Smithsonian's National Museum Analysis
There have been museums that let the public in on the history of African Americans in this country for years, but it has never been done like the newest museum: Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). In September of this year, the museum finally cut the red tape after breaking ground in 2012. This expansive museum contains nearly 37,000 artifacts that various prominent figures and people from the African American culture donated to address the history of the American leg of the African diaspora. With an upwards of 700,000 people obtaining passes to visit the museum before the end of 2016, it is fair to claim that the museum is an important landmark for people of the diaspora, as well as, people outside
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Because of this, it is hard to pinpoint its origins. We do, however, know that the spiritual comes after Christianity was introduced to the slaves as spirituals are “a genre that symbolized the slave population’s unique expression of Christian religious values” (Burnim 2015,50). With this knowledge, we can deduct that the music began its development a short time after the first Great Awakening movement of 1740, a time when many slavemasters were able to successfully convert slaves to Christianity. Despite this new found religion, the spiritual developed alongside the secular music of the slave culture with many of the same foundations and sound …show more content…
Spirituals employed a style known as “call- response” in which the leader would sing a line and the congregation would respond with a line (Burnim 2015:50). This was often done with a repeated line which made it easy for people to catch on and join in. The lead singer improvised a lot of their lines with the basic structure of the song coming from the oral tradition, as previously stated. It was not until universities adopted and performed the spirituals on the concert stage did musicians record the music as sheet music. The success of the Fisk Jubilee singers led to a more fixed form of the spiritual known as the arranged spiritual which provided musical literacy to emancipated Black people at the time. These advancements would allow for the development of many other genres of music that took little pieces from the spiritual as time
Because of this, it is hard to pinpoint its origins. We do, however, know that the spiritual comes after Christianity was introduced to the slaves as spirituals are “a genre that symbolized the slave population’s unique expression of Christian religious values” (Burnim 2015,50). With this knowledge, we can deduct that the music began its development a short time after the first Great Awakening movement of 1740, a time when many slavemasters were able to successfully convert slaves to Christianity. Despite this new found religion, the spiritual developed alongside the secular music of the slave culture with many of the same foundations and sound …show more content…
Spirituals employed a style known as “call- response” in which the leader would sing a line and the congregation would respond with a line (Burnim 2015:50). This was often done with a repeated line which made it easy for people to catch on and join in. The lead singer improvised a lot of their lines with the basic structure of the song coming from the oral tradition, as previously stated. It was not until universities adopted and performed the spirituals on the concert stage did musicians record the music as sheet music. The success of the Fisk Jubilee singers led to a more fixed form of the spiritual known as the arranged spiritual which provided musical literacy to emancipated Black people at the time. These advancements would allow for the development of many other genres of music that took little pieces from the spiritual as time