social groups in the USA considers Hispanics to be individuals originating or descending from Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries, regardless of their ethnic heritage or social classes. Thus conceived, Hispanics represent the second largest minority in the country, with the prediction that they will soon be the most numerically important non-Anglo-Saxon group in the USA. Despite this reductionist classification, Hispanics are as diversified as the cultures from which they originate. Hispanic or Iberian Americans include not only Spanish Americans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, Dominican Americans, Portuguese and Brazilian Americans, but also other citizens from Central and South America. Their musical expressions and traditions are therefore as diverse as their various parent cultures. In some specific cases, such as those of Afro-Cuban or certain Mexican or Andean indigenous groups, one confronts a musical tradition that, as a whole, is anything but Hispanic; thus a wide range of different traditions are subsumed under the term Hispanic American music.

(i) Mission and colonial contributions.

(ii) Contemporary traditional music.

(iii) Latin urban popular music.

USA, §II, 3: Traditional music: Hispanic American

(i) Mission and colonial contributions.

The vast territory of what is now the American Southwest and California was first explored and claimed by Spain in the 16th century, but the mission life introduced by the Spaniards was not fully organized until the 17th and 18th centuries. Spanish missionaries, particularly Franciscans in the Southwest, gave a prominent place to music in their conversion work among the Amerindians. Religious education included vocal and instrumental training. Following models established in Mexico (New Spain), Amerindian choirs sang at daily services in the mission churches. Training in making instruments for church use also received special attention, particularly organ building and the production of brass, percussion and, in the 18th century, string instruments.

The earliest well-organized Spanish missions were in what is now New Mexico. Among the Franciscan friars who accompanied the Conquistador Juan de Oñate into the area (1598) was Cristóbal de Quiñones, considered ‘the first music teacher who worked within the confines of the present United States’ (Spell, 1927). Before 1669 one of these friars had installed an organ in the church of the San Felipe mission. By the time of the Amerindian rebellion of 1680, which drove the Spaniards out of the New Mexico territory for the next 12 years, some 25 missions had been established in the area. Those of San Francisco at Sandia and of San Antonio at Isleta had ‘schools for reading and writing, singing and playing of all instruments’, as Alonso de Benavides reported in 1630 in his Memorial, the chief source of information for New Mexican church music in the first half of the 17th century.

Music teaching revolved around Gregorian chant, polyphonic music (canto de órgano) and traditional Spanish religious music. The last included villancicos and aguinaldos (Christmas songs), and alabados and alabanzas (songs of praise), all in Spanish. In addition, the monks introduced into the area the music and songs of the traditional Iberian catechetical folk theatre. Particularly important in the New Mexico and Texas areas were the autos sacramentales, dramatic religious representations with appropriate songs. The folk play Los pastores, still occasionally performed in New Mexico and Texas, is believed to be a retention of the old auto sacramental. The performance of Los pastores is preceded by the singing of posadas recounting the search of Joseph and Mary for shelter in Bethlehem. One of the three recognized genres of alabado was introduced into the Texas area by Antonio Margil de Jesús, a Franciscan missionary who worked there from 1716 and founded several missions, including the San José mission in San Antonio.

The discovery of Once misas mexicanas from the village of Tomé (founded in 1739) and other villages of northern New Mexico points to the existence of a Latin folk mass tradition, as these masses incorporate secular dance music and folksongs. Although these works were notated between 1875 and 1904 they probably dated from the 1840s or even earlier. Likewise documentary evidence on the secular musical life in Hispanic New Mexico in the 19th century, as reported by Koegel (1997), indicates folk-dance music performed in fandango festivities.

The Franciscans established their missions in the California territory only after 1769, with a total of 21 missions extending from San Diego to Sonoma by 1823. The most notable music teacher and composer in California was Narciso Durán (1776–1846), head of the San José mission. He compiled a very substantial choirbook of Gregorian chant and polyphonic music (1813), and a mass, La misa de Cataluña, discovered at the San Juan Capistrano mission, has been attributed to him. As a good pedagogue, Durán developed a simplified method of music teaching to respond to the needs of the Amerindian population of the missions. For example, he used only the F clef for all voices, wrote the melodies in the most suitable range and included all four voice parts on a single staff, the bass in solid black notes, the baritone in red, the tenor in black with white centres and the alto in red with white centres (such coloured notes were used in the California missions and in the Texas missions; see fig.18). The number of tones or melodic formulae used in the service for introits, alleluias and communions was reduced in Durán’s method. Another notable musician and dramatist was Florencio Ibáñez, who served at the missions of San Antonio de Padua and Nuestra Señora de Soledad. A pastorela (nativity play) of his apparently won great popularity throughout the California missions.

Little is known of the actual development of traditional music in that same area during the colonial period. It stands to reason, however, that traditional music activities, similar to those developed in Mexico during the 17th and 18th centuries, were present (to a certain degree) in the Southwest and California. In addition, Hispanic traditions must have been introduced gradually by the colonizers, though documentary evidence is scant.

USA, §II, 3: Traditional music: Hispanic American