A new book explores ways that singers can build inclusive singing communities and address representation in the recital hall.
In the introduction to the new book Singing Down the Barriers: A Guide to Centering African American Song for Concert Performers, authors Emery Stephens and Caroline Helton describe the origins of the “Singing Down the Barriers” project. In 2004, Stephens was a DMA student at the University of Michigan in a seminar taught by Helton. Stephens, as the only Black student in the class, was struck by the hesitancy of his white classmates to “cross the color barrier in performance” by singing concert arrangements of spirituals. Engaging Helton as a collaborator, they began to expose the forces that were keeping African American song literature segregated from the rest of the American song canon and explore how those forces can be overcome.
The results of their efforts over the last 20 years have now been collected into a new book. In the interview below, Stephens and Helton describe what their work has uncovered and how it is impacting the greater voice community.
In the early sections of Singing Down the Barriers, you state that those of us in the arts must do the work of examining how racism and slavery shaped our culture and gave rise to certain perceptions and stereotypes around performance. However, there are “Obstacles of Ignorance”—like erasure, segregation, and blind spots—that can make this work difficult. Can you describe these obstacles?
In looking at the obstacles of ignorance in approaching this uniquely American music genre, we identify specific topics, such as erasure, that address the underrepresentation of Black composers in classical music and their initial suppression in the dissemination of their creative output (composition, performances, recordings) from the late nineteenth century into the beginning and middle of the twentieth century. As a Guinean proverb that we quote in the book states, “We cannot love that which we do not know”; if music by Black composers is not published, performed, or recorded at a rate similar to historically predominant composers in the canon, such works are automatically marginalized and go unnoticed in the music industry.
In the case of academia, a majority of music history courses have not taught about the significant contributions of African American composers, and art songs by African American composers have not been widely performed or studied. Which means, besides concert and choral settings of spirituals, the average student of classical singing has no context and few role models for performing these songs.
Compounding this ignorance is a set of class-based assumptions that assigns Black creativity solely to the realm of popular genres, causing a blind spot in our cultural expectations.
Erasure is less of an issue today than the politicization of racial conflict. We advocate an approach that centers conversation and cultural humility, which provides an open framework toward lifelong learning, self-exploration, and willingness to learn from diverse cultural identities through respectful and contextual performance practice in building inclusive singing communities while addressing larger themes beyond the music, such as equal representation and access.
In the book’s introduction, you acknowledge the hesitancy of white singers to perform spirituals or art songs that portray African American voices so as not to engage in cultural appropriation. You also describe experiencing resistance at a historically Black university to your premise that people of all races should sing spirituals or songs by African American composers that center the Black experience. What are the ramifications of these perspectives on the arts community?
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Because of the exclusion of African American composers from the canon, the majority of concert halls are experienced as effectively white spaces. As we seek to bring all the voices of American song to our recital programs, singers of all ethnicities are faced with the complicated responsibility of centering Blackness in this so-called “white” space because text and embodied performance personalize the expression of the song.
Emotions and history also play a role. Most Black singers feel a sense of cultural connection and ownership of the repertoire, and when they experience performances of spirituals or art songs by non-Black singers that center Blackness, it stirs up a lot of emotions that stem from our country’s legacy of mockery and stereotyping perpetuated by blackface minstrelsy as well as the music industry’s history of appropriating Black music for profit.
But Black singers also don’t want to be pigeonholed or limited to performing repertoire by African American composers due to societal expectations of essentialism. The white performer faces ambivalence stemming from the legacy of blackface minstrelsy from the perspective of the perpetrator: is it possible to embody a Black character sincerely and genuinely without causing harm to their fellow Black Americans? If the answer is yes, where does the permission to perform the repertoire come from?
It’s not our fault; our current community of singers didn’t cause the whitewashing of the concert hall. But if we want to achieve our shared goals of inclusive representation on recital programs, we have to work together to solve the problem, and we hope our book presents an avenue for restorative justice. As James Baldwin says, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
You state in the preface that you feel the concert stage is the most accessible venue to work out cultural conflicts, since the purpose of those performances is to tell a story, and “storytellers do not have to resemble the characters they embody in order to transport you into the world of the story.” How do such performances help work out cultural conflicts, for the musicians and for audiences?
Concert singers in classical music have a unique opportunity to tell a story and weave emotions and aesthetic vocal artistry between text and music. In Chapter Seven of the book, we address informed performance practice and urge performers to pay attention to the “usage of signifying musical or linguistic compositional elements,” to deliver the most accurate interpretation of a work by a Black composer.
As Willis Patterson stated almost 30 years ago in his article in the Black Music Research Journal entitled, “The African-American Art Song: A Musical Means for Special Teaching and Learning,” “…the [African-American] art song represents a marvelous and unique opportunity to teach and preserve some of the very best and most noble aspects of American musical and cultural history.” We would add that the act of learning and performing songs by African American composers builds empathy and understanding with their creators and helps performers as well as audiences connect to the Black experience.
The “Singing Down the Barriers” project started on a small scale within the voice program at the University of Michigan. Since then, its tenets have been presented at international conferences, in residencies at colleges and universities, and at an annual two-week Singing Down the Barriers Institute. Are you seeing a change in the overall landscape? How do you hope the book will contribute to this change?
We are certainly seeing a change in the overall landscape among performing arts organizations, colleges and universities, and professional music associations—such as NATS, CMS, MTNA, ACDA, etc.—embracing the need to expand the limited scope of Black music representation in classical music. More and more students and teachers have attended workshops, conferences, and master classes—especially during the COVID pandemic, where we faced some important issues around relevancy in the music industry among younger, diverse voices.
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As a result of this push for inclusive representation from the younger generation of classical singers combined with the accessibility provided by the Internet, new anthologies and collections of songs by African American composers are appearing every day and can now be easily located and purchased.
Even though we are still navigating new ground from the past omission or limitation of the concert repertoire by Black composers, the work that we and other scholars and performers have done is making a real impact. Every group we encounter, whether majority Black or white, is hungry to sing these songs and to engage in these conversations. We hope our book becomes a starting place for students, teachers, and performers and serves as a seminal reference to study and approach this important American music.
Review
Authors Emery Stephens and Caroline Helton divide Singing Down the Barriers into three primary sections. The first, “Historical Foundations and Context,” highlights the musical contributions of African Americans in the history of American song, revealing their foundational influence on the genre. The second, “Institutional Interventions,” offers steps toward restorative justice where music that centers the African American Experience can be prioritized in all areas of academia (pedagogy, performance, research, and community engagement). The third, “Strategies for Creating Community and Building Music Ecosystems,” identifies issues to consider when amplifying the music of African Americans. It also provides models for “creating trust and establishing interracial partnerships in your communities.”
Stephens and Helton emphasize that those of us in the arts must do the work of examining how racism has shaped our culture, which takes conscious and sustained effort. They believe that the work of exploring the causes of ignorance and ambivalence involves inevitable discomfort that is necessary before we can move toward meaningful cultural impact. Their shared aspiration is that the book will provide a model for what that work could look like. As such, it serves as a crucial resource for change that is long overdue.
