when only a spiritual will do

A couple of times recently I’ve sung arrangements of spirituals in church. Firstly, we sang Tippett’s setting of ‘Go down, Moses’ at Matins in Winchester Cathedral. I normally feel that the spirituals from A Child of Our Time (in the modified form in which he arranged them for unaccompanied choir) don’t really work in church services; but at this service our first reading was Moses before Pharoah, so we had a rare chance to replicate a piece of Old Testament narrative in our choice of anthem.

A few days later I sang at a funeral of a member of our church congregation. We used a piece from our choir’s repertoire, an arrangement of ‘Down in the River’, splitting our rather limited forces a variety of different ways in order to cover all the parts. The origins of this spiritual are definitely obscure, and it’s not clear that the author of it was black. It’s been suggested that the words encode instructions to help slaves escape on the ‘Underground Railroad’. I am normally a bit sceptical of this sort of theory, wondering whether it is put forward by people who have difficulties with any expression of religious fervour, but this looks like one of the more plausible cases. The ‘starry crown’ isn’t a biblical image, unless you’re the woman in Revelation.

Both times the spiritual said what we wanted to say, and it’s not clear what could have met the need better.

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